Nuclear Arsenals Need Huge Funds, Says Iaea Official

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) laboratory director Pier R Danesi has stressed that equipping a nation with nuclear weapons requires big monetary investment, in addition to advanced technical support.

Responding to a statement made by a political party on going nuclear if it came to power, Danesi said here that making nuclear weapons was not impossible but it could not be done overnight.

Even developed countries like the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union took a long time to develop their nuclear weaponry due to huge costs involved, said Danesi, who was here to attend the International Conference on Applications of Radioisotopes and Radiation in Industrial Development. The effort also requires a huge scientific force from different disciplines in a concentrated way, he said. D D Sood of Barc, said, a change of guard in IAEA would benefit developing countries .

 

Sood said because of commonality of problems in most developing countries, the nuclear community felt that under the leadership of new chief M El Baradie, the perception towards developing countries would be much better.

As the chairman of ICARID-98, Sood said India would play a major role in promoting radio-isotope and radiation technologies to several developing countries.

Nuclear experts welcomed the initiative taken up domestic industries to use indigenously developed radio-isotope and radiation technologies for improving the quality of production. They felt that change had been brought about by a demand for quality and cost-effective products from various industries.

Replying to a query on the organisations policing role for the United Nations, Danesi said, IAEA was not a policing but a technical administrative body.

Danesi said, IAEA has received a mandate from the UN that it could take up spontaneous inspection in those countries which had agreed voluntarily for verification of international safeguards.

Inventory for weapons is also subject to inspection in both civilian and military sites except in the five nuclear weapon nations US, Russia, China, UK and France, he pointed out.

If IAEA suspected any country going for nuclear weapons then the Security Council would be informed, he added.

Environment monitoring checking of undeclared activities in declared sites where there was no military activity was another way of checking proliferation, Danesi said.

IAEA was presently concentrating on environmental problems faced by many countries due to acid rain by making use of electronic beam processing of coal-fired industrial emission gases to convert them into useful fertiliser, the official said.

Food security in the form of increasing shell life was also being promoted by IAEA, he added.