This is by far the best deal we could have got

The Indo-US nuclear deal, with its attendant ‘123 Agreement’, the India-specific International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and Nuclear Suppliers Group waivers, need to be seen as building blocks of an extended process through which India is being brought into the mainstream of global politics.
Critics of the agreement have parsed every full-stop, comma and preposition to delineate its faults. They have sought to play up fears and put forward worst-case scenarios to undermine the agreement. In the coming years, as India intensifies its nuclear power programme in a big way, there will be many occasions when there will be differences of opinion on various clauses and agreements.
But let’s be clear that if the US has its interpretation of the 123 Agreement or the NSG waiver, so will India. More important, US generosity and Indian diplomatic tenacity has ensured that we have got as much of a level playing field as could have been provided for an outlaw country in the nuclear arena. From now onwards, its future will be shaped not by the fears of its critics but the practical use we make of the opportunities it provides.

Agreement

What does the agreement do? First, and most immediately, it will allow India to import natural uranium fuel to run our existing and planned nuclear power plants at full capacity. Second, it will allow us to resume collaboration with Canada to upgrade the CANDU design on which most Indian reactors are based. The Indian reactors are typically 220, or now 540 MW, while Canada has developed 740 MW reactors and has a 1,000 MW unit on the drawing board. Third, India can import modern units from France, Russia or the US, along with financing to set them up.
Fourth, Indian engineers and researchers will be permitted to work or collaborate with their counterparts in advanced nuclear nations without any special restrictions. Fifth, it provides India’s own industry such as Larsen & Toubro or the NPCIL the opportunity to become suppliers of key reactor items or even reactors. Sixth, it will enable India to acquire hitherto forbidden dual use technology which is critical for our ambitious space and high-tech industry programmes.
In the US, critics like Joseph Cirincione of the Center for American Progress and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association have claimed that US-supplied uranium fuel would free up India’s limited uranium reserves for use in its nuclear weapons programme. The views of these professional non-proliferation lobbyists were echoed on Wednesday in the US Senate by Senators Byron Dorgan and Jeff Bingaman. This claim flies against the face of facts. If India was interested in fabricating nuclear weapons it could have done so in the 1960s, to start with. Even after its single test explosion in 1974, it did nothing.
There were two reasons why it was compelled to change course. First, New Delhi got information of the extent to which China was assisting Pakistan in making nuclear weapons. This was a shocking development, because no country in the world had knowingly transferred nuclear weapons technology to another — not the US to UK or France, nor Russia to China. As a recent issue of Physics Today has disclosed, not only did China transfer a weapons design in 1982, but it also tested a weapon that had been made in Pakistan in its own test site in 1990.
Second, following the end of the Cold War and the scare over Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, the US began to move in a concerted way to lock up India’s options. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — which acknowledges nuclear weapons possession only by five big powers — was extended “in perpetuity”. India was not affected as we are not signatories. But the second step was more compelling — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was approved. This would ensure that India and other threshold powers would never be able to test their weapons.
Though we categorically rejected the treaty, it decreed that unless forty threshold countries, which included India, Pakistan, Israel, also signed and ratified it, it could not come into force. The pressure for ratification became intense as all significant countries signed up, though some key countries like the US and China did not ratify it.

Mirror

These pressures pushed India to test. The first attempt by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government in December 1995 was foiled when the preparations were discovered, and the second came apart when Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 13-day government collapsed in 1996. The tests were eventually carried out in May of 1998, a quarter century after the Pokhran I test.
This was hardly the behaviour of a power bent on making nuclear weapons. In any case even today if India did want to make lots of nuclear weapons, it could simply take its 14-odd power reactors out of the electricity grid and use them in a “low burn-up” mode to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
There is a mirror-version of this critique in India. There are those who say that the agreement has taken away our right to test and that it will come in the way of constructing our nuclear arsenal. The test issue would be clear to anyone who has bothered to read the various documents associated with the deal — there is nothing in there which prevents India from testing. As for the weapons, the most knowledgeable authority — K. Santhanam of the DRDO who steered the programme to the tests at Pokhran II has made it clear in an article last year that India already has all the nuclear material it needs to construct a “credible minimum deterrent.” R. Chidambaram, the chief of the DAE at the time, too, stated last August that the tests met all the scientific community’s requirements for fabricating the arsenal that was needed.

