Posted on 03/31/2006 2:17:38 AM PST by Irreverent
Brahma Chellaney
The Bush administration has attached a legally binding rider to the nuclear deal with India even before the US Congress has had an opportunity to put conditions of its own. Under the administration's action plan, India would become a party to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) through a congressional piece of legislation. This is the first time in world history that one power has sought to bind another state to an international treaty rejected by its own legislature. The US Senate threw out the CTBT in 1999.
Under subsection �d' of the "waiver authority" sought by the administration from Congress, India would be precluded forever from conducting any nuclear-explosive test. If India were to violate that blanket prohibition, all civilian nuclear cooperation with it will cease, leaving high and dry any power reactors it imports, bereft of fuel.
That is exactly what happened to the US-built Tarapur power reactors when, in response to India's 1974 test, America walked out midway through a 30-year civil nuclear cooperation pact it signed in 1963. Although the 1963 pact had the force of an international treaty, the US halted all fuel and spare-parts supplies. Today, with the Indian foreign secretary in Washington to negotiate a new civil nuclear cooperation accord, India is reliving history.
For Washington, the nuclear deal has come handy to impose qualitative and quantitative ceilings on India's nuclear-deterrent capability in order to ensure that it never emerges as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state. A permanent test ban is part of its effort to qualitatively cap the Indian deterrent, while the quantitative ceiling comes from America's success in making India agree to reduce to less than one-third the existing number of facilities producing weapons-usable fissile material.
Lucky to escape Mr Bush's nuclear embrace, Pakistan can now seek to overtake India on nukes, as it has done on missiles. It can watch the fun as the Bush administration and the US Congress entangle India in a web of capability restraints, in return for offering New Delhi dubious benefits � the right to import uneconomical power reactors dependent on imported fuel.
The White House has ingeniously used the reference to India's "unilateral moratorium" in the July 18, 2005, nuclear deal to make it legally obligatory for New Delhi to abjure testing perpetually. In other words, India is being compelled to forswear a right America will not give up, even as the US merrily builds nuclea bunker-busting warheads and conducts sub-critical tests.
The reference to the Indian moratorium in the July 18 accord is specifically linked to the commitment therein that India "would be ready to assume the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the US." The US imposition of both a perpetual test ban and perpetual international inspections, however, shows vividly that India is being denied the "same benefits and advantages" as the United States.
While parties to the CTBT can withdraw from the treaty invoking its "supreme national interest" clause, India will have no such option. It will take on US-imposed, CTBT-plus obligations.
Instead of repealing or amending provisions of its domestic law, the Bush administration has simply sought a waiver authority under which, if the President were to make seven specific determinations on India's good conduct, "the President may ... exempt" nuclear cooperation with New Delhi from the requirements of Sections 123(a)(2), 128 and 129 of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.
The seven good-conduct determinations listed in subsection �b' of the Waiver Authority Bill include the following � that "India is working with the US for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty" (FMCT); and that India is making "satisfactory progress" with the International Atomic Energy Agency to implement an "additional protocol", which will bring India's entire civil nuclear fuel cycle and its workforce under international monitoring.
There is also an eighth determination to be made. Marked, "Subsequent Determination", subsection �d' reads: "A determination under subsection (b) shall not be effective if the President determines India has detonated a nuclear explosive device after the date of the enactment of this Act."
India's second-class status is being endowed with legal content, so that it stays put at that level permanently.
It began with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's announcement earlier this month that, contrary to his solemn pledge in Parliament "never to accept discrimination", he gave his word to Mr Bush that India will accept international inspections of a type applicable only to non-nuclear states � perpetual and immutable. Mr Bush's waiver-authority request makes clear that he would seek to grant India any exemption only after it has brought into force a legally irreversible international inspections regime.
After being the only nuclear power to accept perpetual, enveloping inspections, India now stands out as the only nuclear-weapons state whose test "moratorium" will cease to be voluntary or revocable. Although still to build a single Beijing-reachable weapon in its nuclear arsenal, India will have no right to test even if China, Pakistan or the US resumed testing.
