The Hon. Christopher A. Ford
New Paradigms Forum -- International Security Policy Since 2009
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Prospects for U.S.-Vietnam Civil-Nuclear Cooperation
Dr. Christopher Ford • May 21, 2021
Dr. Ford prepared the following remarks for a May 20, 2021, panel on U.S.-Vietnam civil-nuclear cooperation at the "United States - Viet Nam Security Dialogue," sponsored by the Pacific Forum and the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this conference, and congratulations to the Pacific Forum and the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam for putting all of this together.
For an American of my generation – just old enough to remember the closing phases of the Vietnam war, and having had a close relative who served three tours there in U.S. Army aviation – it is sometimes nothing short of amazing to see how far relations between our two countries have come in merely the last generation. I came to Washington as a young foreign policy scholar in the mid-1990s, at about the same time as the United States restored diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and things have been steadily improving since then.
I had the privilege of visiting Hanoi in professional capacity in late 2018, when serving as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation. Despite some continuing challenges between our governments – such as in the arena of compliance with human rights law and norms – my overwhelming impression was of ever-stronger feelings of strategic partnership between our two countries. And nowhere was this more true than in the myriad ways that grow out of our shared concern with the destabilizing threats presented in the Indo-Pacific by the rising power and increasing belligerence of the People’s Republic of China.
I. Energy Opportunities
But there’s more than just a common threat that we both must work to meet. We also have some exciting shared opportunities – not least in the realm of civil-nuclear cooperation. After all, Vietnam, like so many countries, faces challenges today not just of accelerating its already impressive economic development, but also of meeting expanding energy requirements at a time in which the international community is focusing more and more upon replacing fossil fuel-based energy with carbon-neutral sources.
The World Nuclear Association reported in 2020, for instance, that energy demand in Vietnam has been rising rapidly – with demand growth, especially in the country’s South, having risen by 15 percent in recent years – resulting in electricity rationing. Vietnam has been talking about possible expansion into nuclear power generation since at least 1995, but in 2016 some of these plans were deferred
in favor of gas and goal options.
Since mid-2020, however, it has been reported
that Vietnam’s Ministry of Energy and Trade is once again exploring the possibility of building nuclear power plants. Specifically, it’s been said that Vietnam may even eventually wish to acquire a nuclear power generation capacity of some 1,000 Megawatt electric (MWe) by the year 2040 – that is, a gigawatt, or a billion watts of electricity – and up to 5,000 MWe by 2045. (There have even been reports
of discussions about potentially eventually aiming for as many as 14 reactors totaling more than 10 gigawatts in capacity.)
I will defer to other panelists here today on the specifics of Vietnam’s current thinking and planning about nuclear energy. To my eye, however, this renewed opened to nuclear electricity generation creates some very promising possibilities for U.S-Vietnam civil-nuclear cooperation.
Since I left office in January, of course, I am no longer able to speak about such matters on behalf of the United States. Indeed, I do not represent anyone at this point, and my comments here today do not necessarily represent the views of anyone else, in or out of government.
But even though I speak only for myself, I think it is quite clear that there is in front of us the chance to build a wonderfully collaborative future in nuclear-related cooperation between the United States and Vietnam. The stage seems now well set for us to make significant progress together.
II. Nonproliferation Credentials
Having until recently been the U.S. Government’s top nonproliferation official, I should perhaps begin by emphasizing the progress that Vietnam has made over the last decade or so in joining the international community of “best practices” in fighting proliferation.
For example, at a time when some other U.S. partners in other regions of the world continue to fan international worries about their nonproliferation bona fides by resisting adherence to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Additional Protocol (AP), Vietnam has signed the AP, which entered into force for it in September 2012. In fact, I wish more countries would follow Vietnam’s example, for the AP has indeed become the de facto standard for IAEA verification “best practices.”
Vietnam is a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and has been an IAEA member since 1979. And it has had an IAEA safeguards agreement since 1990 – now, as noted, supplemented by the AP in order to help allay concerns about undeclared nuclear material or activities. Vietnam’s 2008 Law on Atomic Energy prohibits the development of nuclear weapons as a matter of national legislation, and in 2010 it issued regulations that would make any trafficking of nuclear materials illegal.
Vietnam has also joined the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT) – which has grown into a large network
of nations committed to working together to strengthen global capacity in the fight against terrorism – and is also now one of the countries participating in the Proliferation Security Initiative
(PSI). Further bolstering its nonproliferation credentials, Vietnam has, in agreements with the United States, made clear its intention to rely upon international markets for nuclear fuel supply rather than pursuing its own fissile material production, with all the nonproliferation questions and challenges that might raise.
