Reports

The legacy of the Cold War nuclear arms race remains a danger to the world. The United States and Russia are still possess tens of thousands of intact nuclear warheads with no clear plans for their dismantlement. Meanwhile, efforts to control the global spread of nuclear weapons are being undermined by the radical Bush Administration policy authorizing preemptive nuclear attacks against nations that may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Global Nuclear Partnership (GNEP) is a major element of the Bush Administration’s energy policy. Its principal goal is to expand the world-wide growth of nuclear energy as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fostering economic development.

However, our investigation found that: GNEP is a rushed, ill-conceived, poorly supported and technically and economically risky expansion and redirection of the nuclear industry. GNEP will likely worsen the radioactive waste disposal problem and would also make the United States the dumping ground for nuclear wastes from the other participating nations.

In the past several years, there has been renewed interest in nuclear energy as a means to mitigate the impacts of global warming due to carbon emissions. An expansion of nuclear power to effectively mitigate greenhouse gas emissions would be prohibitively expensive and risky, requiring at least 1,000 reactors over the next 45 years. It also would be an extremely slow process, taking decades to achieve any reductions in world CO2 emissions, if, indeed, it ever does. This would be a much longer time frame than implementing energy efficiency measures, distributed generation, or renewable alternatives, such as wind. Such a massive expansion of nuclear power also would divert capital resources from investments in other faster and more easily deployed alternatives for reducing world CO2 emissions.

As George W. Bush’s administration enters its last year in office, the danger of a U.S. military attack on Iran looms. Widening opposition to the illegal Iraq War, growing recognition that the war in Afghanistan has failed to bring stability or democracy to that beleaguered country, new tensions rising in Pakistan, escalating violence and humanitarian crisis in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, all have brought new fears but also heightened interest in the wider Middle East region, especially interest in Iran. It is to address this new and renewed interest in Iran, to answer questions, and propose some ideas to prevent another looming disaster, that this pamphlet is designed.