Canada’s plutonium mishap in India was 50 years ago this wee

[Oscar]

Canada’s plutonium mishap in India was 50 years ago this week – is history repeating itself now?

[ https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/05/16/cana ... tself-now/ ]

by Susan O’Donnell and Gordon Edwards, NB Media Coop, May 16, 2024

EXCERPT: "In the public imagination, nuclear power for electricity and nuclear weapons are entirely separate issues. Because Canada is not a nuclear weapons state, Canada’s nuclear power reactors are thought to be unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, and its nuclear technology exports are considered ‘peaceful.’

Yet this week marks the 50-year anniversary of one day in May when Canada’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear image was shattered. On May 18, 1974, India shocked the world by conducting a test A-Bomb explosion it called ‘Smiling Buddha.’ The nuclear explosive was plutonium, obtained from a ‘peaceful’ research reactor – a gift from the Canadian government in 1954. . . . ."

MORE . . .

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Background to the above . . . (this is NOT the article!)

On May 18, 1974, India exploded its first atomic bomb in the Rajasthan Desert, calling the nuclear test “Smiling Buddha”. The CIRUS reactor that produced the plutonium for this bomb was a gift from the Canadian government. It was a copy of the NRX reactor built at Chalk River, Ontario.

The go-ahead for the NRX reactor was given in 1944 in Washington DC, as part of the tripartite WWII Atomic Bomb Project, under the terms of the 1943 Quebec Accord involving US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

The NRX was designed by a team of French and British nuclear scientists working with Canadian colleagues in a secret laboratory on the slopes of Mount Royal in Montreal from 1942 to 1944. Subsequently the French helped Israel build its own plutonium-producing reactor, the Dimona reactor, modelled after the NRX design. Dimona became the basis for the Israeli nuclear weapons prpgram.

The very first Canadian reactor, ZEEP, started up in September 1945 at Chalk River – just one month after the Hiroshima A-Bomb explosion – as part of the wartime effort to produce plutonium for bombs. Almost immediately a Soviet cipher clerk in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, revealed that soviet spies in the Montreal scientific team had been providing secret A-Bomb information to Stalin’s regime in Russia, including sending a tiny sample of plutonium. For two decades after the war’s end Canada sold plutonium produced in reactors at Chalk River to the American military for use in bombs, as well as large quantities of uranium that were sold under military contracts.

Even before the NRX reactor started up, British scientists working at Chalk River used a small amount of plutonium to conduct all the preliminary pilot work needed to build their own plutonium reprocessing plant at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) in Northern England. Later, the British received their very first sizable sample of plutonium from the NRX reactor at Chalk River just months before Britain exploded its first atomic bomb in the Monte Bello islands off the coast of Australia.

So Canada, through Chalk River, played a material role in the nuclear weapons programs of USA, UK, USSR, France, Britain, Israel, and India.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, President
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
http://www.ccnr.org


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