Vietnam has also worked cooperatively with the United States and others to remove all weapons-usable nuclear material from the country, through the conversion of its Russian-origin research reactor from highly-enriched uranium (HEU) to low-enriched uranium (LEU) under the Global Threat Reduction Initiative
(GTRI) program and the repatriation of Vietnam’s HEU
to Russia. Furthermore, U.S. Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials have trained Vietnamese counterparts on nonproliferation and nuclear safety best practices in power plant operation, and my former bureau at the State Department has provided assistance with improving Vietnamese export controls. All this nonproliferation good sense and shared commitment to nonproliferation values helps provide a strong foundation for civil-nuclear cooperation.
III. Framework for U.S. Cooperation
Since 2002, Vietnam has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with several Western countries, including France, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. It even signed agreements with Russia and with China in 2002 – which, as I’ll explain shortly, probably isn’t such a good idea – and followed up the Chinese agreement with a further cooperative memorandum in 2017.
From the perspective of laying a foundation for Vietnam’s access to the safest and most sophisticated nuclear power generation technology on the planet, however – and to emerging opportunities on the cutting-edge of next-generation nuclear electricity production – the crucial steps began in 2007 with an agreement for cooperation and information exchange between the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
A further U.S.-Vietnam agreement was signed in 2010, and a full cooperation and commercial trade agreement – a so-called “123 Agreement,” named after the section that governs their creation in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act – was signed in 2013
and came into effect in 2014. The two countries also announced a flurry of additional cooperative steps
in the nuclear technology arena in 2016.
To be sure, this momentum was sapped somewhat by Vietnam’s 2016 decision, for economic reasons, to defer some of its planned nuclear power acquisitions. With Hanoi’s nuclear energy planning now perhaps getting back on track, however, it’s useful to flag some of the ways in which cooperation with the United States may be able to develop in the years ahead.
IV. Benefits of U.S.-Vietnam Cooperation
I would argue that this is now a particularly auspicious time for Vietnam and the United States finally to jump-start such cooperation. I admit that the U.S. civil nuclear sector is not what it once was in terms of global market share. We have indeed been undercut by state-sponsored “national champion” industries – not just in China and Russia, but also in a couple of Westernized democracies – which spend state funds and make decisions only partly for economic reasons, and which have proven distressingly willing to use disinterest in high nonproliferation standards as a tool for competitive advantage over nuclear providers, like us, who care profoundly about such things.
So U.S. suppliers certainly don’t dominate the international market anymore. But they do remain the world leaders in safety and reliability, and in the overall quality of the technology they offer – a quality that is ironically demonstrated by the fact that Chinese nuclear companies have consistently tried to steal U.S. nuclear know-how, and both Chinese and South Korean suppliers have repeatedly tried to pass off U.S. technology as their own. In fact, the Chinese company with which Vietnam has signed a cooperation agreement
– China General Nuclear Power Corporation (a.k.a. China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corporation, or CGNPC) – is an unscrupulous thief facing criminal charges. CGNPC has been indicted in U.S. courts for stealing American nuclear technology, a pattern of criminal conduct for which one of its employees has already pleaded guilty and served a jail sentence.
Nor are other suppliers able to offer technology with the safety credentials that U.S. providers do. We all know, for instance, how the Russians approach nuclear safety: it’s clearly not too much of a priority for them. They’re the folks who brought the world the Chernobyl disaster in the 1980s, after all, and who in more recent years have killed their own scientists through a criticality accident with the nuclear reactor
they built for the reckless new cruise missile their military is trying to develop.
But the Chinese nuclear industry is also no paragon of safety. All three of the big Chinese state-owned nuclear companies – CGNPC, the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), and the State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) – have willfully cut corners in design, testing, and safety protocols in order to save money and achieve research and development (R&D) goals more quickly. Seeing faster timelines and faster construction as their tickets to international competitiveness and domestic self-sufficiency, they may have deliberately sacrificed safety on the altar of rapid expansion. Yet, the Chinese nuclear business is presently trying to get British
and European Union
agreement to build and operate its “Hualong One” reactor design – a type that has only been operational in China itself, at this point, for mere weeks
– thus effectively seeking to use foreigners as guinea pigs for reactor safety and certification.
Happily, U.S. nuclear technology has none of these drawbacks, offering peerless quality, safety, and security at a time when governments and publics are understandably interested in these qualities as they contemplate embarking upon the very long-term, 50- to 100-year bilateral partnerships that a major reactor project can create. What’s more, the U.S. nuclear sector stands today on the verge of a veritable revolution in reactor technology that is likely to offer even better, safer, more affordable, more grid-appropriate, more easily constructed, and more proliferation-resistant designs.
