Nuclear power for Asia

ARTICLE: The Next Nuclear Continent, By Chris Hildebrand, The Diplomatic Courier, October 20, 20092009

Another easy call from Great Powers, including the Russians in the aggressive lead.

Second, as globalization's great infrastructural build-out unfolds, shifting over time from the New Core East to the Gap as a whole, we're clearly going to see a major increase in the role of nuclear power. Africa, home to about one-fifth of the world's uranium, wants to move aggressively in this direction. The West and Russia, fearful of proliferation of nuclear weapons-grade uranium, push to create a Core-dominated consortium that will oversee the entire fuel-enrichment cycle for any country willing to outsource that process, in effect asking Gap countries to assume an energy-dependency relationship. Several proposals are on the table, and while there is a chance of competing rule sets fighting it out over time (e.g., competing U.S. and Russian systems), the odds are that the Core will come to some agreement that Gap countries fi nd acceptable. But the clear upshot of all this will be that far more nuclear material will move along globalization's networks, only emphasizing the worldwide need for better real-time, pervasive monitoring systems. So again, a shift from Cold War deterrence to globalization-era transparency seems inevitable.