NEW DELHI – Just as the nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India receives a major boost in Washington with the House of Representatives strongly voting for it, the deal continues to face flak in India’s own Parliament.
On Thursday, the House approved 359-68 a bill that facilitates resumption of civilian nuclear commerce with India, although this country has tested and possesses nuclear weapons. A similar bill is likely to be passed by the U.S. Senate either very soon or in September, after the U.S. Congress reassembles post recess.
Earlier, the foreign relations committees of both chambers had negotiated legislation to amend certain sections of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954 by giving the president special authority to waive their restrictive provisions.
However, precisely because both bills lay down certain conditions for granting such a waiver, they have provoked domestic opposition in India, both from the political Left and the Right. The governments in New Delhi and Washington will have to exert themselves a great deal to reconcile differences with the bill’s critics, and perhaps amend their text.
Meanwhile, ominous signs have appeared of a likely acceleration of the nuclear arms race on the subcontinent following a report in The Washington Post on July 24 that Pakistan is building a large plutonium production reactor, which will allow it to make 40 to 50 Nagasaki-type fission bombs a year, thus narrowing the nuclear warhead gap with India.
The U.S.-India nuclear deal was initialed a year ago between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington. It has been described as “historic” and representing a “tidal shift” in India-U.S. relations, and as the “most important foreign policy initiative” undertaken by Bush.
The Bush administration, joined by powerful Indian-American and Zionist-Israeli lobbies in Washington, as well as by public relations agencies engaged by New Delhi, has invested a major effort in promoting the deal, through which Washington hopes to recruit once-nonaligned India as its “strategic partner” or junior ally. One objective of such partnership is to “contain” China’s influence as a rising power.
The administration’s effort has whittled down much of the opposition to the deal from those members of the U.S. Congress who resist making a special one-time exception for India in the global nuclear order. Such an exception is necessary to permit civilian nuclear cooperation with India, although it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970.
However, the Bush administration has had to pay a price for getting a consensus favoring the deal. This lies in negotiating compromises that take the critics’ concerns on board and alter the bills it originally presented to the two chambers of Congress.
These alterations change the sequence of steps India must take before the U.S. Congress ratifies the deal. More important, they impose conditions such as annual certification of India’s nuclear activities by the U.S. president. These were not part of the original Bush-Singh agreement signed last year. Nor did they figure in the plan for separating India’s civilian and military facilities agreed to with Bush in March.
What rankles the political opposition in India is the divergence between the bills and the statements made by Singh in Parliament on July 29 last year and this past March 7. Some opposition parties are pressing for “Sense of the House” resolutions recording their differences with the U.S. Congress bills.
The Singh government has warned that such resolutions could lead to the fall of the ruling coalition. (The Left supports the Centrist coalition from the outside, because it is keen to prevent the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party from making a bid for power.)
On Wednesday, Singh tried to reassure Parliament personally that he would not agree to any departure from the commitments made in the past agreements with Bush. But this did not satisfy the opposition parties, which regard the U.S. bills as interference with India’s sovereignty and independent strategic decision-making.
The parties raised strong concerns over The Washington Post report that Pakistan is building a plutonium production reactor, and demanded to know what India is doing in response. This disclosure was first highlighted by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, which has published satellite images of the facility under construction at Khushab, in the Punjab.
According to ISIS, the reactor has a capacity of 1,000 Mw (thermal) and can produce 200 kg of plutonium a year, enough for 40 to 50 bombs. The reactor has been under construction since 2000 but is nowhere near completion.
There is speculation in India’s so-called strategic community about whether Pakistan has the capacity to design and build a reactor of this size, and also to make crucial ingredients for it, such as heavy water.
Pakistan’s experience with this technology is limited so far to a small (40-70 Mw thermal) plutonium reactor, and a heavy water facility that only produces tiny quantities of about 10-5 tons. It is not known if the small reactor has successfully produced weapons-grade material, or in what quantities.
“But what is much more interesting is that the U.S. government says it has known of the existence of the reactor for a long time,” says M.V. Ramana, an independent nuclear expert based at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore. “Now, depending on how long it has known this, it has either silently acquiesced in Pakistan’s plutonium production program, or subtly hinted that such a reactor could ‘compensate’ Pakistan for the disadvantage likely to be caused vis-à-vis India by the Bush-Singh nuclear deal.”
In either case, India is likely to step up its own production and stockpiling of fuel for nuclear weapons so as to deny Pakistan an edge. This in turn could spur Pakistan to further expand its nuclear weapons capability and missile prowess and thus accelerate the nuclear arms race between the two neighbors.
Whatever shape the India-U.S. nuclear deal finally takes, it is certain to influence the rivalry in South Asia.
(Inter Press Service)
