Nuclear journalism in the developing world

This year, Egypt's government is spending about 1 percent of gross domestic product on scientific research — a big improvement from the 0.23 percent recorded in 2011. But scientists nonetheless earn low salaries, and infrastructure is poor at universities and research centers. This causes scientists to migrate elsewhere in search of better standards of living, greater access to advanced technologies, and more stable political conditions.

Science journalists feel they could play an important role in lifting Egyptian science out of its quagmire. But science journalists themselves face serious challenges. Among the biggest challenges, particularly when it comes to covering nuclear issues, is politics. Before the revolution, I faced the problem of excessive secrecy whenever I wrote on a topic related to the country's nuclear program. The Mubarak regime considered all atomic affairs top secret. A watchdog committee censored the press, allowing very little on these subjects to be published. It only allowed nuclear news to be published if it highlighted the regime's achievements. Even now, Egypt's draft constitution fails to provide clarity on the tension between, on the one hand, national security and, on the other, press freedom and the public's right to be informed. (A public referendum on the draft constitution is to be completed on December 22.)

Little space, little money. In Egypt, a limited number of journalists cover science, mostly because media outlets remain unconvinced that covering science is important. Science writers find it difficult to land on the front page, and some newspapers and magazines devote no space to science news at all. Science coverage doesn't receive much money, either — journalists covering nuclear and other scientific issues earn poor salaries, and the result of this is poor coverage, with reporters submitting stories that are translated from Western sources or that depend too much on press releases. But only a few research centers even produce press releases.

Government spokesmen are usually more concerned with official meetings and their travel schedules than with providing scientific information that makes sense to readers. Journalists are not allowed to step inside the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority, and cannot talk to any of the scientists there without permission. Then again, many scientists refuse to grant interviews because some journalists do not prepare for their interviews properly, or publish inaccurate information.

Slow train. Another major challenge I have faced is a lack of training courses for people in my field. I began work as a science journalist in 2004, but no course for science journalists was offered locally until 2008. This was funded by the British Council in Egypt, with financial cooperation from the European Union — Egyptian newspapers are generally uninterested in providing training courses to their staff in such specialized areas. Journalists have to be self-reliant, and improve their skills via independent reading and seeking out courses where they exist.

Traveling abroad to scientific conferences represents another major challenge. Most newspapers do not pay journalists to participate in such events, so one must secure outside funding. I have attended six scientific conferences outside Egypt, but each trip has been funded by an international organization in recognition of articles I have written.

This is a shame, because international conferences provide fertile ground for dialogue and networking among people from the developed and developing worlds. In 2011 Egypt was scheduled to host the World Conference of Science Journalists, but the event was moved to Doha because of political unrest. The event, in which I participated, was nonetheless very worthwhile; half the participants came from the developing world and the conference was a truly multicultural experience. Despite the differences among nations, science journalists around the world still face challenges in common — such as how best to communicate with scientists, reach wide audiences, make stories accessible, and bring science into public debate.

Steps forward. Ideally, the media should play a vital role in encouraging public engagement in science and technology. But in a developing country like Egypt, this ideal very often goes unattained. The situation could be improved in several ways. For instance, more workshops and training courses for science journalists should be organized. Press associations should help fund such courses, and should also sponsor competitions and awards for science journalism. University departments of mass communication could contribute by establishing specialized programs in science journalism.

But science journalists themselves have to fight for their own vocation. I learned early in my career that it isn't enough to produce good work — it's also necessary to sell it to editors, to persuade them to publish it alongside political news. Meanwhile, the government should leave it to journalists to decide what nuclear information is important to publish, and should realize that censorship does not contribute to national security. In fact, censorship may only make the public more resistant to nuclear projects. For instance, Egypt's proposed nuclear power project at El-Dabaa has faced opposition from local residents who are upset over land seizures, or who fear negative environmental and health effects. But perhaps the government could have reduced these problems if, to begin with, it had communicated more openly with the public.

India's public debate on nuclear issues — from nonproliferation policy to weapons doctrine to the safety of civilian nuclear power — is generally quite shallow, and the country’s culture of nuclear secrecy is the main reason. The secrecy arises from a number of factors, some of them particular to India and some of them external. One factor is that official structures like the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 restrict nuclear information and policy making to a small circle of people. The act places large segments of both the civilian and military nuclear programs under a cloak of secrecy so thick that even parliamentary supervision is constrained. Thus, nuclear decision making is restricted to a handful of scientists and bureaucrats, sometimes referred to as India's nuclear enclave, who function with little oversight and even less transparency. Strikingly, the military is not part of this circle, even though the military is in charge of the deployment of the nuclear arsenal.

