Trust us

To put this in perspective about 30,000 years ago, neanderthals still roamed parts of Europe and Asia. As little as 12,000 years ago, no society practiced widespread agriculture. Writing was developed about 5,000 years ago.

Fissile materials will still be hazardous and weapons-usable when the world has changed beyond our wildest dreams. People for thousands of generations to come will have no choice but to still be dealing with the nuclear legacy of the present generation.

Nuclear weapons constitute the greatest immediate threat to global survival and health. In the event of a nuclear war, don’t bother to call your doctor. No meaningful response will be possible for most victims if even one nuclear weapon is detonated in a city.

Anything which increases the number of nuclear weapons; the number of places they are kept; the number of groups who build, steal or buy them; the number of people who have access to them; anything which increases the range of ways and the number of situations they might be used, or reduces the threshold for their use, is bad for your health.

Like other nuclear powers, rather than disarming as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires, China is currently expanding and modernising its nuclear arsenal. This is largely driven by the US missile defence program, to which Australia contributes, and US plans to militarily dominate space.

The standards of safety and caution need to be extraordinarily high when dealing with nuclear materials, and the first rule of the healing professions applies to decision-makers as well: First, do no harm.

IAEA safeguards are intended to have a 90-95 per cent probability of detecting a significant diversion in time before weapons could be made. The significant quantities of fissile materials defined by the IAEA as sufficient to build a nuclear weapon are several times too high. The conversion times within which diversion is supposed to be able to be detected, are also too high. And add to that the lack of universal implementation of safeguards. As of last month, the Additional Protocol which was developed 10 years ago in response to Iraq’s advanced weapons program was in force in only 78 of the more than 180 countries signed up to the NPT.

States can withdraw from the NPT, as North Korea has done, with three months' notice. Application of safeguards in a nuclear weapons state is voluntary. In China only about 10 of 44 proliferation-sensitive nuclear facilities are eligible for safeguards (and therefore might process Australian uranium). In China for the past few years, IAEA safeguards have been implemented at only three facilities. And only one of these has a detailed facility-specific Subsidiary Arrangement in place with the IAEA.

The IAEA does not in any way specifically safeguard uranium from any particular source. If you were dealing with these kinds of gross deficiencies in being investigated for a serious illness, you would be right to find this completely unacceptable and look for another doctor.

The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties of the Federal Parliament has been holding public hearings on the nuclear co-operation and safeguards agreements the government has signed with China in the hope these will pave the way to large and growing exports of Australian uranium to China. The committee is expected to report in the coming month.

However, there seems to be a disturbing systematic pattern of error, misinformation and complacency which is alarming, and which undermines the long-term interests of Australians. The Federal Government and the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) are increasingly part of the problem of proliferation risk, rather than part of the urgently needed solution.

The Federal Government claims that for years it was ignorant of, and cannot be held accountable for, the world’s largest case of illegal and corrupt sanctions breaches, involving the Australian Wheat Board (AWB). For years it ignored, played down and didn’t want to hear questions and what should have been alarm signals from the UN, US and Canada. And that was about wheat. Yet in relation to uranium the government is asking us to trust flawed safeguards regarding the most dangerous of materials, where the weight of leverage lies with China.