U.S.-India Nuclear Agreement is Reckless Foreign Policy
By Leonard Weiss, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation National Advisory Board Member
Published in the Stanford Report on October 16, 2008
The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is an unneeded and potentially disastrous Bush administration initiative that undermines a 30-year nonproliferation policy pioneered by the United States and adopted by 189 nations. It will accelerate both the nuclear and conventional arms races between India and Pakistan, countries that have fought three wars in the past 60 years and have come close at least two other times within the past decade.
After two years of arm-twisting by the United States, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) recently agreed to make an exception to its trade rules for India. Congress followed by voting its approval, and President Bush signed the agreement into law. Until the exception, the NSG rules required that India (and all other 184 countries in its category as defined by the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) allow international inspections of all its nuclear materials and the facilities containing them. India had consistently refused to sign the treaty, known as the NPT, and agree to such safeguards, which led to the cutoff of nuclear trade by the United States under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. This law was motivated in part by India's 1974 nuclear test using U.S. nuclear material that violated the sale agreement prohibiting the use of such material for nuclear explosives. India's violation led to the creation of the NSG, which adopted the safeguards standard for nuclear trade in 1992.
The Bush administration hopes that the agreement will help build up India as a counterweight to Chinese influence and will induce India to follow U.S. foreign policy priorities, particularly with respect to Iran. But good U.S.-India relations are not dependent on the agreement (trade between the two countries has tripled within a decade and continues to grow). Furthermore, India has already made it clear that it intends to proceed with a gas pipeline from Iran passing through Pakistan, despite U.S. opposition.
The agreement will contribute indirectly to India's nuclear arsenal by allowing it to use imported nuclear fuel in its civilian reactors (as defined solely by India), while reserving its relatively scarce indigenous uranium for increased weapons production. This, in turn, will create new targets for theft by terrorists, as demonstrated by deadly bombings in Jaipur last year and Ahmedabad more recently. The agreement will also spur the purchase by India of billions of dollars of U.S. conventional military equipment. Unless a secret promise has been made by India, conventional military sales is where the deal will be most lucrative for the United States, since Russia and France are much more competitive in the nuclear reactor area; they are more likely to receive the bulk of high-ticket nuclear trade with India as a result of the NSG action.
The argument, by some proponents, that the agreement will reduce global warming by helping India replace coal plants with nuclear plants is bogus. India has a notoriously inefficient energy economy. The same amount of investment in efficiency improvements will reduce more greenhouse gases faster than India's plans for a greater nuclear sector over the next 20 years.
Although Congress has placed some tough requirements on the agreement, via the enabling legislation called the Hyde Act, it is clear that the deal shreds U.S. nonproliferation policy, increases the nuclear arms race in South Asia, and puts this country in the position of espousing nonproliferation for our enemies, but not our friends. This formula not only undermines efforts to rein in the nuclear ambitions of Iran, but also risks the collapse of the global nonproliferation regime and the creation of a world where nuclear terrorism can flourish. U.S.-Indian business interests lobbied furiously for the agreement, as did U.S. nuclear and defense contractors and elements of the Israeli lobby (Israel is in the same NPT category as India and, according to some reports, has raised the possibility of a similar deal for itself).
When the U.S.-India nuclear agreement was being negotiated, America's position was that India should sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, stop the production of fissile material for weapons, and place its breeder reactor program under safeguards. India refused, and the Bush negotiating team caved. Indeed, India's government has told its parliament and public that the agreement puts no restrictions on India's ability to test and build nuclear weapons.
Approval of this deal is the clearest sign yet that the world's nonproliferation regime is in deep trouble. The decision makes success more difficult for efforts to reduce and eliminate nuclear arms, as called for in Article VI of the NPT. Locking down "loose nukes" is critical, but not facilitating the production of more nukes is equally important. The risks inherent in the U.S.-India nuclear deal are too great to sustain any faith that this agreement could be a positive development for nonproliferation in the long term. It is premature at best, and another example of recklessness in the administration of U.S. foreign policy.
Leonard Weiss is an individual affiliate of CISAC and a member of the Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978.