There are today a range of advanced, so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) presently under development in the United States, representing a variety of sizes, technology options, capabilities, and deployment scenarios. They will likely vary in size from tens of megawatts up to hundreds of megawatts, and they are likely to provide excellent answers for power generation, process heat, desalination, or other industrial uses.
Six SMR designs are currently under review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) – the world’s premier nuclear regulator – with some at a very advanced state of development, and likely to start being deployed in the late 2020s. The NRC, in fact, has just issued its final safety evaluation report on the “NuScale” SMR design, which is on track to receive full design certification this August.
These new technologies are quite promising, providing a powerful complement to the matchless technology available from U.S. providers in the traditional, large-scale powerplant business. With a so-called “123 Agreement” having now been in place between Vietnam and the United States for several years, I’d say a good foundation is today in place for a very rewarding cooperative relationship.
The United States has also been providing innovative new opportunities for nuclear-related technical engagement and collaborations with international partners. It remains necessary to have a “123 Agreement” in place for U.S. transfers of nuclear materials and equipment such as a reactor, but since 2019 we have also been negotiating Nuclear Cooperation Memoranda of Understanding
(NCMOUs) with select partner governments in order to facilitate improved collaboration between governmental, private sector, industry, regulatory, and academic entities in the countries in question.
These NCMOUs can complement and help partners build more effectively upon a cooperative relationship
where a “123 Agreement” is already in place – as with Vietnam – but they can also be quite valuable in helping catalyze stronger partnerships with countries long before the point of actually seeking to procure reactors and fuel. In both cases, they are an excellent means through which nuclear sectors can work together to help America’s partners build their own infrastructure for the responsible use of nuclear energy and technology, and implement high standards of nuclear safety, security, and nonproliferation, including independent regulatory oversight. I should also stress that these NCMOUs are also important political statements, symbolizing the parties’ commitment to a deeper and wider strategic relationship.
I’m proud to say that we developed this NCMOU mechanism on my watch at the State Department, and that we have already negotiated them with a number of select partner states – including our NATO allies Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. Since leaving government, of course, I no longer oversee the team that negotiates these agreements. Nevertheless, I’d be willing to be Vietnam would be a very good partner in this vein.
V. Strategic Considerations
Having suggested some of the ways in which I think the U.S.-Vietnam nuclear cooperation relationship can grow – and in which it can reinforce and help expand our countries’ broader strategic partnership – let me conclude with a few comments about that strategic context, and about the risks and dangers of entanglement with the Russian and (especially) Chinese nuclear industries.
Even leaving aside the problems of safety and reliability – and technology theft
– that I described earlier, there are powerful strategic and security reasons for countries to avoid involvement with the Russian and Chinese nuclear sectors. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are great risks in both cases. As for Russia,
“cut-rate reactor builds and package deals have been used to create strategic dependencies intended to yield exploitative profits on the back end for services, fuel, and support, while opening host governments to Kremlin manipulation and coercion.”
The Russians also refuse to subscribe to the Organization for Economic Cooperation’s Nuclear Sector Financing Guidelines, and they have suppressed nonproliferation standards in the supply of nuclear reactors and material around the world – even as Russian diplomats have worked in multilateral nonproliferation fora to undermine progress in the evolution of safeguards and export controls.
If anything, there are even greater strategic risks in entanglement with China’s civil-nuclear sector – which, as I’ve pointed out before,
“uses predatory lending terms that create debt sustainability risks and provide the Chinese Communist Party with another tool for expanding its geopolitical influence, as it works to bring more and more countries into a high-tech 21st century analogue to the Chinese Empire’s ancient ‘Tribute System’ of demanding deference and signs of fealty from surrounding peoples. All of this cannot but be of profound national security concern, especially in today’s era of renewed and accelerating great power competition.”
As a close neighbor that lived under the arrogant thumb of the old Chinese “Tribute System” for centuries, I’m sure Vietnam can appreciate this problem – and that it wishes to avoid subjugation under Beijing’s new tribute system.
Taking advantage of every opportunity to build “neo-neoimperial” footholds
in other countries, China uses the leverage resulting from civil-nuclear relationships to advance its strategic goals – which, as Vietnam painfully knows, include the achievement of hegemony in East Asia and a dominant position on the global stage more broadly. As a U.S. State Department paper we published last year
summarized things,
“The PRC seeks a military more capable than any other in the world by 2049; hegemony in the Asia Pacific region … ; leading positions within international organizations; and a dominant position in the advanced technologies essential to military power. With these achievements, the PRC hopes to claim what it sees as its natural hegemonic place at the center of a system that generally defers to Beijing’s interests.”
