The New York Times
Rice Urges Congress to Approve Nuclear Deal With India
By JOHN O'NEIL Published: April 5, 2006
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today that it needed to approve the nuclear deal President Bush signed with India to keep that country aligned with the United States during what she called "an all-out rush for energy supplies" by rapidly developing nations.
"Nothing has taken me more aback as secretary of state than the way energy is — I will use the word warping — international diplomacy," she said.
Ms. Rice described a world in which limited supplies of energy and competing demands from countries like India and China are giving countries that supply oil and natural gas undue influence, and called the agreement crucial to developing a "strategic partnership" between the United States and India.
"India is a rising global power that we believe could be a pillar of stability in a rapidly changing Asia," she said.
Her remarks were greeted with caution by the panel's chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican, who noted that it "would not prevent India from expanding its nuclear arsenal."
"The course of history is not going to be kind to us if we're involved in an arms race" among developing nations," he said.
The agreement, which was first announced last summer and completed by President Bush during his recent trip to New Delhi, would give India access to nuclear technology that had been barred because it never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and would remove sanctions imposed after it developed nuclear weapons. In return, India would designate most of its nuclear reactors for civilian use only and allow international inspections of them.
Ms. Rice acknowledged that "regional realities" meant that India would not agree to accept a cap on its nuclear arsenal. "We are simply seeking to address an untenable situation," she said, asserting that the deal that would "bring India into the nonproliferation framework."
The agreement would require amending the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. But so far, members of Congress in both parties have been relatively cool to the idea.
The chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican, said last month that he believed members of Congress might seek changes in the pact. Ms. Rice was scheduled to testify before that committee this afternoon.
During her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, its top Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, said he was " probably going to support" the deal, but primarily because rejecting it would damage relations with India.
"It comes down to a simple bet we're making," he said of the pact, that India would value its relationship with the United States more than the security it would gain by making more atomic bombs.
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, said the pact "rewards a nation for not signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."
She also questioned whether it would foster the kind of great-power alliance that Ms. Rice described. "I do not share the view that closer U.S.-India ties will be a counterweight to China, which seemed to be the unstated yet driving force behind this deal," Ms. Boxer said, calling the idea "old-fashioned, Cold War thinking."
But Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, said he would probably support what he called an imperfect deal because it would offer greater international oversight of India's nuclear program than now exists.