A tale of two fuel cycles: defining enrichment and reprocessing in the nonproliferation regime

In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration condemned Iran’s use of nuclear-fuel-cycle technologies while endorsing sensitive nuclear activities in South Korea. The politics behind this difference may appear self-evident, but maintaining this policy was premised on a complex interaction between technology and politics. This paper examines both US and international definitions of uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing and finds an incoherence between technical definitions and policy implementation. Definitions of enrichment are narrow, as they refer to a very specific set of material processes. But the Bush administration applied a capacious standard when debating what it meant for Iran to “suspend” enrichment-related activities. On the other hand, definitions of reprocessing are capacious, implicating many different processes that can be interpreted as reprocessing. And yet the Bush administration applied a narrow standard as it sought to assist South Korea’s pyroprocessing efforts. By positing a reciprocal relationship between technology and politics, this article challenges both the position that technical solutions can solve entrenched political conflicts, and also the simplified narrative that great-power politics trumps shared technical and legal standards. Interpretive conflicts over technical standards are shaped by politics, and yet technical contestation also limits and bounds political manipulation.