The United States should embrace a global expansion of civil nuclear power generation, in order to ensure that it and other supplier nations can build safeguards into the growing market, says a report from a State Department advisory panel.

The report highlights a vigorous debate about the extent to which regulatory regimes -- even of the tough kind it advocates -- can actually provide safeguards against a nation determined to thwart them. Critics of the report say it glosses over the risks of its strategy and ignores the weaknesses inherent in any safeguards process.

The report was commissioned by a senior U.S. arms control official from the International Security Advisory Board, a panel of former officials and experts headed by former Pentagon policy head and World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.

The task force of members that wrote it -- in just two months, and keeping its length to a total of about 30 pages, including introduction and appendices -- was headed by former arms negotiator and government scientist C. Paul Robinson.

The report says a large expansion of nuclear power, especially in less developed countries with no existing reactor capacity, is inevitable, given growing energy demand and the rising price of alternatives.

Although some experts contest this premise, the report goes on to recommend that, rather than seeking to strengthen the existing global proliferation control regime by renegotiating a tougher Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States instead should focus on reaching deals with other nations that already produce nuclear fuels -- the "supplier nations" -- to provide aspirant nuclear power nations with fuel and technology in exchange for tough, enforceable pledges that they will not develop their own fuel production capacities.

Fuel production systems, like uranium enrichment using centrifuges or reprocessing spent fuel into plutonium, are among the most proliferation-risky technologies, because they can so easily be used to produce weapons material instead.

The regime of safeguards the report advocates would "have a lot more teeth than the IAEA," Robinson told United Press International.

He said the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with enforcing the NNPT, is "a gentlemen and ladies' agreement" with no provision for surprise or otherwise aggressive inspections. The United States and other nations have promoted voluntary "additional protocols" -- which allow more intrusive inspections and more robust safeguards -- but Robinson said these are being "slow-rolled."

"You could hardly find a less propitious time for renegotiation," he concluded.

Some experts say the proliferation cat is effectively halfway out of the bag already. "The ability of governments to prevent the proliferation of dangerous technologies has drastically declined and continues to decline," said Brian Finlay of the Stimson Center.

The report says supplier nations should jointly establish mechanisms for assessing compliance with pledges to forgo enrichment and reprocessing capability in return for fuel, and "develop criteria and procedures for shutting off fuel and hardware supply in the event that a recipient is found to be non-compliant."

In other words, countries that engaged in freelance reprocessing or enrichment activities would lose their future source of fuel and technology, and -- importantly -- be subject to "take back" provisions by which material they had already received could be confiscated.

"What we are proposing is to write in real prohibitions �� real safeguards �� explicitly into the supply contracts," said Robinson. "That's the quid pro quo" for getting fuel and technology from the United States ad other supplier nations.

But critics say the report's proposals ignore the weaknesses inherent in any system of safeguards.

Historically, it has proved very difficult to detect nuclear weapons production-related activity, pointed out Henry Sokolski, a proliferation expert who was a defense official in the George H.W. Bush administration, worked for Sen. Dan Quayle, R-Ind., and now heads the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

"There's a reason the U.S. intelligence community and international inspectors have been repeatedly cold-cocked" by countries with covert weapons programs, Sokolski told UPI. "This is not a game that anyone has had a good track record at."

Sokolski, who worked for Wolfowitz in the Bush I Pentagon and now serves alongside him on the congressionally mandated blue-ribbon panel examining the threat of terrorist attacks using nuclear material or other weapons of mass destruction, said he was "disappointed" by the report.

The authors "should have done more to explain the limits of nuclear inspection to detect dangerous activities and military diversions in a timely fashion," he said.

"To make nuclear technology and fuels available on the basis of political pledges not to misuse them," he said of the report's recommendations, "when several countries have a track record of doing exactly that, is putting the nuclear energy cart in front of the nuclear safeguards horse."

Sokolski is particularly critical of the report's recommendation that the United States abandon its 30-year-old abjuration of reprocessing spent fuel into plutonium -- and work with other supplier nations to increase global reprocessing capacity.

Even when reprocessing plants are in allied countries like Japan, ensuring there is no leakage or diversion is almost impossible, he said, because of the volumes of material involved and the very small amount -- about 22 pounds -- of material needed to make a bomb.

"Monitoring any large-scale reprocessing plant creates huge accounting problems," Sokolski told UPI. "The margin of error the IAEA expects in such operations -- 1 or 2 percent -- leaves you each year with enough material unaccounted for to make multiple bombs."

Worse, he said, the separated plutonium made from reprocessing "is very easy to fashion into a bomb. It can be done in days or weeks, if not hours." So a monitoring process actually provides little safeguard. "By the time you notice it's missing, it could already be too late."

(Part 3 will examine the nuclear cycle and the cycle of hostility.)