Nuclear mattersMyanmar's nuclear ambitions exposed
Robert Kelley, an experienced former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), analyzed materials smuggled to the West by a scientists who defected from Myanmar, and wrote that the kind of nuclear research work Myanmar is doing leads to the inescapable conclusion that such work is “for nuclear weapons and not civilian use or nuclear power”
Rumors that Myanmar is the next recruit to a shady nuclear and missile network that seems to link North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and possibly others swirl intermittently. The missile link is clearest: In all these cases, including Myanmar’s, North Korea has either sold missiles or helped them build their own. Aside from an agreement in principle in 2007 for Russia to build a small research reactor for Myanmar, there has been little hard evidence of its junta’s nuclear ambitions.
The Economist reports that the recent defection of a former major in the Burmese army, Sai Thein Win, however, and the documents and photographs he brought with him, appear to confirm Myanmar’s intent, if not yet capacity, to enrich uranium and eventually build a bomb.
Sai Thein Win handed over his evidence to the Democratic Voice of Burma, an emigre-run broadcaster based in Norway. The material has been analyzed by Robert Kelley, an experienced former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watch dog.
His 27-page report has plenty of caveats: Sai Thein Win is a missile expert, not a nuclear expert, and some of what he reports is hearsay; some drawings are crude at best; some equipment seen in pictures could at a pinch have civilian uses too.
Still, the Economist notes that experimental work on lasers that could eventually be used to enrich uranium and other equipment for making uranium metal, a necessary step in bomb-making, heighten suspicion. So do close links between supposedly civilian nuclear officials and the Burmese army’s “nuclear battalion,” officially the Number One Science and Technology Regiment.
All this and other evidence, Kelley’s report concludes, lead to the inescapable conclusion that such work is “for nuclear weapons and not civilian use or nuclear power.”
An earlier report, published in January by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), an independent Washington, D.C.-based outfit, debunked some of the wilder rumors about Myanmar’s nuclear quest, but it also concluded that foreign companies should treat inquiries from Myanmar no differently from “those from Iran, Pakistan or Syria.” All are known purchasers of illicit nuclear equipment.
Myanmar has only a “Small Quantities Protocol” with the IAEA. This exempts it from regular inspections, on the government’s assurance that it has nothing to inspect. Sharper questions are now likely to be asked.
The agency had already been trying to dissuade Myanmar and Russia from the research reactor. Sai Thein Win, who learned missile expertise in Russia, says that since about 2002 hundreds of Burmese scientists have trained in Russian nuclear institutes, including one formerly linked to the Soviet nuclear-weapons program.
Sai Thein Win offers no new insight into the North Korean link, but Western intelligence agencies watch North Korea’s activities in Myanmar. There have been reports that a company associated with the construction of a secret nuclear reactor in Syria (until it was bombed by Israel in 2007 just before completion) has worked in Myanmar too.
