WASHINGTON - While the United States Senate's approval of a controversial
nuclear deal with India was hailed by the White House on Thursday as a major
advance in Washington's "strategic relationship" with the South Asian giant,
weapons experts have warned it dealt a serious blow to more than 30 years of US
and international non-proliferation efforts.
"This is a non-proliferation disaster," said Daryl Kimball, the executive
director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, who added that the
deal effectively exempts India from the global non-proliferation regime and
will likely "promote further nuclear competition with Pakistan".
"[W]e are taking apart the basic architecture of nuclear non-proliferation that
has served us for many decades," warned
Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan, just before the measure passed by a 86-13
margin on Wednesday evening. ''We are saying to India it is okay if you produce
additional nuclear weapons if we cannot see them.''
The deal, a top priority of the George W Bush administration since it was
concluded in July 2007 after nearly two years of negotiations, was rushed
through the House of Representatives on a 298-117 vote on September 28 and will
become law when Bush signs the legislation.
Bush had hoped to have signed it by last week, when he hosted Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House, but the turmoil created by the
three-week-old financial crisis - and frantic lobbying to push the
administration's US$700 billion bailout package through Congress - put that
goal out of reach. Indeed, the Senate voted on the nuclear deal minutes before
it approved the latest version of the bailout.
Ratification of the nuclear deal represents a major victory for powerful
business interests, particularly in the nuclear and military industries eager
to penetrate a fast-growing multi-billion-dollar market, as well as for an
increasingly powerful and well-financed Indian-American lobby.
With a population of well over 1 billion, a burgeoning middle class, and an
annual economic growth rate of nearly 9% over the past five years, the Indian
market has become a major target for US exporters, which lobbied hard for the
deal.
In the lead have been major US producers of nuclear plants and technology,
notably General Electric and Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Toshiba, which hope
to get a significant share of the $175 billion energy-poor India is expected to
invest over the next 25 years in nuclear power.
Without the new nuclear deal, US companies were banned from supplying any
nuclear technology to India due to Delhi's refusal to join the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
US arms manufacturers, notably Boeing and Lockheed Martin, also played a key
role in the lobbying effort, arguing that approval would greatly enhance their
chances of winning a $10 billion contract to provide 126 new warplanes that the
Indian air force put out to bid in late August.
Backed by the Pentagon, US weapons contractors have argued that a growing
military relationship with India could eventually blossom into a fully fledged
alliance. This would be a major strategic asset for the United States in the
Indian Ocean and even the western Pacific, particularly if ties between the US
and China take a downward course.
With passage of the legislation, Washington will officially end a nuclear
embargo on India it first imposed in retaliation for Delhi's explosion of a
nuclear device in 1974.
After the test, Washington helped organize the international "Nuclear Suppliers
Group" (NSG) which strictly regulated what nuclear technology its members could
provide to "non-nuclear states". This term referred to nations which had
refused to join the NPT and submitted to certain International Atomic Energy
Agency safeguards. India was one and in 1998 conducted another test.
For the deal to be ratified by Congress, the 45-member NSG had to agree to
largely exempt India from those terms, essentially lifting the ban on civilian
nuclear trade. After a strong lobbying campaign by Washington, the NSG agreed
to do so in early September.
The deal will permit the US to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India for
its civilian energy needs in exchange for Delhi's agreement to open 14 of its
civilian nuclear facilities to international inspectors for the first time.
The provision has been cited by the administration and its supporters as a
major breakthrough that would contribute to India joining what they called the
"non-proliferation mainstream".
But the deal also allows India's eight military reactors - those which provide
weapons-grade nuclear material - to remain off-limits to international
inspectors.
That failure constitutes a huge loophole, according to the non-proliferation
experts, who noted that under the deal India could also buy nuclear fuel from
foreign suppliers for its civilian nuclear plants and divert the fuel that it
produces domestically to its military plants.
The deal also fails to require that India sign the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty (CTBT) and halt production of fissile material as all other
nuclear-weapons states have pledged to do.
Critics of the deal tried to add an amendment to the legislation which would
have required the US to end all nuclear cooperation with India in the event
that Delhi conducted another nuclear test, but the administration insisted that
such a provision was already codified in a 2006 US law and was therefore
unnecessary.
In its deliberations last month, several NSG members called for a similar
provision to be included in its decision to exempt India from its supply
regulations, but Washington successfully smothered that effort, too.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who travels to India Friday, told
lawmakers last week that Washington will make a ban on the export of enrichment
and reprocessing technology to states that do not sign the NPT its "highest
priority", at the next NSG meeting.
Ironically, the chief commercial beneficiaries of both the NSG's decision and
congressional approval of the deal, according to some experts, will be French,
Japanese and Russian nuclear suppliers.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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