In support of these objectives, China uses its nuclear industry as a strategic tool
with which to augment China’s “comprehensive national power” – both through development in the civilian sector and in support of a military buildup. The Chinese civil-nuclear sector, after all, is
“not a purely civilian industry, instead operating in close partnership with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and in support of Beijing’s efforts to fulfill the so-called ‘Strong Military Dream’ of high-technology military modernization. To cooperate with the Chinese nuclear business, in other words, is thus to some extent inescapably to cooperate with the PLA. The nuclear industry’s promotional relationship with Beijing’s security interests and strategic objectives, moreover, has helped give it a very worrying, far-too-close-for-comfort relationship with the Chinese security services, even in its overseas operations.”
The Chinese nuclear sector works with the PLA Navy in building improved nuclear power plants for ballistic missile submarines whose missiles threaten the United States, Russia, India, France, and Britain – as well as attack submarines and aircraft carriers whose operations threaten Chinese neighbors including Vietnam. It is even working to build small, “floating nuclear power plants” (FNPPs) to provide power for the militarized and fortified pseudo-islands the PRC is building in its illegal occupation of the South China Sea
at the expense of neighbors such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
As recently made clear by a groundbreaking study by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, moreover, the Chinese nuclear industry’s plans for a vast new plutonium production and separation capability presents further problems. This new program “will have the result of placing enormous additional quantities of weapons-usable plutonium into the hands of the Chinese government” that could easily be diverted to nuclear weapons purposes, thus potentially supercharging the rapid nuclear weapons build-up that is already underway in China – a build-up that the head of the U.S. Strategic Command has warned could result in Beijing tripling or even quadrupling the size of its arsenal.
Needless to say, I think this is not work that Vietnam, or indeed any other state, should be willing to help subsidize through commercial contracts with the Chinese nuclear business. Tellingly, however, CGNPC – the PRC company with which Vietnam has a nuclear cooperation agreement – is among those working on FNPPs for the South China Sea in conjunction with the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation
(CSIC).
I hope that as it considers its nuclear energy future, Vietnam will keep these risks very much in mind. No good will come from Vietnam’s strategic entanglement with the PRC’s quasi-militarized nuclear energy machine, and it is clearly well past time for global civil nuclear markets to turn away from PRC and Russian suppliers.
VI. Conclusion
I realize that my strategic warnings here are quite stark, but they are unfortunately realistic – and they are informed by all too much unpleasant worldwide experience with the Russian and the Chinese nuclear sectors. Yet I hope you will appreciate that my overall message is one of hope and promise.
I believe the United States and Vietnam are well-prepared to make far-reaching improvements in civil-nuclear cooperation, and that these improvements will provide both countries with very important additional benefits as we deepen our broader strategic partnership. I hope my successors at the State Department and their colleagues elsewhere in the U.S. Government will join with their counterparts in Vietnam – and energy-sector officials, experts, and industry leaders in both countries – to seize these opportunities and build the kind of mutually-rewarding future that I think can lie ahead of us.
Thank you.
-- Christopher Ford
Below appears the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) “PONI Scholars” group on March 28, 2024.
Dr. Ford's paper "Nuclear Posture and Nuclear Posturing: A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing China's Nuclear Weapons Policy" was published in February 2024 by the National Institute for Public Policy . You can read the paper on NIPP's website here , or use the button below to download a PDF.
Below is the text of Dr. Ford's comments at an event the American Enterprise Institute on February 13, 2024, on U.S. outbound investment screening.
Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on February 8, 2024.
For a roundtable on December 13, 2023, sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis and the Stimson Center , Dr. Ford participated in a discussion with Stimson's Debra Decker about nuclear risk reduction and the challenges of leadership in a complex national security environment. You can find materials on the roundtable here , and a video of Dr. Ford's discussion with Ms. Decker here .
Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making brief remarks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “Targeting Workshop” on January 12, 2024.
With 2023 now in our collective rear-view mirror, I thought I’d offer you a handy compilation of my public work product from the last year. The list is heavy on strategic competition with China, of course, but doesn’t omit other topics ( e.g., morality and nuclear weapons policy, nuclear nonproliferation, and North Korea). Keep checking New Paradigms Forum for new material as we move into 2024!
Below are the remarks delivered by Dr. Ford at the “Strategic C ompetition Educators Conference” held on December 7, 2023, at the U.S. Foreign Service Institut e in Arlington, Virginia.
Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered at a conference sponsored by the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), on December 5, 2023.
Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered at Bacon House in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2023, to DACOR ’s annal conference. This text has been supplemented with amplifying references to the original (longer) text Dr. Ford prepared for the event.