Kazakhstan: Inside the nuclear underworld: Deformity and fear (warning graphic)

[ProSense]

Inside the nuclear underworld: Deformity and fear

Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. CNN's Matthew Chance was given rare access to Kazakh villages where above-ground nuclear tests have left generations scarred. Here, he describes what he saw for CNN.com.

SEMEY, Kazakhstan (CNN) -- Kazakhstan's nuclear orphans are a distressing sight.

The first child I met in the local orphanage was lying limply in his crib. His giant, pale head was perched on his tiny shoulders, covered in bed sores, like a grotesquely painted paper-mâché mask. Peering out, a pair of tiny black eyes darted around.

It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing. The doctor told me he was 4 years old.

Through the bars in the next crib, I saw another child, twisted with deformities. His fragile legs and arms turned in impossible contortions.

These are the children of Kazakhstan's terrifying nuclear past.





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http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000549">As North Korea Gives Up Reactor, Kazakhstan Seeks a Nuclear Edge

BY Ken Silverstein
July 17, 2007

North Korea may have just shut down its reactor, but here’s something new to worry about: Kazakhstan, the Caspian country ruled by a man who has just effectively declared himself President-for-Life, may be on the verge of acquiring nuclear fuel processing technology. The only thing standing in the way would be a veto by the Bush Administration, and given its close relationship with President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s energy-rich regime that doesn’t seem likely.

The scenario is as follows: Toshiba now owns 77 percent of Westinghouse, the U.S.-based nuclear power plant builder and operator. It wants to sell 10 percent of its stake to Kazatomprom (KAP), Kazakhstan’s state-run nuclear agency. According to accounts in the Japanese press and international news agencies, the transaction will require Toshiba and Westinghouse to transfer uranium-processing technology to KAP.

If the deal goes through, KAP would not operate a nuclear fuel-enrichment plant but it would produce uranium hexafluoride, or “hex,” which is “used in the uranium enrichment process that produces fuel for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.” Obtaining hex would certainly be of keen interest to any country seeking to develop nuclear weapons as it could be used as feed for its enrichment plants. (Added July 18 at 12:00PM–Furthermore, Kazakhstan has expressed an interest in getting centrifuges and enriching fuel according to Nucleonics Week, an industry publication.)

Nucleonics Week also says the deal would begin transforming KAP “from a uranium producer into a diversified player on the global nuclear market.” The article said that the “KAP buy-in to Westinghouse would be the first instance in which a part of the former Soviet civilian-military nuclear complex became a shareholder in a Western nuclear supplier company.”

Kazakhstan was praised for having voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons arsenal in 1992 after gaining independence from the former Soviet Union. But Nazarbayev’s government is considered to be widely corrupt and “there are reports that nuclear facilities and material are not secure, and there is evidence that people in Kazakhstan have ties to nuclear black-market activities,” according to James Love, head of the Washington-based group Knowledge Ecology International.

The sale of a stake in Westinghouse to a company in a third country requires the approval of the U.S. government. Today, Love’s group and three others, Greenpeace, Essential Action, and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, wrote to the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to oppose the sale on the grounds that it would “undermine efforts to limit nuclear proliferation, and . . . give sensitive nuclear technology to a brutal, repressive and undemocratic regime.”

I ran the potential deal past Henry Sokolski, Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, and he also expressed opposition. “It would essentially be encouraging a government to get into the nuclear fuel-making business,” he said. “That is always going to be a problem, especially in the case of a government like Kazakhstan’s.”

The fact that Kazakhstan has previously given up its nuclear arsenal does not eliminate concerns. “Whatever the economic arguments might be, there always ought to be an overriding security imperative to keep nuclear-fuel making plants out of countries that don’t currently have nuclear weapons,” he said. “If you have a fuel-making plant in the wrong place it doesn’t matter if there are international safeguards. You won’t be able to reliably know where all the nuclear material is and you don’t know where the expertise involved in running the plant may end up.”

The Clintons Kazakhstan problem

Why did Bill Clinton deny meeting Kazakh officials in the Clintons' home

Why the Clinton-Kazakhstan Story Matters

[ProSense]

1. Nuclear Proliferation For Republican-Friendly Dictators

Nuclear Proliferation For Republican-Friendly Dictators

By Cernig

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, nuclear proliferation is OK as long as you're a dictator with an "in" to the GOP and its backers. The sordid hypocrisy of looking the other way for some while threatening to attack others is most obvious in the case of Pakistan's network for illegal moneymaking from sales of nuclear technology, but now Kazakhstan too is being given the chance to create new nuclear threats to the West.

TOKYO: Kazakhstan is to pay $486.3 million to buy a stake in US nuclear reactor firm Westinghouse from its majority owner Toshiba, news reports said Saturday.

The Japanese giant will sign an agreement this month to sell a 10-percent stake in Westinghouse to state-run uranium firm Kazatomprom for slightly more than 60 billion yen, the Nikkei newspaper said. By forging ties with uranium-rich Kazakhstan Toshiba, which holds a 77-percent stake in Westinghouse, aims to secure stable supplies of the resource used by power plants, Jiji Press said.

...Toshiba and Westinghouse are also expected to transfer uranium-processing technology to Kazatomprom, it said...US government approval is required for transactions in which a foreign entity takes a stake in an American business possessing nuclear technology, the Nikkei said. US officials have indicated that the deal poses no problems, the newspaper added.

Mainstream media coverage of this in the U.S. - NIL.

Yet there's considerable reason to be worried about this deal. Kazakhstan is a dictatorship with a thin veneer of democracy where the main opposition party to the dictator-for-life was banned shortly before the last elections. It has a considerable human rights abuse record, one of the most corrupt economies in the world, has been linked to the A.Q. Khan network of illegal nuclear technology traffickers and has an atrocious record in securing nuclear materials.

Kazakhstan is also a base for Islamist terror groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat and Jamaat of Central Asian Mujahedins. Although the Kazakh government has proclaimed its determination to fight Islamist terrorism, primarily by giving the U.S. military basing rights, the country is a recruiting ground for these Al Qaeda linked groups.

On the plus side, as far as the Bush administration is concerned:

A number of other US firms, including Halliburton, are active in Kazakhstan, and the government has retained a number of well connected law firms and lobbying organizations to represent it's interests in Washington, DC, which increasingly involve getting Washington, DC support for its plans for expanded nuclear energy facilities.

Interestingly, Rudolph Giuliani's firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP maintains offices in three non-us locations, London, Dubai and Kazakhstan.

Money for GOP insiders seems to have trumped weighty practcal considerations here. How surprising. Only slightly more surprising is the deafening sound of silence from the corporate media.

[ProSense]

2. No Comment? Wasn't good for Giuilani..

2007: Giuliani Continued To Make Money Helping Increase Use Of Foreign Oil in Kazakhstan.
Since 1997, Bracewell and Giuliani has operated an office in the Republicof Kazakhstan"to service oil producers and their lenders in the Caspian Sea region" Among their clients is "BMB Munai, which develops oil wells in Kazakhstan" (Associated Press, 3/20/07, 5/15/07)

link

OK for Clinton?

[ursi]

3. ah ...Bill's friends did this and he helped add to it with his handshake