Another factor contributing to excessive secrecy is that the nuclear program through the first two decades of its existence was shot through with ambiguity. Because of divisions within the nuclear fraternity, many of whose members were hostile to weaponization, there was great uncertainty about whether the program should have a military component. The country, therefore, developed a dual-track program without formally declaring a military aspect. Later, fears developed that — amid a sustained Western drive to undermine what was in effect a merged civilian and military nuclear program, which operated outside international safeguards — any nuclear information that India divulged would be used against it by the West. The international sanctions deployed against India’s nuclear efforts were very important in establishing a culture of secrecy and isolation among the country’s nuclear scientists.

A final factor is that, once India’s nuclear program appeared to be under siege from "neo-imperialist" foreigners and became wrapped in the flag, public acceptance of the nuclear program was assured. A nuclear mystique then developed, and this proved remarkably corrosive for genuine debate about nuclear policies. The nuclear program never faced much protest even as it became error-prone and in many respects remarkably inefficient. Debate on the program’s merits was highly stunted, intelligent assessment was almost impossible, and the public focused on symbolic accomplishments like nuclear tests. The program was sacrosanct and beyond debate, and its secrecy was seen as a necessity — even as a positive attribute.

Dogs not barking. Making matters worse in India, the institutions that serve as watchdogs in many societies — independent regulators, parliament, the media, and so on — all suffer from defects that dilute their ability to contribute to debate. The most obvious such problem is that the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the primary agency for monitoring the safety and security of India's reactors, is a derivative of the Department of Atomic Energy, the very body it is supposed to monitor. Its lack of autonomy was recently questioned by a government watchdog, the Comptroller Auditor General. And parliament, as noted, has been deliberately cut out of nuclear policy making, and it has even lost control over the nuclear program’s funding.

The media, meanwhile, suffers from severe structural problems. The media market, with over 500 television channels and 70,000 newspapers, is extremely competitive. It is driven by short-term concerns and little room exists for in-depth policy analysis. Stories are short, advertisements plentiful. Few if any newspapers have science correspondents, and none has a specialist devoted to nuclear issues. Most media outlets, like the public, buy into the narrative that past international sanctions required a secretive nuclear program — one that should still be treated as beyond reproach.

The consequence of all this is a nuclear establishment that does not feel the need to communicate with the public, and to a real degree is unable to do so. The public has largely accepted this isolationism. But as the nuclear program has become internationalized following the signing of a nuclear cooperation agreement between India and the United States, the flaws in developing a culture that saw itself as outside the realm of normal public debate have been revealed. Today, as public protests are carried out against civilian power reactors, and as the government avoids taking the initiative on bringing into force a nuclear test ban it once supported, we see the struggles of a nuclear establishment that has never had to explain itself to anyone — other than a prime minister and a dozen other people.

The Indian culture of nuclear secrecy, born of a nuclear mystique in the 1950s and several decades of international sanctions, is not merely obsolete. It is also becoming a liability for the expansion of India's nuclear power program. Though the lifting of a more than 30-year moratorium on nuclear trade with India was supposed to have opened the door to a large expansion of its nuclear power program, growth has been hindered by legal liability issues, political protests against nuclear power, and land acquisition problems — difficulties that are partly a consequence of, or have been greatly exacerbated by, the Department of Atomic Energy’s lack of transparency and weak public outreach. Now, the department and its affiliate bodies have begun to master the art of public diplomacy and mass communication. What is needed is for this new and growing openness to become institutionalized, thus ensuring that India’s culture of nuclear secrecy can come to a permanent end.

The following anecdote illustrates the way in which Russian authorities respond to criticism of their nuclear policy.

In January of 2012, Vladimir Putin — then Russia's prime minister and now its president — became very angry during a meeting with the editors-in-chief of many of the country's top media outlets. Complaining to Alexei Venediktov of the radio station Ekho Moskvy about the "utter nonsense" that he had recently heard on the station from two defense analysts — Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute for Strategic Assessments, and me — Putin claimed that the analysts were promoting the interests of a foreign power, implying the United States.

