President Obama came away from the Korean trade negotiations
last week looking much diminished. “U.S. Wields Less Clout at
Summit” was the typical headline in the Wall Street
Journal.
All this was attributed to many factors — the slow recovery of
the economy, the failure of Keynsian spending, Obama’s election
losses or the Federal Reserve’s egregious attempts to promote trade
advantages by weakening the dollar. Meanwhile, the Koreans refused
to be cowed, saying the fault lay with the U.S., which hadn’t given
them enough to review the revisions made in the original agreement
struck with President Bush.
Much is obviously due to the President’s egotism. As Charles
Krauthammer pointed out on Fox News, “Obama constantly feels
compelled reinvent the wheel.” He can’t accept anything from
previous Presidents but must put his personal stamp on everything.
Thus, he felt compelled to rewrite a perfectly suitable trade
agreement handed him by the Bush Administration — and missed a
deadline in the process. Meanwhile, Bush was winning loads of
admiration by refusing to say a single unkind word about Obama
during his book tour —- even as the new President has spent his
entire two-year term blaming everything on his predecessor.
If you really want to see one of the underlying causes for
America’s diminishing role in the world, however, take a look at
another set of negotiations taking place in Washington right now
between Korea and the U.S. over the 1974 Nuclear Fuel Treaty due
for renewal in 2014.
At the time the original agreement was signed, the U.S. was
leading the world in introducing nuclear power, the great new
energy discovery expected to replace highly polluting coal. Korea,
on the other hand, was a poor, Third World country, still
recovering from the Korean War and ruled by Park Chung-hee, an
autocrat who tried to make himself president for life before being
assassinated in 1979.
Now flash forward 36 years. The U.S. has virtually abandoned
nuclear technology, not having licensed a new reactor since 1976.
We never recovered our nerve after Three Mile Island. Meanwhile,
the rest of the world has shrugged off these fears and moved ahead.
There are now 60 reactors under construction around the world, 20
of them in China, which only initiated a nuclear program in 2006.
France, Russia, and Japan all have mature industries and are
marketing their reactors and nuclear technology to more than 30
countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and many
others.
Last year, those mature industries suddenly encountered a fierce
new competitor — South Korea. The Koreans have become a
nuclear-happy country. They already get 40 percent of their
electricity from nuclear (as opposed to our 20 percent) and are
just getting into the business. Until 1995 they had the Japanese
build reactors for them. Then they took an old design from
Combustion Engineering (now a part of Japanese-owned Westinghouse)
and designed the Korean Standard Nuclear Plant, a 1400-megawatt
giant that has won praise throughout the world. The Koreans run
their reactors at 95 percent capacity — the only country in the
world that exceeds our excellent 90 percent capacity. (We still
know how to run reactors, we just aren’t allowed to build them
anymore.) All those years in which Korean students led the world in
math and physics scores are finally paying off. The highest
concentration of PhD’s in the world is in Seoul.
Last year the Koreans bid against France’s Areva and Japan’s
Westinghouse for the largest contract ever offered — the job of
building four new reactors in the United Arab Emirates. Although
Areva and Westinghouse had much longer résumés, Korea shocked the
field by winning the bidding at $20 billion. The whole country is
now celebrating. Last month the government held National Nuclear
Fair to introduce schoolchildren to the technology.
So after thirty years, the position of the two countries is
almost completely reversed. Korea is now on the world’s cutting
edge in nuclear technology while the U.S. is trying to plug leaks
in 40-year-old reactors. Yet to our diplomats, nothing has changed.
We’re still the masters of the universe.
Unfortunately, around 1974, we became obsessed with the idea
that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would lead to the
proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Spent fuel, you
see, contains small quantities of plutonium, the principal material
for most nuclear weapons. If we isolated that plutonium during
reprocessing, someone might steal it. The source of this anxiety
was The Curve of Binding Energy, a book by New
Yorker reporter John McPhee, in which his main source of
information, maverick physicist Ted Taylor, predicted that
“hundreds of explosions a year” could take place in American cities
from stolen plutonium. In 1974, India did build a bomb with
plutonium extracted from a research reactor given to them by the
Canadians. And so, when we signed the agreement with Korea to
supply them with nuclear fuel, we stipulated that they could not
reprocess it.
On the other hand, reprocessing has become essential to any
country such as Korea that is serious about a nuclear future.
First, it eliminates the false problem of “nuclear waste” that has
tied this country in knots. Reprocessing extracts the spent uranium
and plutonium, which can be recycled as fuel, reducing the volume
of spent fuel by 95 percent. France stores all its high-level waste
beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague while we can’t find room
to put ours in the whole state of Nevada. Most important for Korea,
it has no domestic uranium supplies and must depend entirely on
imports. Reprocessing can cut its fuel imports by 30 percent.
While Korea has now moved way ahead of us on nuclear technology,
to us it’s still 1974. And so, our diplomats are telling the
Koreans they can’t reprocess their fuel. We’re afraid they might
make a bomb with it. The Koreans say they are being treated “like
criminals” and suggest it’s time to look at the relationship
“through a new lens.” Nonetheless, we’re standing on past
privilege. After all, this is our technology, isn’t it?
Just think, South Korea shares a peninsula with a madman who has
already built a nuclear bomb and threatens to use it any time.
North Korea has already attacked South Korean ships and crossed the
demilitarized zone. It’s a wonder South Korea hasn’t built a bomb
already. Theoretically, it is under our “nuclear umbrella,” but
consider this. If North Korea dropped a bomb on Seoul tomorrow,
does anyone really think we would retaliate by wiping Pyongyang off
the map? Wouldn’t we appoint a committee to study the matter
instead? Wouldn’t we have to file an environmental impact
statement?
If our “nonproliferation experts” refuse to budge, it’s more
than likely the Koreans will turn elsewhere. The Russians are
already volunteering to supply countries with nuclear fuel and then
take it back for reprocessing. “The Russians have a peculiar level
of comfort with all things nuclear,” said a New York Times
reporter recently, apparently not realizing it may be us who has a
peculiar level of discomfort. Wouldn’t it be ironic if,
after fighting a war in which we suffered 50,000 casualties to keep
South Korea out of the Soviet orbit, we should now turn them over
to the Russians because of our inordinate fear of all things
nuclear?
It’s a sad story, as old as history — a young, upstart country
with great ambitions for the future confronting an aging society
that has lost its nerve and wants to live off the privileges of its
past. Only this time we’re on the wrong side of history.
