G8, Global Warming and our Nuclear Future

When the Group of Eight summit began in Heilingdamm, Germany, everyone agreed that the big issue there would be climate change. With President George W Bush, the world’s most famous skeptic also making noises about climate change, nearly everyone agreed that climate change is a man-made phenomenon and we need to do something about it.

But there is no unanimity on what to do. Some want to banish automobiles, others want cutbacks in lifestyles, Germany and Japan want deeper mandatory cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Bush’s modest proposal is to send the issue to a committee where developed polluters like the US will sit with the developing polluters like India and China to work out ways of dealing with global warming. Read more about my views on the issue here

The Two Headed Eagle Lands: Vladimir Putin's New Delhi visit

The Putin visit has transformed a relationship based on strategic-political congruence to one based on mutual economic gain. Hindustan Times January 24, 2007

At a press briefing in New Delhi in the late-Eighties, a Soviet academician, when pressed on the quality of technology in his country, said somewhat plaintively, “Surely a country that has flown the Buran cannot be backward.” In the field of space science and military technology, it was not. The Buran, which flew in October 1988, was a Soviet space shuttle that could be launched, manoeuvred and landed automatically. But the Buran never flew again. The country that launched it dissolved, in part because it was bankrupted by programmes like Buran, aimed at giving the USSR strategic parity with the United States. Like a nova, the Soviet Union briefly lit up the earth and suddenly dimmed.

Nearly 25 years later, the core of the USSR — Russia — is once again lighting up the sky. This time as an energy and commodities superpower. It ended 2006 with its eighth straight year of growth, averaging 6.7 per cent annually. Oil and commodity prices have played a key role in this, but investment growth and consumer spending are now beginning to kick in. Oil export earnings have allowed Russia to increase its foreign reserves from $12 billion in 1999 to some $315 billion at the end of 2006, the third largest in the world.

At the helm of affairs in Russia is a no-nonsense leader termed ‘ruthless’ and ‘cold’ by his adversaries, but hugely popular in his own country. Vladimir Putin became acting President on the last day of the 20th century, December 31, 1999. He was anointed President in May after the election and was re-elected for a second term in 2004. Over the years, Putin has undertaken a policy of concentrating political power in Kremlin and re-nationalising Russia’s oil and gas industries.

In international affairs, Putin has begun to re-establish the strong and independent role for Russia, once played by the Soviet Union, without its revolutionary or imperial pretensions. He has accepted American and European influence over the Baltic States, but sought to keep traditional Slavic States like Ukraine and Belarus under a close embrace. Till now, he has acquiesced with the US dominance in West Asia and gone along with American activities in Central Asia. Even in the case of Iran, he has chosen to avoid direct confrontation with the US. However, America’s self-inflicted infirmities in these regions have created a vacuum that Kremlin could once again seek to fill.

Russia’s resurgence under a powerful leader is good news for New Delhi. The Soviet collapse, formalised in 1991, took with it the scaffolding around India’s strategic architecture. The Soviet Union had been the inspiration for our planned economy, supplier of some 70 per cent of military hardware and an uncomplaining supporter of all our causes, from Kashmir to Bangladesh. Soviet weapons systems, provided at ‘friendship prices’, enabled India to field a robust military force that made us a regional power of sorts.

Despite the scramble to re-orient its foreign and security policies, New Delhi never had to go through what Russia did in the Nineties. Russia’s GDP halved, as did its government revenues. By the end of the decade, it witnessed an unprecedented decline in its standard of living, resulting in a sharp rise in poverty and mortality rates. Drastic privatisation led to the State’s vast resources being skimmed off by a small group of oligarchs linked to the Kremlin. Universities and institutions of higher learning, culture and publishing houses that were subsidised by the State found their budgets slashed, if not entirely eliminated. There was an enormous rise in the influence of the West and its institutions in Moscow.

India can perhaps no longer expect the kind of political relationship it had with the Soviet Union to be replicated with Russia. But then, New Delhi no longer needs uncritical friends. Its own foreign policy has been drastically overhauled, it has taken important initiatives with neighbours, made advances in its relations with the US, Europe and Japan, and developed an autonomous self-defence capability in the form of nuclear weapons. Most important, its booming economy has given it a self-assurance and standing that does not need the kind of props the Soviet Union once provided.

