Bush seeking to limit number of N-fuel nations

WASHINGTON — President Bush is scheduled to announce Wednesday a new U.S. proposal to limit the number of nations permitted to produce nuclear fuel, senior administration officials said Tuesday. He will declare that the global network in nuclear goods created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the creator of the Pakistan's bomb, disclosed huge gaps in current agreements to stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology, they added.

In an afternoon speech at the National Defense University, they said, Bush will call for a re-examination of what one official called the "basic bargain" underlying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: that those states that promise not to pursue nuclear weapons will receive help in developing facilities to produce nuclear power.

Iran admitted last year that it cheated on that agreement for 18 years, secretly building nuclear facilities, and North Korea last year abandoned the treaty altogether and declared it was producing nuclear weapons.

Kahn's network secretly sold equipment to both countries, and to Libya, Americans and Pakistanis have said recently.

The officials said that Bush would not call for a reopening of the 1970 treaty., which one senior Bush aide said would be "too hard." Instead, he will appeal to the "Nuclear Suppliers Group," made up of the 40 countries that sell most nuclear technology, to refuse to sell nuclear equipment to any country that currently does not have fully operating facilities to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel into plutonium. Those are the two main paths to building weapons-grade fuel.

The senior official said Tuesday that Iran and North Korea were examples of "regimes which have cynically exploited loopholes in the existing treaty" to build up the capability to obtain nuclear fuel.

While proliferation experts have long agreed that the treaty is flawed, Bush's proposal is bound to raise protests from developing nations that charge that the U.S. and the other declared nuclear states — Britain, France, Russia and China — are simply trying to extend their rights to produce weapons while denying other states that capability. In addition to those five, Israel, India and Pakistan have operative nuclear weapons, and North Korea is believed by U.S. intelligence agencies to have at least two and perhaps several more.

The administration official said that Bush would also discuss for the first time the details of how the Khan network operated, being careful to praise President Pervez Musharraf and to portray the former head of the Pakistani government's Khan Research Laboratories as a rogue scientist.