NIAMEY, Niger, 23 September 2003— Two or three times each week, a convoy of flatbed trucks loaded with drums of mined uranium heads south from the Sahara Desert in Niger on a 10-day journey to the port of Cotonou in neighboring Benin.
Two lightly armed Nigerien gendarmes accompany the tarp-covered trucks on their 2,000-kilometer (1,240-mile) trip. They have no satellite phones or other ways to communicate in case of trouble. On their prearranged stops for the night the drivers must notify the mining companies, but they take no special precautions to secure the drums against theft.
This low-grade security for the powder that can be processed into high-grade uranium for nuclear bombs provides a snapshot of how the world’s second poorest country manages radioactive materials management under closer scrutiny since the Bush administration accused Iraq of trying to buy uranium here.
A UN nuclear agency team plans to visit Niger in the coming months, hoping to speed government approval of an agreement that would permit in-depth monitoring of uranium exports, The Associated Press learned while investigating the country’s uranium trade.
Without this safeguards agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency can’t require Niger to tighten security and has no authority to inspect production or shipments.
Niger produces lightly processed uranium, or yellowcake the raw material for enriched uranium used as fuel for nuclear reactors, or the guts of an atomic bomb.
Despite global fears that terrorists or so-called rogue nations could acquire ingredients of a bomb, the UN agency doesn’t see Niger as a major risk.
Its yellowcake “would require considerable conversion and processing to be usable for nuclear weapons,” agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said. “We don’t start tracking this stuff until it’s in a form suitable for reactor fuel.”
Instead, the Vienna, Austria-based IAEA relies on the governments of countries that import uranium shipments from Niger to report them as obligated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Some experts believe this isn’t enough.
Companies trading in yellowcake should be required to report all significant shipments so that the IAEA can track where the material is going, said Tom Cochrane, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Even the skeptics acknowledge that UN watchdogs lack the money to monitor yellowcake as rigorously as they track more highly radioactive materials.
Niger has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but of the 22 countries that reported producing uranium in 2000, Niger and Kazakhstan are the only ones without a safeguards agreement.
“The pressure has to be put on them to do it quickly,” said Scheinman, who now works at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington.
Niger’s Parliament must ratify the agreement and enact any corresponding laws, and the experts and lawyers who will travel to Niger aim “to break any legal logjam,” said Gwozdecky of the IAEA. Their trip is part of a planned IAEA mission to five West African countries and six in Latin America.
Leading into the war against Iraq, the United States and Britain caused diplomatic uproar by claiming that Iraq’s then-President Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake here to build a nuclear arsenal. An Iraq-Niger connection already existed. Iraq is known to have bought 305 tons of Nigerien yellowcake for its nuclear weapons program about 1981-82. Just five tons can yield enough enriched uranium to build a bomb using basic Chinese technology.
But that was 20 years ago. This year’s controversy related to recent alleged sales, but Washington backed off its allegations after incriminating documents proved to be forgeries. Yet Britain, citing undisclosed intelligence, maintains Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger. This has hurt the African country
Niger denies the accusations, and AP interviews with independent analysts and businessmen who mine and export yellowcake here add weight to the denial.
