Bush's Nuclear Deal with India Is a Disaster for World Safety and the Environment

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted September 10, 2008.

A bitter closure is finally at hand for the long international debate over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. In a controversial statement issued in Vienna on Saturday, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, which regulates the legal nuclear trade worldwide, granted India an unprecedented waiver to buy nuclear material and technology despite its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its possession of nuclear weapons.

The decision is the penultimate step in changing the law to allow U.S. firms to help develop India's nuclear energy sector. With large majorities in the House and Senate supporting the deal -- including senators Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John McCain -- passage by Congress is likely during the opening session of 2009, despite dead-ender opposition by a handful of lawmakers led by Congressman Edward Markey, D-Mass. Passage by Congress would end a long and bloody political process that began in the summer of 2005, when George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a joint statement in Washington outlining a new strategic partnership, including a pledge by the United States to end India's nuclear pariah status.

Saturday's vote in Vienna was a long time coming. Immediately after the 2005 announcement, proponents and critics began digging trenches on either side of the deal, which the Bush administration viewed as its best shot at a meaningful post-Iraq foreign policy legacy. Some boosters went as far as to liken it to Nixon's going to China. By the time Bush and Singh met in New Delhi in March 2006 to sign the Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, the battle lines were marked and the battle cries well rehearsed.

Boosters in both capitols hailed the pact as heralding a historic geostrategic realignment, cementing ties between the world's oldest and biggest democracies. The nuclear deal, they said, would accomplish three things: It would bring India in from the nonproliferation cold by opening its civilian reactors to U.N. inspectors; help the growing country of more than 1 billion people meet surging energy demand; and reduce pressures on global oil supplies and atmospheric carbon counts. Critics decried the proposed exemption as a potentially fatal blow to the already creaking legal infrastructure of the nonproliferation regime. How, they asked, can we reward India for going nuclear without making a farce of the rules binding the rest of the world's non-nuclear nations? What's more, critics warned, sending uranium to India would fuel a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

For years the sides have waged battle in Washington, New Delhi, Vienna, New York and beyond, with overlapping political mini-dramas at times resembling a shifting pattern of Chinese trick rings. Few news stories have been so taxing on the public's attention. Supporters in Washington and New Delhi had to battle domestic and international critics, all the while recalibrating the terms of the bilateral deal. Last weekend's breakthrough comes after numerous rounds of under-the-radar negotiations and arm-twisting inside the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, both of which were required to approve aspects of the waiver before the pact could be ratified by Congress.

As recently as last month, the fate of the deal was in serious doubt. At the NSG's August meeting, an alliance of small European nations demanded, with the quiet backing of China, the insertion of a series of conditions and asterisks to the exemption that were unacceptable to India. But between the August meeting and last Saturday, the European opposition front was crushed under pressure from Washington. Bush then leaned hard on Chinese President Hu Jintao to accept to the deal, which China has never liked because of its implications for the balance of power in its dangerous backyard.

The result is an unprecedented change in international law allowing a non-NPT signatory state to purchase uranium and high-end reactor technology on the world market. In exchange, India will open its civilian plants to U.N. inspectors, in line with a much-criticized partial inspection plan approved by the IAEA last month. India's military nuclear installations, meanwhile, will remain off limits. Most importantly for India's nuclear weapons program, New Delhi can now import uranium to develop the civilian nuclear energy sector, while reserving the country's meager domestic ore deposits for the expansion of its nuclear arsenal, currently estimated to consist of fewer than 100 bombs.

Already some Pakistani officials are saying the deal will lead to an aggravated arms race between the two nuclear states, likely forcing China to participate as well.

Prominent critics of the deal say this is no surprise, and that an arms race in Asia is only the most immediate aspect of the deal's geopolitical fallout. "This is a nonproliferation disaster of historic proportions," says Daryl G. Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association. "The India-specific exemption from NSG guidelines severely erodes the credibility of global efforts to ensure that access to peaceful nuclear trade and technology is available only to those states that meet global nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament standards." Henry Sokolski, a member of the congressional commission on proliferation and terrorism, goes further, calling the deal "Nonproliferation's 9/11."

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Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

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