A vital nuclear step towards the world after oil

The UAE and the United States opened a new chapter in cooperation last week by signing a nuclear energy agreement. As long as the US Congress does not object, the deal will be enacted, placing the UAE on the road to becoming the first Arab nation with nuclear power plants. Support for the deal comes from several luminaries, including Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the former US senator Sam Nunn, Co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Barbara Judge, chairwoman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. With these endorsements, how can anyone object to enacting the agreement? Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is worried that the deal could spark a nuclear arms race in the region. But such fears appear overblown as long as the UAE keeps its promise to maintain a transparent peaceful nuclear programme and refrains from acquiring weapons-usable technologies such as uranium enrichment and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Notably, Iran has been developing a latent nuclear weapons capability through an enrichment programme.

Ros-Lehtinen and other politicians have also sounded an alarm on Iranian trans-shipments of non-nuclear military hardware through the UAE. They have proposed an amendment to the agreement that would require the US President to certify that no militarily useful technologies will transit through the UAE to Iran. This issue has an emotional appeal because American troops in Iraq have been killed with improvised explosive devices that US government officials say were supplied by Iran.

While stronger export controls are surely needed, and UAE officials are working to implement them, US politicians need to understand that no country's export controls are leak proof. The larger issue is to reinforce the mutual security interest the UAE and the US have in containing Iran. Enacting the nuclear deal will strengthen this security relationship. In talks with nuclear security and energy analysts in Washington, I have encountered less widely discussed, but still important, areas of concern: further strengthening of nuclear safeguards, ratifying liability coverage, and conforming with US law on promoting non-nuclear renewable energy sources.

While no one seriously thinks that the UAE will develop nuclear bombs, the deal will set a safeguards standard for countries seeking to acquire their first nuclear power plants. Laudably, the UAE has stated that it will work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to apply the Additional Protocol safeguards system. This protocol was created in the 1990s in response to Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme, which went undetected until after the 1991 Gulf War. But even the Additional Protocol can be abused. During Iran's voluntary application of this protocol until early 2006, Tehran was able to further advance its latent nuclear weapons capabilities.

The UAE and the US should set a higher bar than the Additional Protocol by taking two further steps. The UAE should offer to place its nuclear facilities under near-real time monitoring, and the US should offer to take back the spent fuel from any UAE nuclear power plants. This would eliminate any temptation to harvest plutonium, a nuclear weapons material, from spent fuel. Will the US be able to build nuclear plants in the UAE? Nuclear vendors will need adequate liability coverage in the event of an accident, and will insist on the UAE ratifying the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage. The UAE's 2008 nuclear policy paper notes the need to ratify this and other relevant nuclear liability conventions.

A final concern involves whether the UAE-US deal conforms to Title V of the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which requires a report from the President to Congress on US efforts in assisting developing countries with acquiring non-nuclear energy technologies. This law especially underscores "reducing the dependence of such countries on petroleum fuels" with emphasis on using solar and other renewable technologies.

This more than 30-year-old law is remarkably prescient on the future energy pathway for the UAE. The UAE is already collaborating with the US and other countries through the Masdar Initiative to harness renewable energies and make much more efficient use of energy to lessen dependence on fossil fuels. Because a nuclear power plant takes many years to build, the UAE will probably find that nuclear will play only a limited role, and that non-nuclear renewable technologies offer real energy security.

Charles D Ferguson is the Philip D Reed senior fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington