Why Canada is nonproliferation’s dumbest friend

Maybe you have heard the story of how India got the Bomb with Canada’s inadvertent help. We sold India a nuclear reactor called CIRUS in 1954 on an explicit promise that the facility would only be used for peaceful purposes. When India astonished the world with its first nuke test in May 1974, having upgraded the fuel output from CIRUS, it duly announced that it had successfully created a Peaceful Nuclear Explosive. The permanent consequence was, for better or worse, a nuclear-armed Subcontinent.

This is old news to enthusiasts of Cold War history. Here’s the new news: it almost happened twice. Canadian technology was almost used by another country to break into the nuclear club.

In November, historians David Albright and Andrea Stricker published a new book called Taiwan’s Former Nuclear Weapons Program: Nuclear Weapons On-Demand. The book pulls together the previously sketchy story of Nationalist China’s covert nuclear research, which had its roots in the postwar exodus of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang party (KMT). Albright and Stricker describe decades of effort by the offshore Republic of China on Taiwan to play a double game with nuclear weapons.

At first Taiwan engaged in sneaky nuclear research — it turns out that if you research nuclear safety you learn a lot about nuclear explosions — and it tried to create a plutonium stockpile on the sly. But their scientists left too many clues: a plutonium-based nuke requires processed plutonium metal, and that is hard to make without raising suspicions. The Indian test of 1974 was an important wake-up call to the world, and the nonproliferation establishment and the U.S. Department of State started to get nervous about Taiwan.

After a 1977 confrontation with American officials, who could hardly be ignored by the vulnerable Republic of China, the KMT deep state tried subtler methods to create the “on-demand” weapon described in the title. Taiwan committed formally to nonproliferation and full U.S. inspections of its facilities, but sought to be able to make low-yield nukes within three to six months in the event of a Communist invasion from the mainland.

The key to the story is the 40-megawatt uraniumfuelled Taiwan Research Reactor (TRR), supplied, like CIRUS, by Canada. TRR was very similar to CIRUS in design and capability. The pile went critical in January 1973, giving Taiwan an indigenous source of plutonium. Under the sales agreement, the reactor was to be “safeguarded” by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), answering to its inspectors and accounting for the whereabouts of its fuel. But Taiwanese nuclear agencies immediately began to behave suspiciously, talking to some of the slimier European industrial concerns about buying reprocessing equipment that would allow weapons manufacture.

The 1971 recognition of the mainland Communist government by the UN had been a setback for the IAEA’s ability to monitor nuclear energy in Taiwan. The IAEA is a UN agency, and it had to abandon the negotiating structure it had built for dealing with what was no longer considered a sovereign state. Albright and Stricker note that the Trudeau government’s pro-mainland foreign policy cost us any influence we might have exercised over the use of our TRR nuke plant, which seems to have been a darned fine product. Taiwan started to make deals with South Africa for technical advice and uranium supplies.

The U.S. read Taiwan the riot act in 1977 and nuclear weapons development by the Republic of China was reined in for a while. But TRR continued to operate, creating a plutonium pipeline that could theoretically be called upon at any time. Plutonium was constantly being shipped to the U.S., but regulations and antinuke activism there created delays, so there were always a few kilograms held up in Taiwanese storage, and more was always present in the Canadian reactor itself.

In the 1980s the nationalist military tried to study and develop the “ondemand” capability, which would let it observe the letter of nonproliferation while defiling its spirit. The on-demand plan might never have been practical, for a myriad of reasons. Moreover, Taiwan had no physical room to conduct a real nuclear test, so if it obtained a nuclear weapon, all it could do was to announce that it had one.

Covert nuclear development in Taiwan was finally stopped cold because one of the Republic’s senior scientists, Chang Hsien-yi, became convinced that nukes were dangerous to the existence of the Republic. Chang, who is the major source for the new book, became a CIA informant in the 1980s. In 1987, it became apparent that Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor Chiang Chung-kuo did not have long to live. Chang and the U.S. intelligence establishment were not confident that the constitutional heir apparent, Lee Teng-hui, would be able to prevent a military coup.

They underestimated Lee, but the CIA and the State Department acted boldly. Chang sent his family on a conveniently timed vacation to Tokyo, and was secretly exfiltrated from Taiwan on Jan. 12, 1988. He lives in the U.S. and has not returned to his country. Chiang Chung-kuo died on Jan. 13, 1988: some say the shock of Chang’s escape killed him. The Taiwanese military knew that their nuclear weapons game was up, and cried uncle, working with the U.S. to eliminate the dubious parts of their nuclear energy infrastructure. It’s a heck of a story, even without the hilarious Canadian angle.

HERE’S THE NEW NEWS: IT ALMOST HAPPENED TWICE.