Russian trade and technology transfer relations with China are booming, but a demographically imploding Russia also fears for the future with an economically booming and demographically gigantic neighbour with whom it shares a 3,600 km border. Despite a shared culture, Russia’s relationship with the rest of Europe has been historically troubled and continues to be so. As for the US, the Russians remain suspicious of its agenda in the former Eastern Europe and Central Asia. So, while a shared history of good relations brings Russia and India closer, what makes for the glue today is that the two do not have any conflict of interest or suspicion of each other. Russia remains sensitive to Indian security concerns in its dealings with our neighbours, especially Pakistan; they are with us in trying to stabilise Afghanistan and Central Asia.

No matter how you look at it, Russia remains one of the more important world powers. It is the largest producer of natural gas and the second largest exporter of oil after Saudi Arabia. It is also the source of significant military and space technology. Though two-way trade between India and Russia is abysmal — Indian exports are $ 0.74 billion and imports $ 2.2 billion — the potential is enormous. The upturn in the Russian consumer-led expenditure offers huge opportunities for Indian firms in the pharma, textiles, IT and automobile sectors.

India failed to take advantage of the collapsing Russian military machinery, when some of its best scientists and engineers were hired by the West and China. Today, there is greater awareness that relations need to be based on joint development of technology, rather than simple export or licensed production of weapons systems. There is, of course, far greater interest in India today on Russian energy resources. The reassertion of Kremlin’s control over oil resources does give some advantage to State-owned Indian oil giants. But as of now, the Russian energy policy remains in a state of flux.

India’s new strategic architecture is based on shoring up its strategic autonomy in the economic and security field. To this end, it is pursuing policies to promote economic growth, resolve disputes with neighbours and strengthen relations with all significant nations of the world. This is not very different from what Russia is doing. A resurgent Russia has important implications for India’s regional and global policy, because it enhances the options available to New Delhi. Arguably, there is a closer identity of interests between the two on Central Asia, Iran and West Asia, than between New Delhi and Washington. With the US mired in Iraq and its stock in West Asia at a low, India can work with countries like Russia to provide a stabilising influence, especially in the vital Persian Gulf region.

New Delhi and Moscow have the opportunity, and an apparent inclination today, to rebuild their ties on a new basis, albeit on solidly established older foundations. In a study published in 1991, Santosh Mehrotra noted that while relations between India and the USSR were based on a “compatibility of strategic-political interests”, they also had a basis in strong mutual economic interest. New Delhi and Moscow have clearly understood that they still share important strategic interests. What they need now is to put in work to buttress this with mutually beneficial economic ties.

It is a Big Deal

We must recognise that the US has done us a favour in lifting the nuclear embargo on India.We are desperately short of natural uranium and technology and the negotiation with the US is the only way in which the doors of the Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel, which have been shut to us, will open.

If anyone has alternate suggestions, I will welcome them.

This article was published in Hindustan Times December 13, 2006

Critics of the Indo-US nuclear deal are playing the game with loaded dice, weighted heavily with their anti-Americanism. The condemnation, some positively bilious, has been based on a selective reading of the new US nuclear cooperation law. Any analysis of the deal made, with the US depicted as an ‘enemy’ or ‘hostile’ actor, means that every word or phrase of the new US law can be seen as the imposition of an onerous condition or a hidden trap.

So, efforts by the US to ensure that civil technology is used for the purpose claimed, are viewed as a sinister effort to spy on India’s nuclear technology. Say this much for the Left, they do know their politics well and clearly understand that the key American aim in giving India the extraordinary concession — of ending their 30-year-old successful embargo of our nuclear establishment — is to do with befriending India. And everyone knows that the Left does not want India and the US to be friends.

For 30 years, US laws, accepted by 45 other countries of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, banned the export of even a light bulb to any Indian nuclear establishment. An agreement that enables India to access nuclear raw material and technology from around the world is, therefore, not an every day event. More so, because it does so without any obligation on India to give up or restrict its nuclear weapons capability.

As for the issue of spies who may come in the guise of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors: the military and civil parts of the nuclear establishment will be physically separated. The military parts will operate out of the Kalpakkam and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) complexes.

