Author: Selig S. Harrison
Publication: Los Angeles Times
Date: December 9, 2002
India and Pakistan are both nuclear
powers. But Pakistan has exported uranium enrichment technology to North
Korea in exchange for missiles, while India has refused to sell nuclear
weapons know-how to any other state. Despite India's consistent record
of honoring international nonproliferation norms, the United States clings
to an increasingly obsolete policy that bans U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation
with New Delhi. At the same time, Washington permits such cooperation with
China, even though Beijing has transferred nuclear and missile technology
to Pakistan and Iran.
The ban is a relic of past decades
when the United States was pressing India not to become a nuclear power.
Now that New Delhi has joined the nuclear club, Washington needs to reshape
its policies.
Strategically, U.S. policy is now
based on the implicit premise that Asia is more stable with India having
a minimum nuclear deterrent than with China enjoying a nuclear monopoly.
It no longer makes sense to refuse U.S. cooperation in making Indian civilian
nuclear reactors safer and to bar U.S. companies from selling civilian
reactors to India, as they do to China.
With 14 operating civilian nuclear
reactors that produce electricity, and more on the way, India is anxious
to avoid a nuclear disaster like the one at Chernobyl in Ukraine and has
periodically asked the U.S. to help ensure the safety of its nuclear installations.
Washington has invariably said no, citing U.S. legislative restrictions
that resulted from India's failure to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, or NPT, in 1968.
Last month, however, the Bush administration
opened the door slightly to a possible policy reappraisal. The chairman
of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Richard Meserve, will meet in
January with Indian Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar. The
White House approved the visit to India after a bitter interagency struggle
in which NPT "strict constructionists" tried to block the trip. A compromise
was finally reached permitting Meserve to have a "dialogue" but not to
arrange actual transfers of nuclear safety technology.
The U.S. rationale for discriminating
in favor of China at the expense of India on this issue is based on legalistic
hairsplitting. Because China had tested nuclear weapons in 1964, it was
classified as a "nuclear weapons state" under the treaty and eligible to
sign the NPT, along with the other powers then possessing nuclear weapons.
Other states were barred in perpetuity from the nuclear club and asked
to forswear nuclear weapons formally by signing the treaty. India branded
the NPT as discriminatory and refused to sign. Now it wants to sign as
a nuclear weapons state, but the U.S. will not agree.
The NPT does not bar its signatories
from providing nuclear technology to nonsignatories such as India. However,
the U.S. Congress went beyond the treaty with a law barring nonsignatories
from receiving U.S. nuclear technology even if they accepted International
Atomic Energy Agency safeguards on its use. This legislation specifically
bars the U.S. from helping India to make its reactors safer.
In return for access to U.S. civilian
nuclear technology, the U.S. should impose two conditions, at minimum,
on India. First, New Delhi would have to accept the international agency's
safeguards not only on any new reactors purchased but also on all its existing
civilian nuclear reactors, as it says it is ready to do. Second, India
would have to make some form of binding commitment not to export nuclear
technology, formalizing its de facto policy.
Significantly, Hans Blix, the former
International Atomic Energy Agency director now heading the U.N. inspection
team in Iraq, two years ago endorsed the idea of liberalizing civilian
nuclear sales to both India and Pakistan -- but with a third, tougher condition.
Both would have to freeze their stockpiles of fissile material under intrusive
agency safeguards that would block diversion of reactors from civilian
to military use.
"There is nothing in the NPT that
would stand in the way of such an arrangement," Blix told a Stockholm seminar.
When Blix made this suggestion, Pakistan's secret nuclear transfers to
North Korea had not been exposed. It's unlikely he would advocate civilian
nuclear sales to Islamabad now. But his proposal is more relevant than
ever in the case of India. The administration should follow up the Meserve
visit with a cooperative nuclear safety program as the prelude to a broader
dialogue designed to strengthen India's demonstrated commitment to nonproliferation.
(Selig S. Harrison is a senior scholar
of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of
the Asia program at the Center for International Policy.)
