Joining The Nuclear Family

The Economist

India and America

March 2nd 2006 DELHI

A strategic partnership built on shaky and controversial foundations

“WE HAVE made history today,” Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, told George Bush after a joint press conference in Delhi on March 2nd. They had just clinched what Mr Bush likewise called “an historic agreement” on nuclear power. Many critics believe it will prove an historic mistake.

The deal completes an accord the two men reached in Washington, DC, in July 2005, to bring India out of the international nuclear wilderness. Never having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), India carried out a nuclear explosion in 1974, and took the world by surprise again by testing several bombs in 1998. Yet last summer America agreed to grant it full civil nuclear-energy co-operation. For India, this was a golden opportunity. As Mr Singh told parliament on February 27th, it offered the possibility of “decades-old restrictions being set aside to create space for India's emergence as a full member of a new nuclear world order”.

The deal nearly foundered, however, facing a storm of criticism in both America and India. It was rescued by frantic negotiation, by telephone from Airforce One as Mr Bush's party approached Delhi via Kabul, and overnight once they had arrived.

The difficulty was over India's proposals for separating its military nuclear facilities from the civilian ones, which will be subjected to international safeguards. According to Mr Singh, “our civilian and strategic programmes are deeply intertwined” and India's initial separation plans—keeping almost all its reactors in the “military” basket—were rejected. In later proposals reactors accounting for some 65% of its nuclear-power capacity were listed as civilian. As The Economist went to press, details of the final separation plan had not been released. It may show that India has not done enough to help Mr Bush fulfil his offer to amend American laws and persuade other countries to change international rules that prevent nuclear trade with countries that do not accept full safeguards on all their nuclear facilities.

But America's Congress may yet scupper the deal. Being able to import fuel and nuclear technology from abroad—President Jacques Chirac was in Delhi last week to ensure France was in pole position for new contracts—means India can keep expanding both its nuclear power-generation and its strategic arsenal. That is deeply troubling, argued a group of former senior American officials in letters to Congress, in November and again last month, since the United States is committed under the NPT not to assist another state's nuclear-weapons programme “in any way”. By treating India as the world's sixth accepted nuclear power, Mr Bush also risks encouraging others to kick over the nuclear traces and may now find it even harder to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Of particular concern is the new deal's apparent acceptance of India's demand that its experimental programme of fast-breeder reactors (previously said to be for civilian use) should be exempted from international safeguards. This says a lot about India's ambitions. In 1999, when the Clinton administration attempted to persuade it both to end its production of fissile material for weapons and to sign up to a comprehensive test-ban, Indian officials demurred. Their needs were not infinite, they explained; it would take just a few more years to produce enough plutonium for a credible minimum deterrent.

Now India rejects anything that implies a cap on its strategic arsenal. Last month Anil Kakodkar, chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, publicly objected to any constraints on the fast-breeder programme: not in our “strategic interest”, he said. These reactors are ideally suited to produce plutonium for weapons.

Leaving these off the civilian list, says Robert Einhorn of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank, enables India to produce up to 50 bombs a year, if it chooses, instead of between six and ten. Nor has India taken upon itself the “responsibilities” of the five official nuclear powers, as Mr Bush's officials have claimed. All five have stopped making fissile material for weapons, and have at least signed the test-ban treaty. India intends to do neither. Its tightening of export-control legislation is no concession, but a requirement imposed by the United Nations.

There is still plenty of opportunity for the nuclear pact to run into the sand. Besides the risk of America's Congress throwing it out, India may not be able to reach agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency on the terms of a safeguards agreement. But it did at least provide Mr Bush's visit—only the third by an American president in 28 years—with its big symbolic agreement, marking the president's determination to draw India into a “strategic partnership”. Without it, the diplomacy might have been drowned out by the noises off-stage on March 2nd: the big demonstrations against his visit in Delhi by leftists and Muslims, and the murderous bomb attacks near the American consulate in Karachi, in Pakistan, whose capital, Islamabad, Mr Bush was due to visit on March 4th.

As both Indian and American officials stressed, there is far more to their “partnership” than the nuclear deal. Mr Bush was accompanied by a group of business bosses, enthused by India's booming economy. Indeed, there are plenty of opportunities for the world's richest democracy and its largest to cement their friendship. Helping India hone its nuclear skills is hardly a good place to start.

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