[Mb-civic] How to Regulate Nuclear Weapons - Selig Harrison - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

How to Regulate Nuclear Weapons
The U.S. Deal With India Could Be a Good Starting Point
<>
By Selig S. Harrison
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 23, 2006; B07

Why should India, with a spotless nonproliferation record, be denied 
access to U.S. civilian nuclear technology for electricity, while China 
-- which helped Pakistan and Iran in their efforts to acquire nuclear 
weapons -- can have it?

The inequitable structure of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 
has resulted in built-in discrimination in favor of China and against 
India that has made it necessary and justifiable for the administration 
to conclude its civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi.

The treaty is based on a legalistic fiction that underpins this 
discrimination. When it was concluded in 1968, only the five states that 
had already tested nuclear weapons were permitted to sign as "nuclear 
weapons states." China, which had tested in 1964, got in just under the 
wire. India tested in 1974, six years too late.

As Robert Kagan has argued [op-ed, March 12], the NPT "erected a 
gargantuan double standard," which he went on to call "a particularly 
mindless kind of double standard, since membership in the nuclear 'club' 
was not based on justice or morality or strategic judgment or politics 
but simply on circumstance: Whoever had figured out how to build nuclear 
weapons by 1968 was in."

Article Six of the NPT envisaged an eventual end to this double 
standard: The United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China 
pledged to phase out their nuclear weapons. But they have since largely 
ignored this commitment. Indeed, the nuclear "haves" reinforced the 
double standard by refusing to accept the same permanent safeguards on 
their civilian nuclear reactors required of non-nuclear signatories by 
the International Atomic Energy Agency. Without these "in-perpetuity" 
safeguards, all five, including Beijing, can shift fissile material from 
civilian to military use whenever they choose.

By contrast, India has accepted a rigid separation of civilian and 
military facilities under its pending nuclear cooperation agreement with 
the United States by agreeing to IAEA safeguards "in perpetuity." This 
was a major diplomatic achievement by U.S. negotiators; in fact, the 
Manmohan Singh government in New Delhi is being bitterly attacked for 
accepting a "second class" status that does not apply to China.

The Bush administration's agreement with India does not conflict with 
the NPT. But a 1978 U.S. law went beyond the treaty and does bar 
civilian nuclear technology sales to non-signatories. It is this 
legislation that the administration is now seeking to amend.

The 1978 law is a relic of earlier decades, when the United States was 
trying to stop New Delhi from acquiring nuclear weapons. Congress saw 
denial of civilian technology as one aspect of a campaign to pressure 
India into signing the NPT and forswearing nuclear weapons. But India 
felt that it was entitled to keep the nuclear option open, given Chinese 
and Chinese-assisted Pakistani nuclear capabilities, unless the United 
States and the other four original nuclear powers started to honor 
Article Six.

It is often forgotten that India made an extraordinary offer on June 9, 
1988, to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for a long-term commitment by 
the existing nuclear powers to move toward nuclear arms reductions. The 
late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi called on the United Nations to 
negotiate a new treaty, replacing the NPT, that would commit the nuclear 
"haves" to carry out Article Six by phasing out their nuclear arsenals 
over a 22-year period ending in 2010. Effective immediately upon 
conclusion of this "new NPT," India and the other non-nuclear states 
would be committed under inspection "not to cross the nuclear 
threshold." When the United States rejected this offer, the advocates of 
nuclear weapons in New Delhi steadily gained ground, and in 1998 India 
formally demonstrated its ability to deploy nuclear weapons.

So why not invite New Delhi to sign the NPT as a "nuclear weapons 
state," thus opening the way for civilian nuclear cooperation under the 
1978 law? The administration decided against this option for two 
principal reasons. First, Indian accession to the NPT could not legally 
go into effect until the next NPT Review Conference in 2010. Second, it 
could invite requests for admission to the nuclear club by Pakistan and 
North Korea, which would pose more complex problems than admitting 
India. New Delhi has scrupulously observed the prohibition on 
transferring nuclear technology in Article One of the NPT. By contrast, 
Islamabad's former nuclear czar, A.Q. Khan, ran a global nuclear 
Wal-Mart, and Pyongyang has proliferated missiles capable of delivering 
nuclear weapons.

What the U.S. administration seeks for India is a "halfway house" that 
would give it implicit recognition as a nuclear power by formally 
separating its civilian and military nuclear facilities.

In retrospect, it is clear that the United States made a colossal 
blunder by rejecting India's 1988 offer to stop its nuclear weapons 
development. The Indian proposal for gradual nuclear disarmament was 
pragmatic. Indeed, it could provide a basis even now for a new approach 
to carrying out Article Six. Such a new approach is desirable not only 
for its own sake, to defuse the danger of nuclear war, but also as an 
essential prerequisite for a more effective nonproliferation regime. To 
be sure, regional security concerns are the primary reason countries 
seek the nuclear weapons option. But the inequity of the global power 
structure, in which nuclear weapons are necessary for great power 
status, can be used by national leaders to justify their posture to 
international and domestic public opinion, as the case of Iran has 
demonstrated.

Picking up where it left off in 1988, India should reaffirm its 
readiness to cap and wind down its modest nuclear arsenal during the 
final stage of a process of nuclear arms reductions that would start 
with U.S. and Russian cuts and would then move on to embrace Britain, 
France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. The Bush administration is, 
of course, heading in the other direction by seeking to upgrade U.S. 
nuclear weapons. But India should join with Japan, the only victim of 
nuclear attack, and with Russia, which cannot afford its nuclear 
arsenal, to promote a reappraisal of U.S. policy.

Many U.S. critics of the agreement with New Delhi fear that the 
administration's failure to get India to cap its nuclear arsenal may 
lead to Sino-Indian and Indian-Pakistani nuclear arms races. India could 
deflect this criticism with a nuclear disarmament initiative in which it 
would no longer be a non-nuclear power on the sidelines, as in 1988, but 
a de facto nuclear power now recognized as such by the United States. 
The keystone of this initiative should be the inclusion of all three de 
facto nuclear powers -- India, Pakistan and Israel -- along with the 
five de jure nuclear powers, in a collective approach to progressive 
nuclear arms reductions. North Korea should also be included when and if 
it is found to possess nuclear weapons.

Israel would be uncomfortable with such an invitation, because it does 
not acknowledge its nuclear weapons capabilities, but forcing it to do 
so would be desirable. A resolution of the nuclear crisis with Iran 
presupposes regional security trade-offs in which a freeze of Israel's 
Dimona reactor could be one element of a settlement that also includes 
changes in U.S. military deployments perceived as threatening by Iran, 
in exchange for a fully verifiable Iranian commitment ruling out 
weapons-grade uranium enrichment.

Having implicitly recognized India as a nuclear weapons state, the 
administration should now give Pakistan and Israel the same recognition 
by working with all three to map a scenario for progressive global 
nuclear arms reductions. Only with such an all-embracing approach will 
the de jure nuclear powers feel that it is safe to wind down their 
arsenals, and only when the prospect of meaningful nuclear disarmament 
becomes credible will would-be nuclear powers reassess their ambitions.

The writer, a former South Asia bureau chief of The Post, is the author 
of "India: The Most Dangerous Decades" and "Japan's Nuclear Future." He 
is director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy 
and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for 
Scholars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101627.html
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