AS SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell makes his way to Moscow this week, he will no doubt seek to follow up on issues discussed at the Bush-Putin summit last month in Crawford, Texas. High on the agenda will be nuclear proliferation to and by Iran. The Bush administration is developing a deal under which Moscow, in exchange for severing its overt and covert nuclear ties to Tehran, would receive lucrative contracts to store and dispose of spent nuclear fuel from U.S. allies. The Russians will take some persuading before they agree to go along with this. The day after the Crawford meetings ended, they sent key components of a light-water nuclear reactor from St. Petersburg to Bushehr, on Iran’s Gulf coast. There, a nuclear plant under construction but nearly destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s is being rebuilt. In 1995, President Boris Yeltsin decided to assist in the project. Its purpose, according to Moscow, is simple power generation–whereas U.S. officials believe it is a cover for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the re-export of nuclear know-how. The Russians maintain they are doing nothing wrong. They note that the Bushehr site is monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. “We have extensive communication with the U.S. side on the issue of nuclear plant in Iran, and the project is going forward under tight monitoring,” said Yuri Zubarev, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Washington, Tuesday. But the administration doesn’t buy this. Some wonder why a major oil exporter would want a nuclear power plant in the first place, and if it did, why it would seek advice from the people who brought us Chernobyl. “The fact is [the Iranians] are pursuing things in cooperation with the Russians and others that are inconsistent with a nuclear power program,” said a senior State Department official in an interview last month. “Russian cooperation is a significant accelerator of the Iranian process for acquiring nuclear weapons.” The latest unclassified CIA report to Congress on the topic, dated December 2000, says, “The expertise and technology gained, along with the commercial channels and contacts established–particularly through the Bushehr nuclear power plant project–could be used to advance Iran’s nuclear weapons research.” And in the December 3 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quotes intelligence officials as saying that covert bomb-making efforts are underway at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Now the diplomats, in the words of one senior State Department official, are “trying to build the carrot” Washington will need to induce Moscow to abandon its policy. In addition to rescheduling Russian debts and sharing U.S. nuclear technology with Moscow, the State Department is considering signing a “Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy Agreement” with Russia. The United States already has such agreements with countries like Japan and France. The new one would allow the export to Russia of spent fuel from nuclear reactors in South Korea, Taiwan, and other U.S. allies. The resulting contracts for Russian firms could be far more profitable than the current over-the-table take from the Bushehr project, estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion. Robert Newman, president of the Non-Proliferation Trust Inc., a private American company that raises money for nuclear waste disposal in Russia, has proposed a plan to the Bush administration whereby the Russians would receive $11 billion in contracts to store the spent fuel, after Newman’s group received an initial $4 billion to get the process going and to start other nuclear cleanup projects in the former Soviet Union. The $11 billion would come largely from utility ratepayers in the countries that sent their nuclear waste to Russia. The managing trustees of the Non-Proliferation Trust include former FBI and CIA director William Webster and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s chief nuclear advocate, Thomas Cochran. The group already has exclusive agreements with Alaska Interstate Construction, Duke Engineering & Services, the German company Gesellschaft f r Nuklear-Beh lter mbH, and Halter Marine Group to handle the cleanup projects if and when Washington lets allies ship spent fuel to Russia. NPT Inc. even has an agreement with the Sandia Corporation, the Lockheed-owned company that runs the Sandia labs in New Mexico, to “perform geologic repository and transportation studies in Russia,” according to Newman’s literature. Leading up to the Crawford summit in November, Newman held a series of meetings with non-proliferation experts and Russian specialists from the NSC, the State Department, and the Department of Energy. Newman’s pitch was bolstered by developments in Moscow last summer: In July, the Duma reversed the post-Soviet ban on importing spent nuclear fuel, thus removing a major legal hurdle for Newman and his firm. “There was a general agreement that this was a very good concept,” he told me Wednesday. The participants “said they would be willing to form an interagency task force to look at and study the concept of spent fuel and exporting it to Russia.” But U.S. officials are not wedded to working through Newman’s firm. “There are a number of ways to do this,” one U.S. official said Wednesday. “There are other vendors trying to do spent fuel storage.” This official said that if anything, Newman’s plan complicates the carefully prepared U.S. “carrot” for Moscow because it includes unrelated projects the Russians may want to keep for themselves, such as decontaminating a lake near an old Soviet atomic weapons factory. While the State Department hasn’t made the Russians a formal offer linking an end to Moscow’s nuclear connection with Iran to the disposal of spent fuel in Russia, the administration has floated the idea in numerous meetings. “We’ve presented this at the senior levels and let them know we’d like to do this,” one official says. Powell will be “highlighting and previewing this approach” on his trip to Moscow. Whether the Russians bite may affect the speed with which Iran, a longstanding sponsor of terrorist groups, gets nukes. It will also indicate what sort of partner President Putin means to be in America’s new war. Eli J. Lake is the State Department correspondent for United Press International.
