The Politics of CANDU Exports.

Quigley, Kevin

The Politics of CANDU Exports By DUANE BRATT. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 319, bibliographical references, index.

"Nuclear" is making a come-back. Organizations representing the nuclear industry in the U.S. have been running a regular stream of ads on American television expounding nuclear power's benefits as an energy source: sustainable, domestic and clean; the things that oil is not. The U.K. government has approved a new generation of power stations, the first ones to be built in the U.K. in decades. Many argue that Kyoto targets cannot be met without increased use of nuclear power. Even some in the environmental movement, once strong adversaries of nuclear technology, are having a second look.

The news has not all been positive; nuclear power has also received attention lately for the evil it can do: Iraq, Iran and North Korea--all examples of countries whose governments are or were alleged to have covert operations to produce nuclear weapons. Indeed, some of the most significant international events of the last decade have revolved around these allegations and what Western governments were or were not prepared to do to respond to the possibility of unstable or hostile states developing nuclear capabilities for (potentially) military purposes.

Duane Bratt's new book on the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear power reactor is therefore timely. Bratt is clear from the outset that CANDU exports have always represented a fine balance of several competing interests. As he charts the reactor's history, he describes a complex dynamic, which involves senior politicians and bureaucrats--in Canada and abroad--top scientists and numerous lobbyists, both benign and corrupt.

Bratt notes that supporters of sales of CANDU reactors abroad base their arguments on either economics or politics. Those who base their arguments on economic claims point to the considerable financial dividends that Canada reaps from the sale of CANDUs, including a multibillion dollar contribution to GDP. Specifically, Bratt foregrounds the jobs that are created as a result of the CANDU, particularly in research and development, and the capacity to use CANDU sales to promote Canadian businesses more generally, which helps them expand into new and emerging markets, such as China. Maintaining a nuclear capability in Canada is also very expensive, and therefore sales of CANDUs abroad can generate needed sources of income. This makes the industry viable in Canada and in so doing helps to support a sustainable energy source for domestic use. Those who advocate CANDU sales abroad on political grounds have done so by pointing out that the CANDU can help to raise the standard of living in the developing world and by arguing that by spreading the benefits of nuclear technology, particularly to the developing world, Western countries can help to contain communism. Not surprisingly, this latter argument carried particular weight during the Cold War years.

Equally, over the years, the enthusiasm for selling CANDU reactors has been constrained by numerous concerns. Nuclear non-proliferation is chief among them, but there are others, including the concern over selling reactors to governments with poor human rights records and weak environmental standards, for instance. There are also those who argue that CANDU exports are not the boon that the Canadian nuclear industry contends. In fact, there are various direct and indirect subsidies that Canadian taxpayers have to absorb almost every time a CANDU reactor is sold.

With every sale--or potential sale--of a CANDU reactor, there is a clash of some variation of these for and against arguments. Bratt notes bouts of "schizophrenia" as the Canadian government talks a good game about human rights, for instance, and then succumbs to the favourable economic considerations of CANDU sales and agrees not only to sell but to promote actively the CANDU to foreign governments, irrespective of their record on human rights.

Drawing from political science literature and in particular Cranford Pratt's dominant class theory, Bratt argues that the largely pro-nuclear lobbyists, such as the Canadian Nuclear Association and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., dominate policy discussions. They are an elite class, with an unrivalled knowledge of the science and have privileged access to decision-makers. This dynamic is reinforced by the fact that the elite groups at work within key government agencies--at Natural Resources Canada, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission--understand the arguments largely in the terms in which the pro-nuclear lobbyists pitch them. Ultimately, the economic arguments almost always trump all other arguments, including those put forward by the antinuclear lobby, which does not have the access or expertise to compete with the "insider" pro-nuclear lobby. There have been a few exceptions, such as the tightening of sanctions in the 1970s, which followed the (arguably) clandestine use by the Indian government of Canadian technology to carry out nuclear explosions. Bratt explains the exceptions by drawing on Pratt, who argues, "When there are strategic conjunctures of circumstances that open decision-making up to a wider range of options, the efforts of ethically motivated citizens' organizations can make important contributions to shaping foreign policy" (p. 234).

The book is largely successful. It offers an extremely well-documented history of the CANDU reactor generally. This in itself is significant. For security reasons, information about nuclear reactors is hard to come by, and Bratt should be commended for his considerable effort. His level of detail is particularly engaging when he revisits the arguments between Canada and India following India's nuclear tests. Here is a lucid reminder that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty divides the world into two groups, those who have the right to nuclear arms and those who do not, and that not every country agrees with this obviously discriminatory approach.

Bratt is also careful to place Canada's role in global nuclear debates in its appropriate context. He is clear that Canada has never been a major player in the nuclear world; if it had nuclear capabilities at all, this was due largely to its ready access to uranium, which provided privileged access to elite international political discussions otherwise beyond Canada's reach.

Finally, the author keeps a number of explanatory variables in play as he examines what factors drive CANDU sales abroad. His last chapter provides a helpful summary of the dominant variable for each negotiation, be it economics, human rights or non-proliferation.

The book's strength--its explicit and detailed account of the political dynamics largely within Canada that influence the sale of CANDUs abroad--makes the study a little narrow at times. The author hardly refers to some of the largely American psychology literature that has made important contributions to the study of nuclear power, such as the psychometrics literature, which examines why people "dread" nuclear technology. Nor does he refer to the "normal accidents" and "high reliability organizations" literature concerning the reliability and security of these complex systems. He refers only in passing to the "dread" factor and does not touch on the sociology literature at all. As noted, the book is clearly situated within the political science tradition, and this can explain the absence of these other references. Nevertheless, pointing to these other studies might have been appropriate, or least would have enriched the list of references for further reading.

More importantly, the book's virtual silence on some of the events and issues that have emerged in recent years, and particularly since 9/11 and the conflict in Iraq, is surprising. Strangely, there is little explicit mention of these events in the chapter that details the 1997-2005 period or in the concluding chapter. These events could provide the author with the opportunity to test further some of his principal arguments. If senior officials were influenced by the post-9/11 context--and it is unfathomable to think that they were not--then CANDU sales were not necessarily constrained by the "efforts of ethically motivated citizens' organizations" or the superior expert knowledge of insider lobbyists but rather another force, such as the influence of U.S. foreign policy in Canada.

While explicit references in the book to U.S.-Canada relations are modest in number, particularly in the later chapters, it seems that the Canadian government's positions have rarely run afoul of the relevant foreign policy objectives of the State Department. There may not have been sales of reactors in the mid- to late 1980s, but the U.S. government was deeply engaged in discussions with the Soviet Union about nuclear disarmament; Canada may have been selling CANDUs to China in the 1990s, with little concern for China's human rights records but the U.S. government was also overlooking human rights abuses in order to encourage trade with the Chinese and penetrate China's market.

It certainly seems plausible, for instance, that 9/11, the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and indeed the pursuit of WMDs by relatively new non-nation state groups had (and have) a profound impact on the thinking and actions of the relevant Canadian senior civil servants and politicians. Unfortunately, the author does not really explore this aspect in any detail. The author notes that most of the research for the book was carried out during the late 1990s. Certainly the rich detail that he provides in the first part of the chronology is not matched by his examination of the post-9/11 setting. If the research essentially stopped at the end of the 1990s, perhaps the author's account should also have ended there.

Kevin Quigley is assistant professor in the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University.