Back to the Nuclear Power Future?

"Fight two big threats with one energy plan," reads the headline of a recent op-ed piece by former National Security Council member Daniel Poneman, published in The Baltimore Sun on May 14, 2007. The column proposes that we in this increasingly "global" world need to create new policy by which to monitor and control a much-needed proliferation of nuclear power generating plants around the planet.

(Since the column at the Sun website will cost money to retrieve after 14 days, check it out at the Forum for International Policy website by clicking on the title or the leadoff hotlink of this post.)

Why are nuclear reactors the way to go today, energy-wise, despite the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the recent past? Two words: global warming.

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades that is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. If the planet's atmosphere and oceans warm too much for too long, sea levels will rise and inundate coastlines as polar icecaps melt. There will be undesirable changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation, possibly with unprecedented floods and droughts. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions, and increases in the ranges of disease vectors, exposing more of us to killer infectious diseases.

In other words, if we allow global warming to go on unchecked, many scientists think we are playing with fire.

Conservatives accuse such "liberal" scientists of inventing the global-warming scare out of shoddy evidence, overplaying it, and/or falsely attributing it to human activity, particularly the burning of carbon-based fuels that spew "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. oldstyleliberal thinks the conservatives are wrong to make light of this threat. He believes global warming needs to be taken seriously — which means we need to find alternatives to carbon-based energy.

Such as, for instance, a reinvigorated nuclear power program, on a global scale.


We also need to get on board with the idea of a "carbon tax." Libertarian-minded Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently weighed in on the issue with "Saving the Earth sensibly," a column in which he preferred taxing carbon emissions to "a lot of command-and-control programs that micromanage various industries on the assumption that the government knows best" — an assumption he finds especially ludicrous with respect to environmental protection initiatives.

A carbon tax is is a tax on energy sources which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since CO₂ is the principal greenhouse-gas culprit in man-made global climate change. It would consist of a levy on the burning of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum products such as gasoline and aviation fuel, and natural gas — in proportion to their carbon content. Since coal has more carbon by weight than petroleum or natural gas, the tax on coal would be higher than than on the other two. Economic forces would then move us away from coal, and to a lesser extent away from oil and gas, toward alternative sources of energy.

Such as, again, nuclear power.


The Poneman article points out the dangers here, the principal one being the proliferation of nuclear arms.

You cannot engage in nuclear power generation without the creation of highly enriched uranium to serve as fuel for the reactors, and later of plutonium that is destined to be separated out of the spent fuel and reprocessed. Both can be diverted into the making of bombs.

The enriched uranium in nuclear fuel is not itself concentrated enough to build a practical nuclear bomb, but the same plants and technology used to enrich uranium for power generation can be used to make the highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb.

Moreover, the plutonium produced in power-generating reactors, if concentrated through reprocessing, can be used for a bomb, or, if a reactor is operated on very short fueling cycles, bomb-grade plutonium can be produced by the reactor itself.

We currently fear North Korea, Iran, and other countries intend to develop a nuclear-weapons capability, under the cover of fostering a "peaceful" nuclear power industry. "How can we preserve the ability of nuclear energy to reduce global warming," asks Poneman, "without sparking a nuclear arms race?"


There are basically two approaches, Poneman indicates: the one he opposes, and the one he proposes.

The one he rejects is to continue to rely on individual governments' unilateral "ability to cut off nuclear fuel services on political grounds, such as human rights abuses or other valid concerns about another government's conduct."

He says that

[U]ranium enrichment and plutonium separation technologies are complex and expensive. So nations that seek nuclear energy but not weapons may opt to buy or lease nuclear fuel rather than building their own plants, just as most have opted to buy or lease (rather than build) their own commercial airliners.

Such "nuclear fuel services" represent a pipeline, not for oil but for nuclear fuel, whose "tap" may at present be cut off by, say, the United States government acting unilaterally. If Iran or North Korea misbehave, turn off the tap. That kind of thing.

Poneman opposes that sort of policy-waging on the grounds that it only forces the more antisocial regimes on the world scene to go it alone. That would be counterproductive. Better, Poneman says, to put the matter in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "guarantees could be backed by the [IAEA], which can serve as the supplier of last resort as well as the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred."

The IAEA would thus guarantee that, say, Country X, absent "a material breach of their nonproliferation obligations," would have a reliable supply of nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors. If individual countries such as the U.S. try to cut X off, nuclearly speaking, IAEA would undertake to fill the gap — again, absent "a material breach" of X's "nonproliferation obligations."

Who would serve as "the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred"? Again, the IAEA.


Some might react to Poneman's proposal as internationalism run amok. oldstyleliberal thinks it might work ... particularly if the U.S. can sign on the dotted line along with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and other global bigshots. It's destabilizing to keep on with the present order of things, in which, when a country like Iran seems (maybe) bent on diverting civilian nuclear materials/technology into a weapons program, policy wonks in the U.S. start talking about bombing the hell out of the country as a prophylactic gesture.

Better to encourage countries that are truly committed to peaceable nuclear power uses to tap into the global pipeline in full confidence that as long as they stay peaceable, the valve will not be shut off.

Bremer's Defense

This Sunday's edition of The Washington Post had a to-the-point article by L. Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, "What We Got Right in Iraq." Bremer has been roundly vilified by opponents of the Iraq war for supposed mistakes he made on his watch, errors in judgment which they claim did as much as anything else to lose the war, by destabilizing Iraq irreparably. Bremer's article summarizes his self-defense.