Nuances

It doesn’t take much common sense to see that while we do have the sovereign right to test, there will be diplomatic consequences of the event. While countries like France and Russia may not react at all, the US will, though its position is not as absolute as it appears. On the face of it, the US is required to terminate cooperation and seek the return of its nuclear and non-nuclear material, technology or components.
Practically, however, Article 15(6) of the 123 Agreement would require the US party to compensate at “fair market value” of the equipment and pay for the costs of the removal. As Department of Atomic Energy Chairman, Anil Kakodkar has pointed out, “It is practically not possible [to remove reactor vaults, steam generators, coolant channels etc that make up a nuclear power station]. It is nuanced too by Article 14 which commits the US to consider the context of the termination. In other words, the US reaction would be graded if India resumed testing because of China or Pakistan
doing so.
There are bound to be geopolitical consequences of the agreement. The US has its reasons for what it has done, and India has its own for what it is doing. If there is congruence, well and good, if there isn’t well, the world will not end. But to assume that India is so beholden to the US that it will now be subservient to its interests is to be blind to contemporary reality in which India is the strongest economically and militarily that it has been in 60 years. As for the US, well it would be unfair to extrapolate from its present infirmities.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 3, 2008

FAQ on Nuclear Deal

The Indo-US nuclear deal comprises of two segments—the technical and the political. Linking the two is a complex web of agreements with implicit and explicit conditions and statements. It is politics that has enabled the technical—because the US wants to befriend India, it has taken the decision to take the lead to lift the embargo on civil nuclear trade that has been imposed on India by the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Technical:
Contrary to some views, the technical is not unimportant. Government figures show that the demand for electricity would increase ten-fold by 2050. After taking into account all available generation options, the country would still be left with a power shortage of 400 giga watts (one giga watt is equal to one billion watts). Importing uranium fuel and reactors will help ease this shortage.

Q. Is there a shortage of natural uranium in the country ?

A. According to a news report, speaking in Hyderabad on June 8, Anil Kakodkar, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission observed that there was a huge shortage in the supply of uranium, although the country was on the road to increasing production. Owing to this shortage, the National Power Corporation of India Limited operated at only 50 per cent capacity utilisation. The government agreed to sanction four more units of 700 MW each to NPCIL but they would be constructed only after fuel linkages were established.

Political:

Q. What is this latest revelation in the US ?

A. The State Department has, in a letter to a US Congressman said that under Article XIV of the Indo-US 123 Agreement, the US “has the right to cease all nuclear cooperation with India immediately.” And that the fuel supply assurances demanded by New Delhi "are not, however, meant to insulate India against the consequences of a nuclear explosive test or a violation of nonproliferation commitments."

Q. Didn’t the PM say last August in Parliament that “ The agreement does not in any way affect India's right to undertake future nuclear tests, if it is necessary."

A. Yes, he did. But note the wording of the US letter, it says that the US has the right to cease cooperation, it does not say that India does not have the right to test.

Q. Are Indian officials right when they claim that the July 18, 2005 statement, the 123 Agreement or the IAEA safeguards agreement do not explicitly ban further nuclear tests by India ?

A. Yes they are. But there is a very clear implicit condition-- should India resume nuclear testing again, it will have to pay the price.

Q. How are these conditions implicit ?

A. The Hyde Act has waived the US ban on civil nuclear trade between the US and countries like India which have not signed the NPT, and yet conducted nuclear tests. But this waiver is retroactive going back from July 18, 2005 and covers our tests of 1998 and 1974. Any new test will lead to a termination of the waiver and compel the US to terminate the 123 Agreement.

Q. What is India’s view of the Hyde Act?

A. India says this is a legislation that binds the US Administration, not India. India is bound by the bilateral 123 Agreement that was worked out last year.In international law, an international agreement trumps domestic legislation. Were it not so, countries would undermine international commitments by passing domestic legislation. Actually the US did this to India in the case of Tarapur, and that is why India has gone out of its way to seek assurances of fuel supply from the US.

Q. So was the PM bluffing us when he said we had the right to test ?

A. Not quite, he was correct in the statement, but he did not lay it all out by saying “ My fellow countrymen, we have the right to conduct further nuclear tests, but the Indo-US nuclear cooperation agreement could be jeopardized in case we did so.”

