The United States may cancel plans to export nuclear power technology to the United Arab Emirates because a relative of the UAE president was caught torturing an Afghan prisoner. This strange rationale, if applied without hypocrisy, should signal the end of nuclear power in the U.S.
According to a May 5th report in the Financial Times, the U.S. is considering halting its plan to export "civilian" nuclear technology to the United Arab Emirates because of a caught-on-tape sheikh torturing an Afghan prisoner. The video of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, allegedly a half brother of the UAE president, was shown to members of Congress who could call for at least a temporary hold on the transfer of nuclear energy technology to the UAE.
The hypocrisy of this is breathtaking. The U.S. government sees fit to castigate the UAE and threaten to withdraw its trade commitment over the torture of one man while having itself tortured countless individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Isn’t this precisely the kind of arrogance and paternalism that the Obama administration is endeavoring to correct?
If the absence of torture is to be the new criterion for measuring whether a country should have a nuclear power program (a rather bizarre apples-and-oranges yardstick to begin with), then presumably the 104 operating reactors in the U.S. should be closed forthwith. After all, our record of torture is indisputable. Even before the recent news confirmations, documentaries like Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side left no doubt about the kinds of activities that went on in Abu-Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and in countries that permitted extraordinary rendition by the U.S.
And why stop with the UAE? Clearly other countries with both an acknowledged record of present or past torture and which operate nuclear power programs should be put under similar scrutiny and their nuclear energy operations shuttered. These would include China, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia according to a partial list from Human Rights Watch.
Add to these the list of 30 or so countries who, like the UAE, have expressed interest in developing nuclear energy programs and the cancellations would have to include tortures like: Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Morocco, North Korea, Syria, Turkey and Uganda.
The French government currently heads the list of nuclear power vendors worldwide – no non-torturer either; see Algeria. So the French nuclear power program should probably be closed as well.
Obviously, making this case is about as ludicrous as denying the UAE its nuclear energy program based on a torture episode. The U.S. should first of all lead by example and renounce all forms of torture. It can then, with a clear conscience, refuse to do business – any kind of business, not just nuclear – with countries who continue the practice.
Finally, it’s time to recognize that the whole nuclear energy business itself is divorced from the democratic process and is often a pretext for something else. Countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya, Niger and elsewhere – all first time nuclear energy aspirants – do not actually need nuclear energy. They may indeed have genuine energy needs and these can be met far more appropriately by technologies suited to their environment. Desert countries, for example, are ideal for wind and solar; coastal countries for offshore wind. As Congressman Ed Markey so aptly put it,
"Saudi Arabia is the Saudi Arabia of solar".
There is simply no credible excuse for this sudden interest in nuclear energy. It is merely a cover story, masking an even more dangerous agenda – the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
This of course speaks to the preposterous naivety of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty whose Article IVallows for the "inalienable right" of countries who promise never to develop nuclear weapons to have "peaceful nuclear energy" instead. (See, for example, Iran). This sets up the paradigm that somehow nuclear energy is "compensation" for denouncing the world’s most deadly WMD, when the purpose of a nuclear energy program is ostensibly quite different – to provide electricity.
Article IV perpetuates the misguided psychology that possessing something - anything - nuclear renders that nation somehow more powerful than and superior to its neighbors. Far from curtailing nuclear weapons expansion, it disingenuously leaves the door wide open to precisely that.
