Skip to content Fissionable Material. Where does the plutonium come from? Our analysis shows why the proposed convention is only one element in President Clinton's nonproliferation framework. The convention would leave in place existing stocks of plutonium and HEU accumulated for weapon-related purposes. There is also a residual risk associated with further production and stockpile accumulation carried out for nonweapon purposes—activities that would be allowed under the new convention with safeguards.
Parties to the new treaty could clandestinely build facilities to convert stored plutonium, which would probably be in oxide form, into the metal form needed for bombs, while simultaneously constructing the nonnuclear components of the weapons.
Their efforts might not be detected until the oxide was withdrawn from the storage site in violation of safeguards. It might be only a matter of days or weeks from that event until nuclear weapons were completed. And, with large flows of civilian fuel-cycle plutonium remaining, the threat of theft, as described above, remains.
Having established that there will be a residual availability of plutonium and HEU for weapon manufacture after the implementation of the proposed convention, we considered two further steps as a means to reduce that availability.
First, current plutonium and HEU stockpiles both safeguarded and unsafeguarded might be reduced or transferred to secure custody, and, second, the production of these materials for any purpose might be abandoned or restricted to fewer locations. Reducing stockpiles should reduce the number of bombs that could be made.
This would be a valuable step but not by itself sufficient. Even if excess stocks are eliminated, substantial plutonium would still be present at any given time in the civilian fuel cycles of countries with reactors using plutonium. Also, any nonnuclear nation interested in building nuclear weapons could provide itself with a plutonium stockpile by establishing a plutonium-based civilian fuel cycle.
Elimination of plutonium production for any purpose, on the other hand, should have a very large effect on its availability for weapon manufacture. If stockpiles were also eliminated, nonnuclear-weapon states would have nothing to seize and convert to bombs and subnational groups would have nothing steal.
Nations such as Japan, France, and the United Kingdom, which are trying to establish a plutonium-based civilian fuel cycle as a hedge against exhaustion of uranium supplies, would be against a complete production cutoff. Consequently, the U. However, because the economics of and political support for the civilian use of plutonium have been steadily deteriorating, various measures might be implemented to allay plutonium producers' concerns:.
If the proposed convention is supplemented by stockpile reduction or elimination and by severe restriction or total cutoff of plutonium and HEU production for any purpose, the danger of proliferation will be greatly reduced. The measures listed above might be taken to mitigate any negative effects such additional steps would have on some countries and thus improve the negotiating environment for further action.
We recommend that the United States at a minimum not foreclose, significantly delay, or deemphasize the possibility of further action to substantially reduce the availability of plutonium and HEU. As of , there were approximately metric tons of separated plutonium in military inventories and roughly metric tons of separated plutonium in civilian inventories worldwide.
Britain, France, Russia, India, Japan, Israel and China operate reprocessing plants to obtain plutonium the last two only for military purposes. North Korea has also operated a reprocessing plant. In the U.
Some civilian and military reprocessing also occurred between and at West Valley, New York. The United States does not support reprocessing because of its proliferation dangers, but in practice the U.
The natural uranium mined from the earth consists of about 0. The half life of uranium is million years, while the half life of U is about 4.
LEU cannot be used in nuclear weapons. Traditionally, uranium has been extracted from underground and open pit mines. This natural uranium is processed and then enriched. Numerous technologies have been developed to enrich uranium, such as gaseous-diffusion, centrifuges, and electromagnetic separation. All of these technologies require a large initial investment and large amounts of energy to operate. HEU was first developed for use in nuclear weapons.
In the end, this proposal was not accepted by all members of the CD and the CD president decided not to take any formal action on the text. On 5 November, it was reported that the United States is consulting with key nuclear powers along with India and Pakistan on ways to start negotiations on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The United States reiterated its position that such a treaty should only cover new production of fissile materials, while others, including Iran, Syria and Switzerland, argued for the inclusion of existing stocks in the negotiations.
States Parties discussed the relationship between an FM C T and a nuclear weapons convention, and whether or not fissile material stocks should be included in an FM C T.
Several states emphasized the need for a nondiscriminatory and verifiable treaty. On 28 August, the CD concluded its thematic discussion on the revitalization of its work and began discussions of its draft annual report to the General Assembly.
Delegates did not reach a consensus on the scope and details of an FM C T. The CD meetings opened on 25 January with an agreement on an agenda but were unable to adopt a program of work due to divisions over the inclusion of beginning negotiations of an FM C T. In place of a formal program of work, the CD President Ambassador Grinius of Canada proposed a series of thematic discussions.
On 3 February, the CD met to discuss a fissile material cut-off treaty. Pakistan reasserted its opposition to an FM C T based on the Shannon mandate, emphasizing the need to address asymmetries in nuclear stockpiles in addition to halting production.
The representatives from Australia and Japan announced a series of side events that would discuss definitions for an FM C T, though these would be simply informal discussions driven by national initiative and not connected with the work schedule of the CD. Most expressed an interest in starting negotiations on an FM C T, but differences emerged in how it would be accomplished.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed concern that parallel disarmament initiatives would degrade the multilateral disarmament system. However, the proposal also stated that if substantive steps towards negotiations were not taken in , the NPDI would request that the UN General Assembly begin to consider ways to proceed on negotiations outside of the CD.
Ambassador Suda of Japan reported on this round of events at the CD plenary meeting on 16 June, noting that like the second round of side events, these meetings were focused on verification measures. Manfredi reported that discussions also covered an entry-into-force provision, verification and stockpiles.
At the beginning of the CD meetings on 2 March, the Norwegian deputy permanent representative Ms. Hilde Skorpen spoke about the entry into force of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, citing it as an example for the fissile material treaty. In response, Ambassador Zamir Akram of Pakistan outlined why his country continued to oppose the negotiation of a fissile material treaty.
No program of work was adopted by the CD the in the first two parts of its session. For the second time, the Norwegian delegation called for FM C T negotiations to occur in a different venue if the CD remained deadlocked. However, a proposal to convene a conference outside the CD to address the fissile material cut-off issue did not receive a consensus support at the RevCon.
The Secretary-General of the CD Sergei Ordzhonikidze warned that delegates would probably have at most one more year to start negotiations of an FM C T before parallel initiatives were organized. Ambassador Akram of Pakistan observed that there are clear options for negotiating an FM C T outside of the CD that would not be opposed by Pakistan, but that it would not participate in such negotiations.
In December, the Fissile Material Control Initiative FMCI published a report on global fissile materials, presenting the official declarations of fissile material production and stocks around the world. This report provides important insight into the level of fissile material currently possessed by states as well as an indication of disarmament measure being taken by states.
On 29 May, for the first time in a decade, the CD adopted a program of work. On 29 October, for the first time since , the First Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on a treaty specifically banning the production of materials for use in nuclear weapons. FMCI would be a voluntary, multilateral arrangement open to any country that possessed fissile material whether safeguarded or not and was willing to sign onto a set of agreed principles.
The overall goals of FMCI would be to increase security, transparency, and control over fissile material stocks worldwide; to prevent their theft or diversion to non-state actors or additional states; and to move fissile materials verifiably and irreversibly out of nuclear weapons and into forms unusable for nuclear weapons.
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