Photo Trey Ratcliff
No Australian uranium sales to Russia
Date: 8-Aug-2008
ACF is calling on the Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith to reject a proposed treaty for sale of Australian uranium to Putin’s Russia.
ACF believes this flawed treaty will unacceptably weaken Australia’s policy and practice on nuclear safeguards, compromise our efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons and make Australia complicit in serious failures of the Russian state – where the rule of law, democratic values and human rights are not being observed. Read ACF's Policy Brief on the Russian nuclear treaty.
The treaty was proposed and signed by then prime minister John Howard and Russian President Vladimir Putin at APEC in Sydney in 2007 and has been sent to a federal Parliamentary Inquiry by the new Labor federal government. This Inquiry may report back from mid-September and then Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith will decide Australia’s position.
Australia should not sell uranium to nuclear weapon states – like Russia – that fail to comply with their nuclear disarmament obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Russia maintains the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons and is developing new weapons delivery systems.
This nuclear treaty would jeopardise the aims of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament to rid the world of nuclear weapons and would make the world less safe and more insecure.
Nuclear security risks far outweigh any claims for a nuclear expansion – see the ACF Policy Brief Reject the dangerous nuclear industry.
ACF is working with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW). For Australia to properly act on our international responsibilities and to take up a leadership role for the abolition of all nuclear weapons must involve the phase out of nuclear power and of Australia’s uranium mining and exports for the realisation of a nuclear free world.
In 2006 ACF and MAPW prepared a major report An Illusion of Protection: the unavoidable limitations of safeguards on nuclear materials and the export of uranium to China on the limitations of safeguards for the proposed export of Australian uranium. This critique applies equally to the proposed nuclear treaty for uranium sales to Russia which is based on the same set of inadequate Australian and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
“The contemporary nuclear threat is a key medical and public health issue with Australia priming the pump through irresponsible uranium exports,” said Associate Professor Tilman Ruff, President of MAPW.