Governments saw that there could be a positive side to nuclear and began to promote it as a way of producing electricity. In the United States this “peaceful uses” aspect not only provided a welcome antidote to the government’s determination to rapidly escalate nuclear weapons production but was part of a program designed to win public approval of the expensive new arsenal. In other countries, like Britain and France, the primary purpose of so-called duel-use reactors was to produce plutonium for bombs. Yet the public was sold on the idea that the reactors were meant for electricity.

Fast forward 60 years and we have a new twist on this deception via a loophole in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which is having it’s five-yearly review this month at the United Nations.

What likely will not happen is a revision of the treaty’s Article IV, which states: “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. . .” In effect, Article IV offers a nuclear reward to non-nuclear weapons countries who sign the treaty; promise never to make the bomb and you can build and operate nuclear reactors. Since the materials, and to a certain degree, the processing involved in arriving at fuel for a civilian reactor or to create an atomic bomb are basically the same, a civilian program can lead to – and has led to – the covert development of nuclear weapons.

Not only that but you also get what Mohamed ElBaradei, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calls…

…"virtual nuclear weapons states", who can produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium and possess the knowhow to make warheads, but who stop just short of assembling a weapon. They would therefore remain technically compliant with the NPT while being within a couple of months of deploying and using a nuclear weapon.

Former US vice president Al Gore said in 2006…

For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal -- which is the real issue: coal -- then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale. And we'd run short of uranium, unless they went to a breeder cycle or something like it, which would increase the risk of weapons-grade material being available.

So why aren’t the likes of Gore and ElBaradei, men who’ve seen the dangers of nuclear proliferation first hand, being listened to?