Having set out to drag India into the CTBT through the backdoor, the US is positioning itself to also haul New Delhi into a fissile-material production ban even before an FMCT has been negotiated, let alone brought into force. This objective could be facilitated either through a congressionally-imposed condition requiring New Delhi to halt all fissile-material production or through what undersecretary of state Robert Joseph has called "additional non-proliferation results" in "separate discussions".
The new bilateral civil nuclear cooperation accord under negotiation offers yet another avenue to Washington to enforce an FMCT-equivalent prohibition on India. In any case, once India places orders to import power reactors and locks itself into an external fuel-supply dependency, Washington will have all the leverage to cut off further Indian fissile-material production.
The Bush administration, in its written replies earlier this year to scores of questions posed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, did not seek to dissuade Congress from considering the imposition of additional conditions on India, despite a specific query on new riders. In other words, the administration may not be averse to Congress attaching any additional rider as long as it is not a deal-buster. But given the way India has relinquished the central elements of the July 18 deal, the US might believe that it can make New Delhi bend more.
What US-inspired technology controls against India could not achieve over three decades, the Prime Minister has been willing to do, in order to import power reactors that make no economic or strategic sense � retard the country's nuclear-deterrent capability. He has offered no explanation, for example, for agreeing to shut down the Cirus plutonium-production reactor without ordering a replacement.
The irony is that a nominated PM, who has never won a single popular election in his career, has agreed to a deal with an outside power under which India's nuclear-weapons potential is to be cut by more than two-thirds without he being required to get Parliament's approval either for the accord or his civil-military separation plan. But the same deal needs to be vetted thoroughly by US Congress!
For a country that prides itself as the world's biggest representative democracy, India needs to ask itself what sort of democracy it is when its Parliament passes its national budget without any deliberation, and limitations imposed on its most important security programme escape legislative scrutiny.
Oh, really? What else does M J Akbar (Asian Age Editor) have to say for the sake of the Iran-China-Russia Axis?
Pinging...
...and a blog on the Web:
M.J. Akbar - Editor Journalist, The Asian Age
http://mjakbar.blogspot.com/2004/10/mj-akbars-books-reviews-riot-after.html
Shouldn't this article have a BARF alert?
It is likely that India has access to all needed test reports.
India has till date conducted only 6 tests including 1974. They are not enough for the generation of the data required that allows computer simulations and development of new weapons and/or finetuning and correcting the present designs
In this context the following letter by an upset Hindu reader is a call to all the Hindus to boycott the newspaper which is the media tool of Pakistan within India.
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To, the Editor
The Asian Age
I have been buying "The Asian Age" for the last two and a half months. I was hoping against hope that your newspaper will be different. Unbaised in it's reporting and editorial. But it was too much to expect.
Your newspaper is one of the most baised, anti-BJP, anti-Hindu newspapers I have come across. Your editorials and guest coloumns are nothing but anti-BJP, anti-Hindu and anti-American propoganda.
I do not believe that the issue here is MJ Akbar Or Asian Age. We will be digressing if we allow our thoughts to the medium than the content. The present article has not been written by Akbar but by Brahma Chellany. He is I believe one of the more respected of Indias small strategic community. The points he raises are based on the Bill introduced in the Senate and the Congress. As an aside, this column has also be published in the International Herald Tribune. You will agree that it has no axe to grind even if I accept your characterization of Asian Age or MJ Akbar.
I do not believe that the issue here is MJ Akbar Or Asian Age. We will be digressing if we allow our thoughts to the medium than the content. The present article has not been written by Akbar but by Brahma Chellany. He is I believe one of the more respected of Indias small strategic community. The points he raises are based on the Bill introduced in the Senate and the Congress. As an aside, this column has also be published in the International Herald Tribune. You will agree that it has no axe to grind even if I accept your characterization of Asian Age or MJ Akbar.
Y I agree :-) but have you seen the speech by the India Foreign secretary...he says India cannot be a partner and a target at the same time...i guess what he says is very pertinent.
I feel India has two strategic disadvantages though... its lack of energy resources make it susceptible to petty nation states and at the same time its dependence of european and russian military hardware and limited technological innovations makes it very susceptible to its vendor states. Remember Argentina's dependence proved costly during the Falklands. It could not call upon military resources to fight a war a few .... miles offshore..but Britain could project its power right across the atlantic.
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