Gas Centrifuges and Today's Article IV Debates

摘要

Thank you for publishing John Krige's fascinating essay ('The Proliferation Risks of Gas Centrifuge Enrichment at the Dawn of the NPT: Shedding Light on the Negotiating History," 19.2, July 2012, pp. 219 27). I suppose it isn't much fun at this point for British nonproliferation experts to tell Washington "I told you so," but Krige's account suggests that they could. To my eye, it seems quite clear that UK assessments were indeed much sharper than American ones during the 1960s when it came to the proliferation risks of uranium enrichment technology, and about the feasibility of imposing adequate safeguards upon such technology as it spread around the world. Unfortunately for all concerned, the experts in London-fearing that "once the possibilities of centrifuge enrichment were widely known, clandestine production would render safeguards meaningless as a security guarantee and would reduce the NPT to a 'dead letter'"-seem to have been disturbingly close to the mark.