The Boston Globe
Globe Editorial Nuclear vindaloo August 17, 2007
WHEN THE United States concluded a nuclear deal with India last month, among the results were protests in both countries. The deal allows India to buy nuclear fuel and advanced reactor technology without having to limit its own production of nuclear weapons or foreswear the testing of new weapons. Indian objections to the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement have largely been highly political and hyperbolic. But there should be louder complaints here in the United States.
Whatever its strategic, economic, and environmental benefits, the deal creates a glaring exception to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which India has never signed. Essentially, the Bush administration is saying that since India, the world's largest democracy, is becoming a crucial American ally, and since it has not peddled its nuclear weapons abroad, it may purchase nuclear fuel and technology that no other country outside the nuclear treaty is allowed to receive.
In India, debate over the agreement has been raucous. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was defending the deal to Parliament Monday, opposition lawmakers and leftist members of his own coalition were shouting, "Take back the nuclear deal!" The protesters view the accord as an infringement on India's sovereignty and a humiliating submission to American restrictions on India's right, as a rising power, to increase its nuclear arsenal.
Singh had to assure carping legislators that India retained its right to test nuclear weapons and that the deal gave the United States no control over Indian decisions about its nuclear weapons program. Singh's description of the terms of the agreement was truthful, but it also cast light on what is really wrong with the deal: it gives India far too much leeway.
Maybe India will exercise self-restraint in the matter of testing; maybe it will not produce new nuclear weapons using fissile material from the eight of its 22 reactors that are to remain under military control. Still, the deal represents a poor precedent for bringing other nuclear powers currently outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty into compliance with some set of rules constraining their behavior.
The other two outliers, Pakistan and Israel, ought to be shown that they, too, can have the benefits of access to nuclear fuel and technology if they abstain from testing and producing new weapons. If President Bush grasped the value of international treaties and obligations, he would have used the nuclear negotiations with India to establish less permissive criteria -- which Pakistan and Israel could then be encouraged to meet as well. These criteria could include strict nuclear export controls, an absence of dealings with terrorists, and transparency in a country's nuclear program. That would be a good deal for the whole world.
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