Buffeted by political turmoil at home, US
President George W Bush sought a foreign-affairs
victory in India. To clinch a nuclear-weapons
deal, Bush had to give in to demands from the
Indian nuclear lobby to exempt large portions of
the country's nuclear infrastructure from
international inspection.
With details of
the deal still under wraps, it appears that at
least one-third of current and planned Indian
reactors would be exempt from International Atomic
Energy Agency inspections and that Bush gave in to
Indian demands for "Indian-specific" inspections
that would fall far short of the normal,
full-scope inspections
originally sought. Worse,
Indian officials have made clear that India alone
will decide which future reactors will be kept in
the military category and exempt from any
safeguards.
The deal endorses and assists
India's nuclear-weapons program. US-supplied
uranium fuel would free up India's limited uranium
reserves for fuel that otherwise would be burned
in these reactors to make nuclear weapons. This
would allow India to increase its production from
the estimated six to 10 additional nuclear bombs
per year to several dozen a year. India today has
enough separated plutonium for 75-110 nuclear
weapons, though it is not known how many it has
actually produced.
The Indian leaders and
press are crowing about their victory over the
United States. For good reason: President Bush has
done what Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy
Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and his own
father refused to do - break US and international
law to aid India's nuclear-weapons program. In
1974, India cheated on its agreements with the
United States and other nations to do what Iran is
accused of doing now: using a peaceful nuclear
energy program to build a nuclear bomb. India used
plutonium produced in a Canadian-supplied reactor
to detonate a bomb it then called a "peaceful
nuclear device". In response, president Richard
Nixon and Congress stiffened US laws and Nixon
organized the Nuclear Suppliers Group to prevent
any other nation from following India's example.
Bush has now unilaterally shattered those
guidelines, and his action would violate the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
proscription against aiding another nation's
nuclear-weapons program. It would require the
repeal or revision of several major US laws,
including the US Nonproliferation Act. Nor has he
won any significant concessions from India. India
refuses to agree to end its production of
nuclear-weapons material, something the United
States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and
China have already done.
This is where
Bush is likely to run into trouble. Republicans
and Democrats in the US Congress are deeply
concerned about the deal and the way it was
crafted. Keeping with the Bush administration's
penchant for secrecy, the deal was cooked by a
handful of senior officials (one of whom is now a
lobbyist for the Indian government) and never
reviewed by the departments of State, Defense or
Energy before it was announced with a champagne
toast by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh. Congress was never consulted. Republican
committee staff say the first members heard about
it was when the fax announcing the deal came into
their offices. Worse, for the president, this
appears to be another give away to a foreign
government at the expense of US national-security
interests.
Bad example In
addition to breaking US law and shattering
long-standing barriers to proliferation, lawmakers
are concerned about the example the
nuclear-weapons deal sets for other nations. The
lesson Iran is likely to draw is simple: if you
hold out long enough, the Americans will cave. All
this talk about violating treaties, they will
reason, is just smoke. When the Americans think
you are important enough, they will break the
rules to accommodate you.
Pakistani
officials have already said they expect their
country to receive a similar deal, and Israel is
surely waiting in the wings. Other nations may
decide that they can break the rules, too, to
grant special deals to their friends. China is
already rumored to be seeking a deal to provide
open nuclear assistance to Pakistan - a practice
it stopped in the early 1990s after a successful
diplomatic campaign by the United States to bring
China into conformity with the NPT restrictions.
Will Russia decide that it can make an exception
for Iran?
Lawmakers loyal to Bush are
already signaling tough times ahead for this deal.
Republican Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the
Subcommittee on International Terrorism and
Nonproliferation, offered the following statement
after the deal was announced: "There is
enthusiastic support on Capitol Hill for growing
US-India ties. However, the US-India agreement on
civil nuclear cooperation has implications beyond
US-India relations. In this process, the goal of
curbing nuclear proliferation should be paramount.
Congress will continue its careful consideration
of this far-reaching agreement."
Royce's
subcommittee has oversight and legislative
responsibilities over non-proliferation matters.
Republican Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made no
secret of his concerns, as has Republican
Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House
International Relations Committee. Democratic
Congressman Edward Markey says, "America cannot
credibly preach nuclear temperance from a
barstool. We can't tell Iran, a country that has
signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that
they can't have [uranium] enrichment technologies
while simultaneously carving out a special
exemption from nuclear-proliferation laws for
India, a nation that has refused to sign the
treaty."
This looming congressional battle
will pit the proliferation fighters against the
nuclear lobby and the increasingly powerful India
lobby. Companies and countries (including France,
Canada and Russia) are lining up to sell fuel and
reactors to India. They will be joined by the US
neo-conservatives who seek to construct an
anti-China alliance. For them, as one architect of
the India deal reportedly said, "The problem is
not that India has too many nuclear weapons, it is
that they do not have enough."
If Bush
were riding high in the polls and had a string of
national-security victories behind him, this
David-and-Goliath battle would be won by the
nuclear giants. But with sagging popularity, deep
concern over his leadership, and anger at his
administration's disregard for laws and
consultation, lawmakers more concerned about
proliferation than profits could block or amend
this deal. The president may have made a fatal
error in putting nuclear weapons at the heart of
improved US-India relations. US lawmakers want the
latter, but not at the price of the former.
Dr Joseph Cirincione(jcirincione@carnegieendowment.org) is the
director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in Washington,
DC.