The two main charges against Bremer have been that he should not have decapitated the ruling Baath political party of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein and that he should not have dissolved the Iraqi army. But Bremer shows that "de-Baathification" was absolutely necessary if Iraq was to have "any chance at a brighter future," and that the army had essentially evaporated away by the time he arrived on the scene.


Not only did the mostly Shiite majority of the army's rank and file decamp in the wake of our successful invasion of their country, they stripped the army's bases and supplies of matériel bare as they did so. There was no army left to reconstitute.

As for "de-Baathification," Bremer says it had to happen for the same reason that Eisenhower's conquering army had to destroy the Nazi party in post-WWII Germany:

Like the Nazi Party, the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists recruited children to spy on their parents, just as the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his dreaded intelligence services to read "Mein Kampf."

"Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") was the memoir Adolf Hitler wrote in prison before he and his National Socialists — the Nazis — took the reins of power in Germany in the 1930s. In it, he laid out the program (subjugating his own people, exacting retribution against the hated Jews, conquering the rest of Europe) which he would follow if given the chance, along with its ideological basis.

The Nazis were perfect totalitarians. So too, says Bremer, were the Baathists. Accordingly, "the ... policy of removing top Baath officials from government was right and necessary." Otherwise, openly expressed Iraqi fears "that the United States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in senior government and security positions" would have festered among Iraq's citizens and nipped in the bud any hope of democracy emerging in their country.

In concluding his self-defense, Bremer writes:

No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old army have joined the insurgency. But they are not fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn a living [under CPA policies]. They're fighting because they want to topple a democratically elected government and reestablish a Baathist dictatorship. The true responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with these people and their al-Qaeda collaborators.

Bremer thus paints a picture of the Iraq war as waged mainly between a coalition of Sunni Muslims — former Baathists and their present al-Qaeda collaborators — and everyone else. The fact that the Baathists and al-Qaeda have different ultimate goals — the former are basically secular; the latter want to spread the rule of Islamic religious law — makes little difference now. Nor does the fact that there were no important links between the two organizations at the time we invaded Iraq, despite what the Bush administration was saying back then.

That view of the matter makes sense to oldstyleliberal. Before we invaded Iraq, Baath rule under Saddam had one redeeming quality: it made for a degree of stability in the region. But when Saddam did a Hitler and annexed Kuwait at the point of a gun, thus upsetting the apple cart, the U.S. and its allies went to war to roll that incursion back and re-institute the status quo ante — which is arguably what Britain, France, and others should have done when Hitler rolled into the Sudetenland.

The downside of allowing Saddam to stay at the helm in Iraq was, per Bremer, the fact that Saddam ruled through "the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services." Substitute "Baath" for "Nazi," "the Iraqi army" for "the Reich's security services," and you get the picture.


It is a picture that oldstyleliberal feels today's American left has been more than a little blind to. As a budding liberal in the 1950s and '60s, oldstyleliberal was imbued with the sense that Nazi-style tyranny was the worst thing that ever happened, bar none. But his liberal contemporaries today have little to say about this indictment from Bremer:

It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old [Iraqi] army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves.

Civilian genocide and mass graves would seem to oldstyleliberal to constitute, if anything could, a call to arms to those of a liberal mentality.


The rhetoric and tactics the Bush administration has used to justify and prolong the Iraq war continue to baffle oldstyleliberal, he readily admits. He feels he has no special grip on the actual facts, either. Will the war be won? Can it be won? What would constitute a win? How will we know when the troops can come home? What is the correct exit strategy? The effective role of regional diplomacy in all this? All these are questions oldstyleliberal can't answer. It seems no one really can.

Yet it seems to oldstyleliberal that Bremer is right. Barring a full-scale roundup of former Baathists in the wake of our 2003 military victory — which would have been impossible, under the circumstances; look how long it took us to find Saddam Hussein — our only strategy was (and is) to work against their ongoing troublemaking. We had to expect it. And we all needed to recognize

• that the Baathist remnant would surely join forces with al-Qaeda at some point
• that their combined attacks on Iraq's majority Shiites would eventually provoke bloody retaliations
• and that this situation could not be quickly or easily dealt with by the fledgling democratic regime in Baghdad, without outside help
  

We should also have figured that military and police power, wielded by us and our invader allies or by Iraqis in their brand new uniforms, could not alone quell the instability. Diplomacy, too, was going to be needed — among all the players in the region, including Iran and Syria. What was Bush thinking in resisting this? Exactly what was Baghdad supposed to do with Iran, Syria, and the other states in the region when left to its own devices, post the eventual U.S. withdrawal? Or did anyone look that far ahead?

But never mind. This is where we are today. Call it what you like — civil war, chaos — we have to find a way to turn the page. We need to pull out all the stops and work for, if nothing else, stability without tyranny in Iraq. That's the overall goal.

If this means our troops must, for now, stay in harm's way there without a firm timetable for coming home, so be it. If it means we have to negotiate multilaterally or one-on-one with despised regimes in the region, fine. If it means we have to be open to reconfiguring Iraq as three semi-autonomous democratic regions, one Kurd, one Sunni, one Shiite, well and good.

oldstyleliberal feels he will be voting in 2008 for the presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican, who best embodies such an approach.