Taiwan Nukes and Self-Promotion

kerr — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:47:06 +0000

Well, not entirely. Jane put up a good “post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1548/counter-proliferation-in-taiwan about, as she put it, the National Security Archive’s “new “electronic briefing book”:http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb221/index.htm on U.S. opposition to the Taiwanese nuclear program in the 1970’s.”

I haven’t had a chance to read the briefing book yet, but I hope to later this week.

The self-promotion part is that I wrote “this piece”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_01-02/Egypt_Taiwan.asp a while back on the IAEA’s investigation of some past suspicious Taiwanese nuclear activities.

At the time, I wrote that, according to _AP_, the IAEA had “found evidence that Taiwan conducted plutonium-separation experiments until the mid-1980s.” That time frame might be off, though – I was cautioned by a State Department official that “it is possible the reported experiments took place during the 1970s.”

Here’s some more history:

bq. Boucher said that Taiwan “worked under IAEA supervision and safeguards on plutonium at some point” during the 1970s. Whether Taipei ever separated plutonium, however, is unclear. *According to declassified State Department documents, the United States had concerns in the mid-1970s that Taipei was secretly separating plutonium. Taiwan reportedly began building an additional facility that could separate plutonium in 1987 but again stopped because of U.S. diplomatic pressure.*

I have occasionally taken stabs at trying to find out whatever became of the IAEA’s investigation, but to no avail.