Bush Changes Direction With India
    Lib ration

    Thursday 23 March 2006

    By signing a nuclear cooperation agreement with India on March 2nd, George W. Bush broke with a policy that had been the United States' for over fifty years and that was supported by Republicans as well as Democrats: the refusal to encourage nuclear proliferation. That policy also had the support of the five official nuclear powers - China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and today Russia - which grandfathered the 1970 adoption of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed by a majority of the planet's countries.

    That text, to which Israel, India and Pakistan notably refused to subscribe, prohibits supplying any nuclear technology whatsoever to countries that have not signed the NPT. The American-Indian treaty trashes that disposition, even though India, which conducted its first nuclear attempt in 1974, proceeded to testing atomic weapons in 1998.

    If it's approved by the American Congress, this text will allow India to pursue its nuclear military program while enjoying transfers of technology and nuclear fuel for its civil program. The only quid pro quo accepted by New Delhi: its civilian reactors will from now on "in perpetuity" be subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection, but its eight military installations, including a breeder reactor under construction, will remain off limits to IAEA inspectors. [1] Consequently, India could considerably develop its military program by devoting all the nuclear fuel it produces to it, while it buys the fuel necessary for its civil program from the United States. In fact, the agreement provides for Washington to commit to delivering that fuel "in perpetuity." Other nuclear powers could also benefit from the windfall once the Group of Nuclear Suppliers - which controls international transactions in that matter - has lifted the strict sanctions imposed on New Delhi after the 1998 tests. France hopes to be among them, as Jacques Chirac, whose visit to India preceded that of George W. Bush by a few days, declared.

    The American approach, which de facto rehabilitates a state which had up until then been considered a pariah by the NPT signatories, could not have come at a worse time. At the moment when the international community is trying to bar the military nuclear route to Iran, after having failed in that regard with North Korea, Washington can be accused of applying a policy of rigged rules and double standards. India will be able to develop its nuclear arsenal at its pleasure, while Iran, an NPT signatory, purports to want only to develop its civilian program, even though it is strongly suspected of a hidden military agenda. To which George W. Bush retorts that India is a democracy, that it is also threatened by Islamic extremism and that it (unlike Pakistan) has never indulged in proliferation activities, while Iran is an extremist theocracy that threatens its neighbors and encourages terrorism.

    The American president, who knows that he will have to convince a more-than-dubious Congress, advances another argument: helping India develop its civilian nuclear program will keep this country in the midst of rapid development from pursuing its race for fossil fuels, notably from Iran. Thus he declared in New Delhi: "It's in our economic interest that India have a civilian nuclear power industry to help take the pressure off the global demand for energy. Everything we can do to reduce the demand for fossil fuels will help the American consumer."

    In other words: because it will be difficult to develop civilian nuclear energy in the United States, given the opposition by ecologists, we might as well do it in India with products from General Electric and Westinghouse. None of that is inaccurate, but it doesn't change the fact that the American initiative - which presupposes definitive political stability in India and settlement of the still-explosive issue of Kashmir - risks unleashing a nuclear military race, especially in Asia. Beginning with Pakistan, which has been refused the same type of agreement he concluded with India by George Bush, and which will inevitably attempt to obtain one from a China that cannot help but see the new strategic American-Indian pact as a containment measure. Not to mention the infernal Korea-China-Japan triangle.

    In conclusion, a quotation from John Kennedy that goes back to the beginning of the 1950s. An author George W. Bush is certain not to go in for: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

    [1] India has fourteen reactors in operation and nine under construction.