The obligations the US seeks are quite legitimate. These are rules and regulations that will assure the US and the NSG that the opening of civil nuclear trade to India will not, in anyway, aid India’s nuclear weapons capability. Considering India defied the world community and tested nuclear weapons in 1998, this is not an unreasonable expectation. Since our hearts are pure and military facilities will be in separate enclaves, there is no reason why we should worry about the intrusiveness of inspections.

What the red and saffron filter does not reveal is that the US has come more than half-way to accommodate India. Leave alone dropping the insistence that India “cap and roll back” its nuclear weapons programme, the US has actually laid the groundwork for intensive collaboration with India in the civil nuclear sphere. For example, much is being made of the fact that the Hyde Act does not mention the issue of reprocessing US-supplied nuclear fuel in India. As of today, the US prohibits this, regardless of the country. But, say officials, the very fact that it has not been mentioned in the legislation is the loophole that a subsequent technical ‘123 Agreement’ can be used to enable this. A clause in the Bill makes India the only country in the world that can have US reprocessing and enrichment technology, albeit conditionally.

Much has been made of annual certificates needed to continue cooperation. Actually on Indian insistence, “certification” has been changed to “assessment”, the difference being that negative reports will not lead to cessation of cooperation. Another claim of US’s bad faith is that it had the NSG inspection laws tightened to target India. G. Balachandran, a long-time analyst of the issue, says that the change in the rules were mooted in the NSG in mid-2004, a year before the Indo-US nuclear deal, and approved by the outfit’s plenary in June 2005.

The opponents of the Indo-US nuclear deal need to answer how they propose to meet the deficit of natural uranium that afflicts India’s civil nuclear power programme?

The shortage is not a matter of speculation. The mid-term appraisal document of the Tenth Five Year Plan states this. In July 2005, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, A. Gopalakrishnan, now a vocal critic of the deal, wrote in the Economic and Political Weekly: “at present the DAE (department of atomic energy) is beginning to face a serious shortage of natural uranium, even to fuel the 18 pwhr (pressurised heavy water reactors) currently under operation or construction.”

This is a good place to examine the attitude of some of our retired scientists who are criticising the deal. All of them know how the US-led embargo crippled the Indian nuclear programme. They seem to be inspired by a sense of technological vengeance in insisting that India go it alone and prove its three-stage nuclear plan. This could well be technological hubris. Balachandran says India has just about enough natural uranium to run a 10,000 MW programme, sufficient to trigger the fast-breeder reactor programme using a plutonium-rich fuel to breed more plutonium. “If there are no imports, then everything hangs on the fast breeder reactor,” he says. “If, for some reason, this technology does not perform, we will be stuck at that level.”

The only deal that will satisfy our scientists is one in which the US not only unconditionally gives in to all Indian demands, but also rewrites the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to accommodate India as a nuclear weapons State. This attitude can only be born out of dotage, or a wrenching awareness that their world will be changed forever. Instead of the cloistered institutions they ran with little accountability, India, in the changed circumstances, could well have a vast nuclear establishment with many new actors, including probably private sector companies, both Indian and foreign. Nuclear power research, today, is a cooperative affair, involving several countries and institutions — both private and public — primarily because of the costs associated, as well as a desire to spread the technological risks.

There is one last thought that needs to be addressed. In international relations, all State-to-State relations are between equals. When Prime Ministers and Presidents make joint statements and declarations, this principle operates. The reality is, however, that while all nations are sovereign equals, in the real world, geographic location, economic and military power, and resilience of political institutions create differentials.

It is on this template that we need to examine the Indo-US deal. So, while the July 18, 2005, statement and the PM’s statements in Parliament work on the belief that it is an agreement between sovereign equals, the practical procedures that the two countries work out cannot avoid reflecting the real differential. The US, the world’s largest economy and military power, is also a recognised nuclear weapons State under the NPT; India is a pariah State when it comes to nuclear weapons and technology, as well as a poor country in desperate need of energy.

The US, the lead State in maintaining a global embargo against States that have not signed the NPT, has been remarkably generous with India. Not only has it tacitly accepted India as a nuclear weapons State, it has explicitly agreed to lift its embargo against India’s civil nuclear programme in exchange for assurances that there are no leakages from India’s civil programme to the military. To see this as sinister or demeaning is either obtuse or perverse, or perhaps, a combination of both.