NUCLEAR WEAPONSIs Myanmar About to Go Nuclear?
The specter of the world’s first ‘Buddhist bomb’ still hangs over Myanmar. It has been given impetus by the coup in February 2021 and the military regime’s increasingly close relations with Russia. The question must be asked: why is the junta expending precious resources on a nuclear reactor of arguable utility when it is already struggling with a costly civil war, an economy in dire straits, the collapse of government services and widespread poverty and hardship?
A front-page story in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2009 confidently predicted that within five years Myanmar would have its own nuclear weapon and be capable of producing one atom bomb every year thereafter, if all went according to plan. The story, by two respected Myanmar watchers, was based on the claims of a military ‘defector’, but followed years of rumours, gossip and speculation.
As history has shown, this prediction was spectacularly wrong. If Myanmar’s military government was ever contemplating a nuclear weapons program—and some observers still argue that it wasn’t—the scheme had barely reached the experimental stage. Following the Herald story, the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote that Myanmar ‘has no known capabilities that would lend themselves to a nuclear weapons program’.
Two years later, the US government said that, despite concerns that North Korea might be willing to transfer sensitive nuclear technologies to Myanmar’s military regime, it saw no signs of a major nuclear weapons program. Other governments agreed, and there the matter seemed to rest. International concerns, where they existed, were assuaged further in 2011 by the transfer of power to an unexpectedly reformist quasi-civilian government.
Between 2015 and 2020, Aung San Suu Kyi’s government took important steps in this field. In 2016, Myanmar ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which it had signed in 1996. The same year, it acceded to the Convention on Nuclear Safety and the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. In 2018, it signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. All these instruments made clear the National League for Democracy’s opposition to the manufacture, testing and use of nuclear weapons.
Despite all these measures, however, the specter of the world’s first ‘Buddhist bomb’ still hangs over Myanmar. It has been given impetus by the coup in February 2021 and the military regime’s increasingly close relations with Russia. More to the point, perhaps, fears of a new clandestine nuclear weapons program are being stoked by pro-democracy activists, who are keen to blacken the junta’s name and garner additional international support.
Once again, the situation in Myanmar demands careful analysis of the available information and sober judgements.
