Anti-proliferation meeting starts: Australia accused of double standards

Australia may have "innocently" exported nuclear technology to parties with weapons of mass destruction programmes, Defence Minister Robert Hill said Tuesday on the sidelines of an anti-proliferation forum. As environmental lobby Greenpeace accused Australia of double standards over nuclear proliferation, Hill urged all Southeast Asian nations to closely monitor their exports of what he called "dual-use" goods.
Hill did not specify whether the material in question may have gone to government or non-government bodies, and said he had no reports of such products being obtained by terrorist organisations. He described the goods as "nuclear-area technologies that can have legitimate non-threatening value, but at the same time can be used within a nuclear weapons program".
"They can be exported quite innocently and there have been suggestions that some may have been exported from Australia innocently that have been used within WMD, at least research programs," he told reporters after addressing an international meeting of the US-backed Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). The minister was responding to a report by Greenpeace accusing the government of supporting a company known as Silex Systems Ltd in its research of laser-based uranium enrichment.
Greenpeace said the program could inadvertently help the spread of nuclear weapons.
Hill declined to comment specifically on Silex, which occupies floor-space of the government-funded Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney.
Greenpeace campaigner James Courtney said the government's support set a "dangerous double standard that erodes international efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons-related technology."
Courtney called on the government to set an example to the rest of the world by ending research into sensitive nuclear technologies that posed proliferation risks.
"Our government is currently pressuring Iran to abandon its enrichment program and went to war to stop Iraq from developing this type of technology," he said.
Hill described Australia's system for monitoring exports as "quite sophisticated".