Abstract
For decades, the nuclear rules of the road have been rather straightforward: If you want access to the global market in civilian nuclear technology and fuel, you must first renounce any intentions to build nuclear weapons and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
India knows those rules better than anyone. After all, it was India's detonation of a nuclear device in 1974 that prompted the United States and other countries to form the Nuclear Suppliers Group as a way to control exports to would-be proliferators. And India's ongoing refusal to sign the NPT and accept “second-class status” as a non-weapons state has effectively denied it the means to keep its nuclear power plants going, let alone expand the plants' output to slake India's thirst for more electricity.
So, it must have come as a great relief to Indian Prime Minister Manmo-han Singh when, with a little help from President George W. Bush, he found a way to have his yellowcake and eat it, too. In a July U.S.-India joint statement, Bush pledged to push Congress to amend U.S. laws to allow sales of civilian nuclear parts and technology to India, and to press other nu-clear supplier states to “adjust international regimes” to do the same. For its part, India promised to separate its civilian facilities from its military ones; place civilian facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards and monitoring; further strengthen its export controls on nuclear technology; continue its moratorium on nuclear testing, and work with the United States toward a fissile materials cutoff treaty.
The debate over the merits of the agreement has been fierce. For exasperated arms control advocates, the deal was yet another Bush administration attempt to chip away at global nonproliferation norms. Carving out an exception for India, they claim, undermines the NPT by offering a non-member the benefits–civilian nuclear parts and know-how–that only signatories are supposed to enjoy. In their view, it's only a matter of time before other countries expect the same. Predictably, Pakistan's request for a similar arrangement was rejected outright, prompting Jehangir Kara-mat, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, to warn that, “The balance of power in South Asia should not become so tilted in India's favor, as a result of the U.S. relationship with India, that Pakistan has to start taking extraordinary measures to ensure a capability for deterrence and defense.”
South Asian saber-rattling aside, supporters of the deal see it as a nod to reality that finally brings India into the nonproliferation regime. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has voiced his approval because Indian nuclear facilities will now come under international safeguards. Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, offered his blessing of the deal, noting in the Washington Post that New Delhi had been following NPT rules prohibiting the transfer of fissile material, even though it wasn't bound by them.
Of paramount concern to India are its energy needs. Its 14 nuclear plants produce around 2.7 gigawatts of electricity–approximately 2.5 percent of the country's total energy. Carnegie Mellon's V. S. Arunachalam, the defense science adviser to five Indian prime ministers, estimates that India needs to add a new 1,125-megawatt power plant every month over the next 10 years to maintain its 8 percent GDP growth rate. And without any new imports of parts and fuel, India's nuclear power industry will be limited to the amount of uranium it already possesses, which will last around 40 years but will not allow it to expand output significantly.
The controversial core of the debate revolves around fissile material. The nonproliferation community's chief complaint is that the United States failed to secure from India a firm commitment to stop producing fissile materials for nuclear weapons–something that all five NPT nuclear powers are committed to doing. George Perkovich, an expert on India's nuclear program and the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that the joint promise to work toward a treaty on fissile material cutoff “is so cynical that even Bush administration officials laugh about it privately.” Because India retains the ability to expand its arsenal with new fissile material, critics argue that it got off easy.
Interestingly, a livid contingent of Indian critics argues the exact opposite, claiming that India has sold out its national interests in an effort to please Washington. Separating civilian and military facilities, they say, amounts to placing a ceiling on India's arsenal by limiting the amount of fissile material available to it. Echoing that concern, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee maintains that the size of India's credible minimum deterrent “must be determined from time to time on the basis of our own threat perception. This is a judgment which cannot be surrendered to anyone else.” Satish Chandra, a former Indian national security adviser, puts it more bluntly, saying, “It is the U.S. game plan to cap India's nuclear weapon program.”
An important wild card in Indian geopolitics is India's geology. Although the country possesses meager amounts of uranium, it has one of the world's largest reserves of the rare radioactive element thorium. (Thorium is not fissionable and therefore cannot sustain a nuclear reaction. But when it is bombarded with neutrons, it yields uranium 233, which does fission). Though experts say that India is around 10 years away from having thorium-fueled reactors, India's plan has always been to wean itself off of imported uranium. The first phase is to use uranium-fueled heavy water reactors to generate plutonium; the second to use thorium and plutonium fueled fast-breeder reactors; and the third to use the uranium 233 from the fast breeders with thorium in advanced heavy water reactors. One of the chief reasons why many Indian nuclear scientists question the merit of the U.S. deal is that they don't see much need for the imported fuel in the years ahead, even if they might need some soon.
I scratch your back …: President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House in July 2005.
Although under the agreement India would still retain the capacity to expand its nuclear arsenal, the key question is whether it would choose to do so. New Delhi has already decided not to pursue the largest nuclear arsenal that it could have, opting instead for a no-first-use policy and a credible minimum deterrent. Nevertheless, it would like to retain the ability to produce new nuclear weapons, as a hedge against threatening developments in neighboring Pakistan or China. But some see more at work. “The administration didn't forget to ask India to stop producing bomb material,” Perkovich says. “They want India to build a bigger strategic arsenal to balance China's power.” Likewise, Steven Weis-man, the chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, believes the deal with India was spurred by growing U.S. concerns over China's military strength, even at a time when New Delhi has sought improved relations with Beijing. “When you talk to Indian officials, they are adamant, and resentful, frankly, that they are being seen in “Washington as a kind of a pawn here to beat up on China among the China bashers,” he explained in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. “So, for both India and the Americans, you don't hear very much [public] talk about, ‘Let's build up India as a counterweight to China,’ even though everybody knows that's part of what's happening.”
The best indicator of what direction India will take may be the number of nuclear facilities it eventually decides to classify as “civilian”–thereby opening them to IAEA inspectors and safeguards. There already exists a rough division, since defense reactors have never produced electricity. That makes the decision of how many facilities should be classified as civilian a crucial indicator of India's intentions. Carnegie Mellon's Arunachalam suggests that perhaps the best way to determine which facilities fall under IAEA safeguards is to simply put a reactor under safeguards as soon as it has any imported fuel loaded into the reactor. Yet, if India balks at putting the majority of its facilities under safeguards, the prospect for India's peaceful uses of nuclear energy will suddenly become murkier and the politics more difficult.
Nuclear Suppliers Group members France and Britain have both signaled that they will resume nuclear exports to India. But large obstacles remain. Although the negotiators' idea behind hammering out the grand bargain in one go (and in less than 400 words) was to avoid the delays of a more bureaucratic approach, Bush and Singh still have procedural problems to resolve. U.S. lawmakers now say they may indeed go ahead and green-light the rule changes, but only after India executes its end of the deal. Meanwhile, Singh is confidently telling his political opponents that India will make sure the United States upholds its end of the bargain before beginning the tedious task of separating its civilian and military infrastructure. Sooner or later, something will have to give.