Wednesday, October 17, 2012

drawing on recommendations

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States that did not already have enrichment and reprocessing technology might blanch at being forbidden from ever developing it. But those states would have a guaranteed supply of fuel from an international organization, and they could console themselves with the fact that every other country was in the same boat. For enrichment-capable countries, too, the plan would pose challenges. What would it take, for example, to buy out the private elements of existing uranium-enrichment companies? In the United States, any whiff of "nationalization"--let alone internationalization--would provoke industrial and ideological opposition. But the enrichment industry is small: There is only a single uranium-enrichment facility currently operating in the United States, and it is leased from the U.S. government by the United States Enrichment Corporation, a private company with a market capitalization of less than $1 billion. Internationalizing a venture that size seems a small price to pay for strengthening the nonproliferation regime. Indeed, globally, the enrichment industry yields only $5 billion in revenue per year--hardly enough for any country to justify undermining nonproliferation efforts.
True, such ideas have floundered before. In 1946, drawing on recommendations prepared by physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who had led America's wartime effort to develop the atomic bomb, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, presented President Truman with a plan to internationalize all enrichment and reprocessing under an Atomic Development Authority. That plan shattered on the animosities of the incipient cold war--neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was ready to cede control of such a crucial technology. But, as we move into this perilous new phase, it's a plan that should be exhumed and urgently considered, so that we can prevent this nuclear renaissance from slipping into a nuclear dark age.'Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions,"