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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
Posts: 7295
Location: Amsterdam
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 Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 3:25 am Post subject: George Bush as Dr Strangedeal |
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George Bush as Dr Strangedeal
The Economist’s take on the India-US nuclear agreement
Ten years from now, will George Bush’s determination to rewrite nuclear rules for preventing the bomb’s spread be judged to have been courageously right or dangerously wrong? In striking his deal with India, allowing it to import nuclear fuel and technology despite its weapons-building, Mr Bush has not for the first time seemed readier to favour a friend than to stick to a principle ...It is one thing to have as broad and close a friendship with a nuclear India as the anti-nuclear rules allow...It is quite another to knock aside the rules for India’s sake. To be sure, Mr Bush is not proposing that other nuclear dabblers be given a welcome if they are persistent enough to succeed...Rather, he wants democratic, friendly, law-abiding India to be treated as an exception by Congress...
The problem here is that India could instead prove the exception that fatally weakens the rules. The devil is both in the deal’s troubling detail, and in its likely knock-on effects. India may not have signed the NPT, but America has. In doing so, it promised not to help other countries with their nuclear-weapons tinkering. It also pioneered the reinforcing principle that only countries that have all their nuclear facilities under international safeguards (India doesn’t now and won’t in future) should benefit from trade in civilian nuclear technology. If countries were going to sign the NPT and renounce nuclear weapons themselves, they needed assurance that as many others as possible would follow suit...
Allowing nuclear trade with India breaks that bargain in a particularly damaging way. The rules had started to bite: India was running short of supplies of uranium for both civilian and military purposes. By allowing it to import nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors, America will be directly easing the bottlenecks in its weapons programme...Worse, India’s experimental fast-breeder reactor programme, ideally suited to produce plutonium for warheads though previously claimed to be for civilian purposes, is to be exempted from all safeguards. That will allow India in future to produce scores of weapons a year...Then add insult to injury. Not only is nuclear armed India being offered all of the civilian benefits available to countries that have accepted the NPT’s anti-nuclear restrictions. It has also accepted few, if any, of the real obligations of the five official nuclear powers recognised by the treaty, America, Russia, China, Britain and France. All at least signed the treaty banning all nuclear tests; India declined...
Giving India a freer ride is also likely to embolden Iran and North Korea in their defiance...When Congress is asked to change America’s anti-proliferation laws, it should say no.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=89329
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