[NukeNet] India Debates Its Right to Nuclear Testing

[Bill Smirnow]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/world/asia/21india.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
   India Debates Its Right to Nuclear Testing

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By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: April 21, 2007
NEW DELHI, April 20 - A nuclear accord hailed as the centerpiece of India's
deepening friendship with the United States appears to be in jeopardy, as
Indian officials argue about whether its limitations on their nuclear
activities offend the country's sense of sovereignty.

The accord, which was announced by President Bush last year and approved by
Congress, is now mired in the swamp of history and complicated politics of
nonproliferation. In effect, the negotiations have been unable to resolve a
central question: should India be treated as a nuclear weapons state, which
retains the right to test its weapons and reprocess spent nuclear fuel?

The issue is proving trickier to sort out than anyone anticipated. The
dispute has come up as the two countries have tried to negotiate an accord
known as a "123 agreement," which could prohibit India from conducting
further nuclear weapons tests, and put restrictions on whether it can
reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The "123" refers to a section of the United
States Atomic Energy Act.

The United States fears that the reprocessed fuel could be used to produce
weapons-grade plutonium for a new generation of nuclear weapons, undermining
Mr. Bush's argument that the unusual deal with India would aid
nonproliferation.

The deal is not necessarily doomed. But the sticking points are so
politically contentious that they make it extremely difficult for either
President Bush or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India to break the
impasse easily.

American and Indian negotiators conferred this week on the sidelines of a
meeting of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group in South Africa. Washington
has made it clear that it has already made plenty of concessions to Indian
demands, and administration officials have openly stepped up pressure.

"We are frustrated it has taken this long," R. Nicholas Burns, the under
secretary of state for political affairs, said in a telephone interview from
Washington on Thursday. "We would have hoped for faster progress. But we do
not doubt their good faith. We are friends. We will get through this."

Mr. Burns said the Indian foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, had been
invited to Washington for talks early next month, and Mr. Burns planned then
to travel to India.

Completion of the deal will determine whether India can buy nuclear fuel and
reactors from the United States or anywhere else. Until the 123 agreement is
sealed, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a loose organization of countries that
sell nuclear equipment and material, will not open the doors to nuclear
commerce with India.

The United States-India nuclear pact, announced in March 2006, would allow
India access to civilian nuclear technology, overturning a decades-old ban
that resulted from India's refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty. India has possessed nuclear weapons for 30 years, and in 1998 it
tested its weapons - a test that Pakistan answered with one of its own.

But India also wants to generate nuclear power to meet its growing energy
demand. In exchange for the right to buy reactors and fuel on the world
market, it has agreed to allow international inspections of its civilian
nuclear facilities, which it has promised to segregate from its military
arsenal.

Congress last year gave its initial approval to the administration to allow
the sale of nuclear technology to India. The Congressional blessing was
advertised in Washington and New Delhi as a signal of India's growing
importance to the United States, and it was the source of intense lobbying
in the United States.

The deal was opposed by many groups concerned with nonproliferation, which
argued that the Bush administration was setting a bad precedent by agreeing
to sell nuclear technology and fuel to a country that for years has declined
to join the nonproliferation treaty.

Opponents of the deal argued that Mr. Bush won no limits on the development
of new Indian nuclear weapons.

For his part, the Indian prime minister, Mr. Singh, expended considerable
political capital on selling the deal here at home, where distrust of
American interests prevails, particularly among atomic scientists and the
government's leftist allies.

>From the scientific camp has come the greatest opposition to the deal.

"Were this deal to collapse now, after so much effort and hype, it would
represent a substantial setback for the emerging partnership between the two
countries," Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, said in an e-mail message. "It
would probably be many years before either side was willing to take
political risks to rejuvenate the relationship."

Some opponents of the deal in Washington say they would be happy to see it
collapse because of objections in New Delhi, leaving the Bush administration
to argue that it came through with its part of the bargain, winning passage
in Congress. Congress would also have to vote on a final agreement on
nuclear cooperation.

The deal appears to have been further muddied by an indictment, made public
this month, charging officials at a private company, Cirrus, with buying
prohibited weapons technology for Indian government agencies.

The indictment drew new heckles from the nonproliferation lobby in the
United States and put new pressure on the government in New Delhi.

India's atomic scientists have been among the most influential critics of
the nuclear deal, consistently protesting that it would nip the country's
ability to advance its strategic program, for instance, by carrying out more
nuclear tests.

India has promised a moratorium on tests, but as a Times of India editorial
put it last Saturday, "it would like, as an assertion of national
sovereignty, to retain the theoretical right to conduct further tests."

Bharat Karnad, a strategic analyst with the Center for Policy Research in
New Delhi, a chief critic of the deal, maintained that India should not
agree to any deal that kept it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "Our
nonproliferation interests simply cannot be reconciled," he said of India
and the United States. India, he added, seeks to "enjoy the privileges and
prerogatives of a nuclear state."

"Testing is the pivot on which the whole thing rests," Mr. Karnad argued.
"It's the symbol of our strategic independence."

The other important sticking point is the right to reprocess spent fuel, an
enterprise that the Americans fear would allow India to generate plutonium
for its weapons programs. India says it needs the reprocessed fuel for
civilian use alone.

The fuel dispute is as symbolic as it is practical, tinged with historical
memory. In 1974, after India's first nuclear tests, the United States cut
off its supply of nuclear fuel for a reactor at Tarapur, in western India.

Indians to this day are fond of recalling that the Americans had originally
agreed to provide a lifetime supply of fuel for the reactor.

The logjam is all the more serious for the timing. The longer the
negotiations drag on, the closer it gets to both United States elections in
2008 and Indian elections in 2009. There is considerable good will in this
country for all things American, but in this deeply nationalistic body
politic, anti-American sentiment can also be deployed as a political tool,
and Mr. Singh's government can hardly be seen to be bending too much to
American pressure.

"The pressure on both sides is time pressure," a senior Indian official
said.
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