Phosphate fertilizers as a proliferation-relevant source of uranium / [electronic resource] Robert Kelley and Vitaly Fedchenko

SIP1723

"May 2017".

"The authors would like to thank Anna Wetter for her contribution".

A historical and often overlooked source of uranium for weapons and nuclear power is the extraction of uranium from phosphate fertilizers. In this way, uranium can be acquired legally but in an undeclared fashion, invisible to international commerce and export controls. One example is the production of 109 tonnes of uranium in Iraq, which was dedicated to a clandestine weapons programme. The equipment and processes used were European, supplied legally and openly. The International Atomic Energy Agency was unaware of the uranium extraction at the fertilizer plant and it is an important example of the dangers of supplying this technology to a country in the absence of proper export controls. The fertilizer industry is not normally seen as an industry that enables nuclear weapon acquisition through the use of dual-use equipment, but past events and current international trade practices clearly demonstrate that better-informed export controls and end-user processes are required

The EU Non-Proliferation Consortium is a network of foreign policy institutions and research centres from across the EU engaged in political and security-related dialogue and discussion of measures to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems. The Consortium is managed jointly by SIPRI and three other institutes, in close cooperation with the representative of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The three institutes are the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique in Paris, the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt (HSFK/PRIF), and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London.

This paper expands on and updates WMD proliferation-related aspects of the book by the author Lundin, L.-E., The EU and Security: A Handbook for Practitioners (Santérus: Stockholm, 2015), in particular section 4.2. It also builds on the logic of focusing on the need for a comprehensive approach by the EU to non-proliferation work initially outlined in the paper by Lundin, L.-E., ‘The European Union, the IAEA and WMD non-proliferation: unity of approach and continuity of action’, Non-proliferation Paper no. 9, EU Non-Proliferation Consortium, Feb. 2012, <https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/ Nonproliferation9.pdf>. The collection of material for this paper has to a large extent been carried out using the website <www.lelundin.org> as a basis, including subpages relating to arms control.

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