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| India-Pakistan |
| Safeguards inspection not necessary for India: IAEA official |
| 2008-07-21 |
| The Indian government is quaking thanks to a 'safeguards agreement' it wants to ink with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. But, surprise, surprise a senior safeguards analyst of the IAEA Diane Fischer, said 'what's the point of inspecting a nuclear weapons state like India'. It essentially means that the safeguards agreement which is causing so much heart burn in India may just remain a piece of paper and not the monster it is being made out to be. Speaking in the Euroscience Open Forum-2008 meeting on a session on 'atomic detectives' she said inspections are very expensive and the IAEA has to make a 'trade off of resources spent (on inspections) versus benefits'. The IAEA would rather carry out inspections in states that are on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons like Iran, North Korea and possibly Syria. The immediate implication of signing this agreement for India is that inspectors from the IAEA will be able to visit India to verify and account that India is not diverting the imported civilian nuclear material for its weapons program. This essentially means there just may not be any need to conduct safeguards inspections in India since there is nothing that India is doing which is clandestine. Safeguards inspections are basically intrusive visits by specialist technicians and are undertaken to ensure that whatever nuclear fuel a country imports is not diverted on the sly towards making nuclear bombs. Since India already has enough uranium and plutonium for its weapons programs there just may not be any necessity for the country to divert materials, hence there may just not be that 'smoking guns' the safeguards inspectors are on the look out for. IAEA director general Dr Mohd ElBaradei while sending the India Specific Safeguards Agreement for the approval of the board of governors has stated that if India puts one facility for safeguards in 2009 it would cost a whopping Euro 1.2 million for the agency to undertake this task. The Board is scheduled to meet on August 1, 2008 to consider this safeguards document. It is worth noting that there are almost no visits by safeguards inspectors to the five nuclear weapon states of USA, Russia, China, Great Britain and France since there is nothing new that the IAEA safeguards inspectors can find as these states have a declared nuclear weapons program. On the same lines India is also a 'defacto' nuclear weapons state whether the world wants to give its stamp of approval for that or not. |
| Posted by:john frum |