James F. Keeley

Nuclear exports and world politics

This book presents ten essays by an international group of specialists in nuclear politics that examine recent trends in nuclear supply policies. Focusing on the policy-making processes in the US, France, West Germany, Canada, Britain, and Australia, they address such issues as the balancing of export earnings against security risks, the impact of shrinking domestic markets, and the different roles assumed in the making of export policy.

The Automotive Sector

The North American automotive industry has been subjected to intense and painful pressures in the last several years, stemming from slow growth in its markets and increasing foreign penetration of those markets. Together with the governments of Canada and the United States, it has begun a process of response and transformation. This article will examine some aspects of the problems faced by the North American industry and the North American governments in this transformation process, setting these within the broader context of trends in the global automotive industry. A brief review of some major global developments in supply and demand will be followed by a specific look at the problems of the North American industry. The actions of the Canadian and American governments in response to this situation will be outlined, and finally some possible lines of future policy development will be sketched.

Regime-making and the Limits of Consensus

Nuclear export policy does not spring untainted from theoretical analyses of the nature of the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation. Such evaluations are certainly a part of the multiplicity of factors lying behind the formulation of policy, but, in this field perhaps more than in others, analyses can also be self-serving and the criteria of political acceptability of technical arguments may shift according to circumstance, interest, opportunity and the real or anticipated actions of others. Yet on the other hand, this is also a policy area in which states have periodically been tempted to launch crusading endeavours in the name of peace and to accept, indeed, substantial costs in terms of lost commercial deals and the erosion of diplomatic capital in order to do so. Given competition between national nuclear industries, the prospects of growing overseas sales laced occasionally with multi-billion dollar contracts, uncertainties and declines in the domestic nuclear power programmes of western countries generally, the high political character of many of the issues involved and the consequent minimal authority of international agencies, the identification of national programmes with national prestige and of certain parts of the nuclear fuel cycle with national survival — given these and other factors, supplier consensus becomes not so much an elusive ideal as an analytical conundrum: puzzling when it happens and, for some on the receiving end of nuclear supply decisions, perturbing.

Nuclear Export Policies and the Non-proliferation Regime

Few technologies have promised the extremes of danger and benefit, or generated the fear and the enthusiasm, presented by and associated with nuclear power. Domestically, the hope for cheap, abundant energy has been set against environmental and safety concerns. Internationally, nuclear power as an instrument of economic growth and of energy independence has been set against the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fear of nuclear weapons proliferation. In the last decade, the unfavourable aspects of this duality have been strengthened. Domestic opposition to nuclear power development, reinforced by the potent symbol of Three Mile Island, has had devastating results in some countries, while the economic virtues of nuclear power have been rendered ambiguous at best by inflation and stricter regulation. And India’s test of a nuclear explosive device in May 1974 signalled — though it did not of itself cause entirely — the start of a period of increasing doubt about the effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. Nuclear exporters, individually and collectively, began to reconsider their policies — a process which created tension not only among suppliers but also between nuclear haves and have-nots. The prospects of increasing use of nuclear power, of growing stockpiles of plutonium, and of the development of national enrichment capabilities raised fears that weapons-usable material would be more readily available and less easily controlled than formerly.