ElBaradei's nuclear bank plans

By Jonathan Marcus
BBC Diplomatic Correspondent

Mohamed ElBaradei says the US and Russia have reacted positively

The annual non-proliferation conference of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace brings together the movers and shakers of the disarmament world.

But this year was special since the key-note address was given by Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Mr ElBaradei and his organisation were recently awarded this year's Nobel peace prize.

The award has been widely seen as bolstering not just the IAEA but the whole idea of multilateral arms control.

It is an approach that has found little favour in Mr Bush's Washington, where traditional treaty-making has been replaced by more unilateral ideas, not least the doctrines of preventive war.

NPT drawback

But things are perhaps changing. Not least because the diplomatic row over Iran's nuclear activities is posing a fundamental challenge to the existing non-proliferation machinery.

That machinery is not in very good condition. Its centre-piece - the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - has a serious draw-back.

Dr ElBaradei has championed a three-decade old but nonetheless elegant scheme that could get both the Iranians and the international community off the hook

It has traditionally been seen as allowing countries who pass international inspection and monitoring to develop the capacity to manufacture nuclear fuel.

This is what Iran is trying to do, and Tehran insists that it only has peaceful intentions.

It wants to be self-sufficient in terms of providing fuel for its nuclear reactor programme.

But mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, as it is known, also enables a country to go a step further, potentially abandoning the NPT treaty in order to develop a bomb.

That is why in a series of on-again, off-again talks, the European Union is trying to persuade Iran to abandon its fuel cycle development.

So far the talks have made little progress, though the most recent signals from Tehran suggest that the Iranians would like to return to the negotiating table.

Washington has been watching from the wings, backing the Europeans, but seemingly having little else to do with the process.

Interesting debate

Enter Mr ElBaradei. He has championed a three-decade old but nonetheless elegant scheme that could get both the Iranians and the international community off the hook.

His idea is to establish a central bank of nuclear fuel from which a country like Iran could draw its supplies.

Iran is likely to initially react negatively to the idea of fuel bank

In an exclusive BBC interview Mr ElBaradei said that he had received "a good encouraging response from the United States".

"Washington," he said, "was ready to offer some nuclear material to be part of the fuel bank. I got the same response from Russia. So we are hard at work," he told me.

And he hopes that in the next six months or so the IAEA should be able to come up with a mechanism to enable countries to get the fuel they need and, at the same time, accept a moratorium on developing their own fuel cycle facilities.

Iran's initial reaction is likely to be negative. It will no doubt assert its right to master the whole nuclear fuel cycle. And the row could still go on for months if not years.

But there is an interesting debate here among disarmament experts about the Non-Proliferation Treaty's essential meaning.

Is it intended to allow everyone to make nuclear fuel? Or is its aim simply to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology?

Mr ElBaradei is implicitly moving to a more restrictive interpretation, believing that countries like Iran should at the very least forego some of their "rights" in favour of international security.

He hopes that a fuel bank might ultimately provide the means to break the diplomatic log-jam that surrounds Iran's nuclear programme.

Speaking now with the added authority derived from winning the Nobel peace prize, he argues that this is an idea whose time has finally come.