Heavy Water Cheaters
By Gary Milhollin
Foreign Policy
Winter 1987-1988, p. 100-119
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/pubs/articles/1987/heavywatercheaters.htmCivilian nuclear exports are founded on two assumptions: No country will export a crucial item without requiring a pledge of peaceful use or use an item imported under such a pledge to make bombs. The same nuclear reaction that makes electricity makes weapons; the importer's pledge is the only barrier between the two. If countries receiving nuclear imports could freely convert them to arms, the nuclear exporting countries simply would be spreading atomic bomb factories across the world. The human race's prospects for controlling nuclear weapons would fall rapidly, and so would its chance of survival. To prevent proliferation, the supplier countries routinely re-quire two guarantees—a pledge of peaceful use and inspection of exported material, equipment, and technology. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is based in Vienna and comprises more than 100 member states, conducts the inspections.
It now appears—for the first time in history--that a country has broken the peaceful-use pledge. It also appears that a second country may have broken it, that a third is threatening to break it, and that the civilian exports of a fourth—possibly made without the pledge—have gone freely into bombs. The culprits are, respectively, Israel, France, India, and Norway. Israel has been making plutonium with Norwegian heavy water for more than 20 years and, according to recent evidence, putting the plutonium into bombs; India has been making plutonium with U.S. heavy water for about the same period and is threatening to put that plutonium into bombs. Norway has exported heavy water that France has used to build a thermonuclear arsenal. If these countries can undermine the pledge and avoid the consequences, there is no reason why others will not do the same.
Edit: Long read, one to avoid if you have ever had thoughts of suicide. I almost wish I never read the whole damed thing, knowing it was twenty years old to begin with.