Do you want to be in my gang?

alvinwoolf

May 16th 2007
From Economist.com

ONE may take a bet on extraordinary things. Gambling websites, and more traditional bookies, will give you odds on whether Osama bin Laden will be captured, Elvis will return, or even on the prospect of the universe ceasing to expand. A new item might now be added to the list of the improbable events: that the brutal dictatorship of Myanmar will go nuclear.

To anyone who has strolled the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s capital, and spotted the grim-looking government building devoted to atomic energy, this seems a most unlikely turn of events. But on Tuesday May 15th Russia announced that it would help the south-east Asian country’s ruling junta to set up a nuclear research reactor. Myanmar—once called Burma—had reportedly tried to strike a similar deal with Russia before, but the plan stalled over payment. Now Myanmar, flush with an annual trade surplus (the country is well endowed with natural resources, like oil), says it will pay cash, and Russia has accepted.

On the cards is only a small-scale research programme, which Myanmar says will be used to generate power, presumably to keep the flickering lights on in Yangon. The plan is to build a 10 megawatt nuclear reactor that uses low enriched uranium. The centre would, reportedly, be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog. This is a long step from getting the means or the knowledge for building a bomb, but it is enough to spread jitters.

Myanmar is an international pariah presided over by Than Shwe. Authoritarian since 1962, it has kept Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate, under house arrest, on and off, since 1989. Elections won by her party in 1990 were annulled. Repeated attempts to censure Myanmar at the UN, for its grim human-rights record and its crackdown on democracy, have been stopped only by the intervention of Russia and China.

Now Myanmar may count on a new friend, after a rapprochement with another small, repressive and peculiar Asian country, North Korea. Diplomatic relations between the two were cut when North Korean agents murdered a number of South Koreans with a bomb in Myanmar in 1983. But late in April the two finally restored ties; Mynamar is also thought to buy weapons from North Korea.

Although it is not a nuclear threat of any sort, Myanmar’s aspiration to get nuclear technology is worrying, given proliferation elsewhere. Last year North Korea tested a crude nuclear weapon, to the dismay of China and other neighbours, after years of developing a nuclear energy programme. Efforts since—by America, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan—to persuade North Korea's Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear ambitions in exchange for aid and security guarantees have stalled. As troubling, this week the IAEA confirmed that Iran has made significant progress in enriching uranium on a large scale. Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says his country has the right to develop nuclear technology (with Russian help) for the purposes of energy generation. Outsiders say that the real goal is to develop nuclear weaponry.

Perhaps most worrying is Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapons. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s American-allied military dictator, has seen his grip on power challenged recently. The increasing clout of Islamist extremists there, along with that of secular opponents, promises continued instability. Next door in India America is not helping matters much; indeed it appears to be encouraging proliferation by agreeing a deal on nuclear co-operation with Delhi.

What America or others will do about Myanmar’s putative research programme is unclear. Putting nuclear materials in the hands of unstable regimes, or unpredictable dictators, seems far from a good idea. An American decision to provide the technology, in the 1950s, for a nuclear reactor in Kinshasa, in Congo, (in gratitude for uranium supplied by Congo to America for use in the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945), proved to be less than sensible. Nuclear-fuel rods were stolen in the 1970s and then traded by Italian smugglers, raising fears that terrorists could get their hands on such material.

As in Congo, where a dictator was unable to ensure the secure storage of the nuclear material, or as in North Korea, where a dictator seems keen to develop nuclear weapons, the lesson for Russia over Myanmar should be clear: spreading nuclear technology to troubled countries is a bad idea.