By Tom Clifford
Assistant Editor of Gulf News
Dubai: Washington has given the green light to five non-nuclear nations to begin uranium processing and enrichment programmes for nuclear power generation.
It is these programmes that the United States is trying to prevent Iran and North Korea from undertaking. The states are Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.
Japan will also be allowed to start up a reprocessing facility to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods.
The move has been termed as hypocritical by the environmental group Greenpeace, which is among the participants at a conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"The bottom line is that this reveals the hypocrisy of the United States," Greenpeace official William Peden told Gulf News from the conference venue in New York.
"This does nothing to allay fears and increases tension in the Far East and the Middle East. It is clear that there are some countries entrusted with nuclear technology and some who are not. Rules are applied for some that others can ignore," he said.
The decision reverses a previous US policy proposal to limit the production of processed and enriched uranium and plutonium that has the potential to be used in nuclear weapons.
The proposal on Japan was made in light of Tokyo's plan to begin an enrichment and reprocessing facility at Rokkasho, Aomori prefecture.
Germany and the Netherlands have joined a conglomerate with Britain to create a group which enriches uranium. Brazil has made uranium processing a priority and had criticised US attempts to prevent such programmes.
In February 2004, US President George W. Bush proposed a ban on obtaining such technology except for nations that already operate such facilities. This has now been overturned.
At the conference, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan conceded the treaty needed strengthening. He urged the US and Russia to cut back their weapons arsenals. He also supported Iran's right to have access to nuclear fuel, but said that it "must not insist" on developing sensitive technology.
The chief of UN nuclear watchdog agency, Mohammad Al Baradei, asked all nations to stop processing nuclear material until new controls could be negotiated.