Putin was particularly angry over Konovalov's suggestion that the location of US missile defense installations should not concern Russia's political and military leadership because the installations pose little, if any, threat to the country's nuclear deterrence capabilities. In fact, Putin said that if the United States deployed radar installations for a missile defense system in Georgia, Russia might aim some of its missiles at Tbilisi. But Washington has no plans to deploy radar facilities in Georgia. True, four Republican senators in the United States proposed this idea last year, but it was little more than a propaganda stunt, and few in Washington took the proposal seriously. Putin sincerely believes that he is an expert in the field of nuclear weapons, but his stance on missile defense indicates otherwise.

Hysterics and bogeymen. Because nuclear weapons are so fundamental to Russian's foreign policy, journalists who cover and question nuclear weapon policy can face accusations that their work is unpatriotic. Since Putin first came to power, a concerted effort has been made in Russian diplomacy to bring issues of nuclear strategy to the forefront. From the Kremlin's viewpoint, Russia can only demonstrate that it should be considered a superpower by emphasizing its nuclear potential. Therefore, in every way possible, it has tried to leverage the huge nuclear arsenal that it inherited from the Soviet Union for greater influence in international affairs. In fact, in discussions with Western and above all American counterparts, Moscow seems to want to discuss little besides nuclear issues. Putin has labored doggedly to raise nuclear warhead counts to the top of the international agenda in order to obscure other issues where Russia is weak — such as the country's level of economic development, which doesn't align with Putin's superpower ambitions. He believes that the United States is the root cause of all his problems, and he uses every opportunity to remind Washington that one country in the world remains capable of destroying the United States.

In recent years, Moscow has often expressed its dissatisfaction with Western policies by resorting to the clichés of the Cold War. For instance, the Kremlin is unhappy with Georgia's desire to join NATO, and with the possibility that Ukraine might join as well. Therefore, it claims that the West will inevitably build military bases in those countries if they join NATO, and that these bases will be equipped with missiles aimed at Russia. Moscow dislikes it when the United States and countries in Western Europe express their displeasure with Russia's suppression of civil liberties — and responds by going into hysterics about NATO building up a military superiority.

Much of this was demonstrated in a speech Putin gave in Munich in 2007, in which he said that peace based on fear of mutual destruction "was reliable enough," but that "today it seems that the peace is not so reliable." He put Cold War issues like the balance of conventional arms and missile defense in Europe back on the negotiating table, while repeatedly accusing the United States, as well as other NATO countries, of attempting to achieve military superiority over Russia.

The idea that ​​nuclear weapons are the state's main asset precludes discussion of serious issues such as whether Russia needs to maintain nuclear parity with the United States. Nor is there much legitimate debate in Russia on the most pressing nuclear issue of the moment — the US missile defense system. Russia insists that the United States through missile defense is undermining strategic stability and threatening Moscow's nuclear deterrent. But nobody in Russia is interested in having a serious discussion on the subject, and missile defense has become a perfect bogeyman that the Kremlin can use for political purposes in the same way that it has used NATO expansion.

In reality, Putin is deathly afraid of threats from the West. But it isn't nuclear war that he fears, but rather an Orange Revolution in Russia. The Kremlin is paranoid about such a "color revolution." Concerns over US missile defense plans are phony — Russian leaders understand that these plans pose no threat to Russia's deterrence capabilities — but they are prepared to battle the "orange plague" wherever it appears in the world. The United States executed regime change in Iraq, and helped do so in Libya. Now it wants the same in Syria — and, according to the Kremlin, the United States is planning a regime change for Russia.

Hints, allusions, and treason. Under such circumstances, casting doubt on the government's nuclear policy calls into question the country's entire foreign policy. This affects journalists, and also nongovernmental organizations. Several Russian research organizations employ highly qualified experts on nuclear issues. These include the Center for International Security, which is headed by international-relations scholar Alexei Arbatov; the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, headed by Sergei Rogov; and the Carnegie Moscow Center. Outstanding experts such as retired Generals Vladimir Dvorkin and Viktor Esin are affiliated with these organizations, but the expert community prefers not to engage in direct discussions with the Kremlin on nuclear issues. It prefers instead to speak in allusions, and to make hints so thin that the government can safely ignore them. Analysts may suggest ways to continue the process of disarmament — but government officials say that Moscow is not interested in any disarmament.

Now authorities have at their disposal a new, highly effective tool to stop any discussion about nuclear weapons. Russia recently enacted a treason law that could criminalize anyone who associates with organizations whose activities are perceived as threatening Russia's security. Security is a concept that can be interpreted very widely, of course, and the new law provides an excellent opportunity to silence anyone — including journalists — disagreeing with official views.