India Not Out of the Nuclear Wilderness
Dec. 18, 2006 — -- President Bush signed HR 5682, the United States and Indian Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act of 2006, into law at a White House ceremony this morning.
The act allows the United States to renew the supply of civilian nuclear technology and materials to India after a hiatus of nearly three decades. The reason for this long cold shoulder: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The treaty, put together in 1968, declared that only five recognized nuclear powers could have both nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear reactors. After China carried out a nuclear test in 1964, India decided to seek nuclear weapons. Since India wasn't a recognized nuclear power, its nuclear power program was cut off and isolated by the world community, including the United States.
As part of a broader policy of transforming bilateral relations between the two largest democracies, the U.S. administration announced in July 2005 that it would seek to pass legislation that would allow the United States to resume civilian nuclear cooperation with India.
In return, India would place its civilian reactors under international safeguards, ensuring they would be proofed against proliferation. However, India would be allowed to keep its nuclear weapons -- in the same way that the United States, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and China do.
The 2005 agreement sparked a heated debate about its merits within India and the United States, as well as in other parts of the world. The strongest argument against the deal was that giving India an exemption within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would encourage rogue states like Iran and North Korea to demand the same.
The case for the deal had two sides.
One was that bringing India -- a rising power and a country with a better nonproliferation record than, say, China, an official nuclear power -- would strengthen the global nuclear system, not weaken it. Among the proponents of this argument was Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the treaty's official guardian.
The other, felt strongly by Bush and his officials, was that a close strategic relationship with India was necessary to U.S. security in the coming decades. This partnership would remain stillborn so long as the United States maintained treaty-based technology sanctions against India.
For example, the treaty's sanctions put severe curbs on U.S. know-how in several fields, including supercomputers and high-performance jet fighters, in India.
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri is an Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Fellow in New York. Pramit is also the foreign editor of Hindustan Times, in New Delhi, and is the newspaper's U.S. correspondent.
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