Is The U.S. About To Break One Of Its Own Nuclear Treaties?
Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.
He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”
In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.
Related: Iran Deal Opponents Try A New Approach
At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.
The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose of by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.
But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.
The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.
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