[Mb-civic] Letting India in the Club? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Letting India in the Club?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft
spot for countries of one billion people, speaking a hundred different
languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular
free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce
generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more
productive and peaceful place. Sure, as today's bombings in India
illustrate, it has its problems ‹ but it is not Iraq. It is a beacon of
tolerance and stability.

So I applaud President Bush's desire to form a deeper partnership with
India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse ‹ in
its current form ‹ the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with
New Delhi. I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the
world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran.
But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

What's the problem? India has never signed the N.P.T., which is the
international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the
U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been
very consistent: we do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country
that has not signed the N.P.T. And since that included India, India could
never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.

But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the U.S. eager to
build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the
Bush team wanted ‹ rightly ‹ to find a way to get India out of the corner it
put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the
Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors
as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other 8
free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as
India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India
civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.

This is a troubling deal for two reasons. First, it could only undermine the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yes, I know, the Bush team doesn't believe
in treaties and says the treaty isn't restraining the rogues anyway. But
this treaty is the legal basis by which we have been able to build
coalitions against the nuclear rogues to restrain them from spreading W.M.D.
One of the key legal bases for isolating Saddam Hussein was that he'd
violated the N.P.T., which Iraq had signed. The legal basis by which we are
building a coalition against Iran's going nuclear is the N.P.T. Under the
N.P.T., we board ships suspected of carrying W.M.D. Japan, Brazil and
Argentina all chose to forgo nuclear weapons to gain access to foreign
nuclear technology by abiding by the N.P.T. What are they going to think if
India gets a free pass?

What should we have done? Bob Einhorn, who has worked on nonproliferation
for every administration since Nixon's, has the right idea: Tell India that
it can have this deal ‹ provided it does something hard that would clearly
reinforce the global nonproliferation regime. And that would be halting all
production of weapons-grade material, thereby capping India's stockpile of
nuclear bomb ingredients where it is. That could be a lever to get Pakistan
to do the same. The fewer bomb-making materials around, the less likely it
is for any to fall into the hands of terrorists.

"The Bush administration proposed such a production cutoff in negotiations,
but dropped the idea when India balked," Mr. Einhorn said. "India says it is
willing to adopt the same responsibilities and practices as the other
nuclear powers. It so happens that the five original nuclear powers ‹ U.S.,
U.K., France, Russia and China ‹ have all stopped producing fissile material
for weapons. If we are going to bring India into the club, it should do so
as well."

India says it needs to keep producing nuclear material to have a more
credible deterrent. I can't judge that. All I know is that we should not go
ahead with this deal until India is ready to halt its production of
weapons-grade material.

"The problem the Bush administration faces in selling the nuclear deal is
not, as the president has said, that 'some people just don't want to change'
or that they are focused on outdated concerns," Mr. Einhorn argued. "People
are willing to change. They want to support the president's India
initiative, even modify longstanding policies. But they want to do it in a
way that also serves an objective that is hardly outdated: preventing
nuclear proliferation."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top