From Russia (to Iran) with Love
LAKE, ELI J.
From Russia (to Iran) with Love Nuclear proliferation will be the real test of Putin's friendship. BY ELI J. LAKE AS SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell makes his way to Moscow this week, he will no...
...Robert Newman, president of the Non-Proliferation Trust Inc., a private American company that raises money for nuclear waste disposal in Russia, has proposed a plan to the Bush administration whereby the Russians would receive $11 billion in contracts to store the spent fuel, after Newman's group received an initial $4 billion to get the process going and to start other nuclear cleanup projects in the former Soviet Union...
...officials are not wedded to working through Newman's firm...
...But the administration doesn't buy this...
...allies...
...There was a general agreement that this was a very good concept," he told me Wednesday...
...We have extensive communication with the U.S...
...official said Wednesday...
...Whether the Russians bite may affect the speed with which Iran, a longstanding sponsor of terrorist groups, gets nukes...
...Leading up to the Crawford summit in November, Newman held a series of meetings with non-proliferation experts and Russian specialists from the NSC, the State Department, and the Department of Energy...
...officials believe it is a cover for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the re-export of nuclear know-how...
...High on the agenda will be nuclear proliferation to and by Iran...
...The United States already has such agreements with countries like Japan and France...
...The group already has exclusive agreements with Alaska Interstate Construction, Duke Engineering & Services, the German company Gesellschaft fur Nuklear-Behalter mbH, and Halter Marine Group to handle the cleanup projects if and when Washington lets allies ship spent fuel to Russia...
...The new one would allow the export to Russia of spent fuel from nuclear reactors in South Korea, Taiwan, and other U.S...
...And in the December 3 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quotes intelligence officials as saying that covert bomb-making efforts are underway at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran...
...This official said that if anything, Newman's plan complicates the carefully prepared U.S...
...side on the issue of nuclear plant in Iran, and the project is going forward under tight monitoring," said Yuri Zubarev, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Washington, Tuesday...
...The managing trustees of the Non-Proliferation Trust include former FBI and CIA director William Webster and the Natural Resources Defense Council's chief nuclear advocate, Thomas Cochran...
...In addition to rescheduling Russian debts and sharing U.S...
...It will also indicate what sort of partner President Putin means to be in America's new war...
...carrot" for Moscow because it includes unrelated projects the Russians may want to keep for themselves, such as decontaminating a lake near an old Soviet atomic weapons factory...
...The latest unclassified CIA report to Congress on the topic, dated December 2000, says, "The expertise and technology gained, along with the commercial channels and contacts established—particularly through the Bushehr nuclear power plant project—could be used to advance Iran's nuclear weapons research...
...NPT Inc...
...The Russians will take some persuading before they agree to go along with this...
...In 1995, President Boris Yeltsin decided to assist in the project...
...The day after the Crawford meetings ended, they sent key compoEli J. Lake is the State Department correspondent for United Press International...
...They note that the Bushehr site is monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency...
...While the State Department hasn't made the Russians a formal offer linking an end to Moscow's nuclear connection with Iran to the disposal of spent fuel in Russia, the administration has floated the idea in numerous meetings...
...Petersburg to Bushehr, on Iran's Gulf coast...
...Some wonder why a major oil exporter would want a nuclear power plant in the first place, and if it did, why it would seek advice from the people who brought us Chernobyl...
...BY ELI J. LAKE AS SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell makes his way to Moscow this week, he will no doubt seek to follow up on issues discussed at the Bush-Putin summit last month in Crawford, Texas...
...The Russians maintain they are doing nothing wrong...
...Its purpose, according to Moscow, is simple power genera-tion—whereas U.S...
...Russian cooperation is a significant accelerator of the Iranian process for acquiring nuclear weapons...
...Newman's pitch was bolstered by developments in Moscow last summer: In July, the Duma reversed the post-Soviet ban on importing spent nuclear fuel, thus removing a major legal hurdle for Newman and his firm...
...nents of a light-water nuclear reactor from St...
...allies...
...Now the diplomats, in the words of one senior State Department official, are "trying to build the carrot" Washington will need to induce Moscow to abandon its policy...
...even has an agreement with the San-dia Corporation, the Lockheed-owned company that runs the Sandia labs in New Mexico, to "perform geologic repository and transportation studies in Russia," according to Newman's literature...
...The $11 billion would come largely from utility ratepayers in the countries that sent their nuclear waste to Russia...
...The fact is [the Iranians] are pursuing things in cooperation with the Russians and others that are inconsistent with a nuclear power program," said a senior State Department official in an interview last month...
...The resulting contracts for Russian firms could be far more profitable than the current over-the-table take from the Bushehr project, estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion...
...nuclear technology with Moscow, the State Department is considering signing a "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy Agreement" with Russia...
...We've presented this at the senior levels and let them know we'd like to do this," one official says...
...There are a number of ways to do this," one U.S...
...But U.S...
...There are other vendors trying to do spent fuel storage...
...The Bush administration is developing a deal under which Moscow, in exchange for severing its overt and covert nuclear ties to Tehran, would receive lucrative contracts to store and dispose of spent nuclear fuel from U.S...
...Powell will be "highlighting and previewing this approach" on his trip to Moscow...
...There, a nuclear plant under construction but nearly destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s is being rebuilt...
...The participants "said they would be willing to form an interagency task force to look at and study the concept of spent fuel and exporting it to Russia...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 13
