US Pressure Wins Nuke Deal For India

By Cernig

Intense overnight pressure from the Bush administration has won India a one-off waiver to non-proliferation rules at the crucial Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting in Vienna, opening the way for a nuclear deal the administration has invested a lot of political capital in. The final hurdle for the deal, which would permit the sale of civilian nuclear technology and fuel to India, despite a long-standing refusal to sign the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, will be ratification by the US Congress.

After two weeks of meetings and long-distance consultations, resistance to the exemption finally crumbled when six holdout states reluctantly accepted an Indian declaration on Friday reinforcing a commitment to a voluntary test moratorium.

It also said India -- whose regional rival Pakistan also has nuclear firepower outside the NPT -- would not join any future nuclear arms race, would permit broader U.N. inspections and adhered to the NSG anti-proliferation export control regime.

The NSG consensus was also based on "a number of understandings" against exports of fuel-enrichment technology able to produce peaceful energy or bombs, diplomats said.

None of that is legally binding, however, and might be impossible for India to live up to given India's internal domestic politics about its nuclear arsenal.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "It's a really very big step forward for the non-proliferation framework."

Not everyone feels the same way.

a European diplomat in the Vienna gathering said: "For the first time in my experience of international diplomatic negotiations, a consensus decision was followed by complete silence in the room. No clapping, nothing.

"It showed a lot of us felt pressured to some extent into a decision by the Americans and few were totally satisfied."

Diplomats said the final draft cited only the need for a special NSG meeting if India reneged on its commitments.

"The problem here is that the NSG works only on the basis of consensus. So if India did another test the follow-up meeting could be reduced to a talkshop by any one member like the Americans," said another diplomat.

"It's not clear we could take action as a group."

... NSG critics and disarmament campaigners fear Indian access to nuclear material markets will let it tap into more of its limited indigenous resources, such as uranium fuel, to boost its nuclear arsenal, and drive Pakistan into another arms race.

Intense U.S. pressure for the waiver involved overnight phone calls to presidents and prime ministers of holdout countries, several diplomats said.

Six NSG nations had been demanding a clause stipulating an automatic cessation of the waiver if India tested another bomb.

And today, an op-ed in the Washington Post by Mira Kamdar, a fellow at the Asia Society, scathingly criticised the deal.

The deal risks triggering a new arms race in Asia: If it passes, a miffed and unstable Pakistan will seek nuclear parity with India, and China will fume at a transparent U.S. ploy to balance Beijing's rise by building up India as a counterweight next door. The pact will gut global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear materials and encourage other countries to flout the NPT that India is now being rewarded for failing to sign. The U.S.-India deal will divert billions of dollars away from India's real development needs in sustainable agriculture, education, health care, housing, sanitation and roads. It will also distract India from developing clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, and from reducing emissions from its many coal plants. Instead, the pact will focus the nation's efforts on an energy source that will, under the rosiest of projections, contribute a mere 8 percent of India's total energy needs -- and won't even do that until 2030.

So what will the deal accomplish? It will generate billions of dollars in lucrative contracts for the corporate members of the U.S.-India Business Council and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The Bush administration hopes that it will help resuscitate the moribund U.S. nuclear power industry and expand the use of this "non-polluting" source of energy, one of the pillars of the Bush team's energy policy. The deal will let the real leaders of the global nuclear-power business -- France and Russia, both of which eagerly support the deal -- reap huge profits in India. And the pact will provide spectacularly profitable opportunities to India's leading corporations, which are slavering to get their hands on a share of the booty. How much booty? This newspaper estimates more than $100 billion in business over the next 20 years, as well as perhaps tens of thousands of jobs in India and the United States.

This is what the U.S.-India nuclear deal is really all about. This is what the nonproliferation regime that has kept the world safe from nuclear Armageddon for decades is being risked for: cash.

... the deal will tell other would-be nuclear powers -- and nuclear rogues -- that the old barriers to nonproliferation need not be taken seriously. They certainly have not been taken seriously by the United States.

I have to agree with him. This deal is nothing more than prostitution of the NPT regime to the vested interests of the enegy lobby. That it comes alongside continuing bellicose rhetoric against Iran, an NPT member which hasn't done even close to half of what India, Pakistan or Israel has in nuclear proliferation, only points up the hypocrisy of Bush administration claims to a belief in the NPT.