Wampum

I suppose I should put these things together again. I sort of thought it was one of those everybody-knows things, then I noticed that the IHT is fianlly surfacing the legal, and more importantly, the North-South economic aspect of the <scary-music> reason why one or more nuclear weapons states is about to start a third war in as many years in West Asia</scary-music>. So maybe not everybody knows.

Nominally of course, the cause for pre-emptive war is non-proliferation, a variation on the Niger-yellowcake-goes-to-Iraq story that the regime milked during the midterm.

So, start with my posts on Lisa's blog, first on January 14th, Domestic Enriched Uranium production means ..., then on February 17th, In Defense of Howard Dean. The really salient point is this, William H. Timbers, the company's president and chief executive officer, waxes optimistic about the USEC's long-term future in the global enriched uranium market:

The American Centrifuge will reinforce USEC's long-term position as the global leader in the uranium enrichment marketplace. It represents the first of what I hope will be a new generation of nuclear power construction projects in the United States. Increasingly, America is recognizing the need to boost the use of nuclear power to support our energy independence and to protect national security.

About the same time I mentioned in ROTOTK (5) that the motive of an oil rich state to pursue commercial enrichment was not necessarilty a covert weapons program. At the time I'd been reading the statements from in the Iranian press (in translation) that Iran intended to enrich more fuel than it used and to enter the ... enriched uranium market. Iran wants to sell fuel. USEC wants to sell fuel. Others want to sell fuel too.

Does the NPT cover the entire fuel cycle? Most of its signatories are absolutely certain that it does, and that raw yellowcake need not be exported to China, Russia, Europe or the United States and processed into fuel, and imported back to its {country|region|economy} of origin, and then re-exported when spent for re-processing to China, Russia, Europe or the United States. A few of the signatories, the United States and the UK, and perhaps, only perhaps, Holland, Germany and France, construct the NPT as entitling all of its signatories to only some parts of the entire fuel cycle, and a few of its signatories to all of the entire fuel cycle.

So, the right way to understand the Iranian position is they are positioning to be in competition with USEC (NYSE:USU), BNF (UKGOV), COGEMA (NYSE:CCJ), and whatever comes out of the Russian and Chinese commercial fuel ventures. A Southern State, perhaps the only one, to compete with the Northern States for the fuel market for commercial reactors in the South. An echo of the Non-Aligned Movement's expression in fissiles, which began on 19 December 1945 with the establishment of the now rather well-known Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). When the Americans bomb the Parchin conventional weapons complex, and the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) in Isfahan, the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility, and on down the first-strike laundry list, they will be bombing Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of an economically decolonized South.

Time to re-read Samir Amin's "L'accumulation � l'�chelle mondiale".