Q. Why do you say only “jeopardized”, and not that it would be terminated ?

A. Because there is some clever drafting that provides a loophole of sorts which says that before the agreement is terminated, both sides will consider the circumstances and consult on why the party is seeking a termination. Though either of the parties may still terminate the agreement if they are not satisfied, they have agreed “to consider carefully the circumstances that may lead to termination… [and] take into account whether the circumstances that may lead to termination or cessation resulted from a party’s serious concern about a changed security environment or as a response to similar actions by other States which could impact national security.”

Q. Is the BJP making too much of the testing issue ?

A. It is, because Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 1998 “after concluding this limited testing program, India announced a voluntary moratorium on further underground nuclear test explosions. We conveyed our willingness to move towards a de jure formalization of this obligation. In announcing a moratorium, India has already accepted the basic obligation of the CTBT.”
In other words, India was ready to forgo any further nuclear tests.

Q. Does the US have an agenda in pushing the nuclear deal?

A. Of course it does. As they say, there is no free lunch. But that’s not quite the same thing as accepting that India will slavishly serve that agenda. What it will do is to utilize the opportunity to move its own agenda forward.
India has its own agenda and sees in the present global conjuncture an opportunity to strengthen its own position relative to the major powers.
In fact, being stronger than it has ever been, both economically and militarily (India is a nuke power, remember ?) it is in a far better position to resist unseemly pressure on issues. On the other hand, there is no reason why we should not cooperate with the US and other world powers, if there is a mutuality of interests. Sitting out the dance as a wall-flower is certainly not a good option for India.

Q. So why have the two countries taken such a round-about way of dealing with the issue ?

A. We come back to politics. For four years, the Congress formed a coalition with the Left and so did not want to spell out the price India would have to pay for violating the agreement. At the same time, it had to deal with the BJP which muscularly asserted India’s right to test.
At the same time, in the US, the Administration had to walk the fine line of satisfying existing US law in relation to countries like India, Pakistan and Israel, who are outlaws of the world nuclear system because they have not signed the NPT and possess nuclear weapons.

They had, in the words of Nick Burns, the former US official who negotiated the 123 Agreement, to “square the circle.” As you know squaring the circle is not really possible, you have to create an illusion of sorts to achieve that feat.

The worm is turning

To go by what the media says, the nuclear deal is still showing some signs of life. This is what The Hindu reported on a press conference held during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to New Delhi:

Maintaining that the government remained committed to the civil nuclear deal with the United States, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said, “We have not reached the end of the road” even if there was some delay in operationalising it.

I am not surprised. I never believed it was dead. It did suffer a terrible blow when the Left suddenly pulled the rug under it in August, and a worse one when party members and UPA allies stabbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the back.The reason why I remain optimistic is not some special information, but my analysis of what underpins its robustness.

In my view, the Indo-US nuclear deal, occasioned perhaps, by US worries about China, is actually a a larger geopolitical shift that is taking place as a result of the end of the Cold War. This is about the new world order that Bush 41 spoke of in 1990. India's nuclear status has been a pill stuck in the collective throats of the international community for quite a while. Bush 41 tried first to handle this by pinning down India and Pakistan in a regional arrangement, but this did not work. After India’s nuclear tests, and especially after 9-11 the situation was such that the idea of equating India and Pakistan became laughable. Pakistan was on the verge of economic collapse, the A Q Khan network had been exposed, and was now seen as a “rogue” state that had to be controlled. So, the US emphasis shifted to co-opting India.

The nuclear deal is a means of doing that, and there is nothing dishonourable about this. India is getting an opportunity to join the world community, whose leading lights also constitute the Nuclear Suppliers Group. There is an unwritten consensus among them that the US will work out the terms of engagement, and the Indo-American 123 Agreement is precisely that.

American benevolence has nothing to do with a sudden love for India and Indians, it is again, systemic. Indian economic weight is growing in handsome measure, its military power, though dissipated in internal policing, is not insubstantial. India is one of the most open societies in the world, fiercely democratic, naturally capitalistic, indeed a natural ally of the US, once the latter gets off its high horse and begins to understand the consequences of its misadventure in Iraq.

As for the nuclear deal politics, what we are seeing currently is intense effort to knock sense into the BJP’s head. Everyone, but everyone knows that the party is taking a completely opportunistic position on the deal—in other words, opposing it for the sake of doing so, rather than any principle. Brajesh Mishra’s comment is kind of non sequitur:

“If I were to get credible guarantees from the government about the integrity of what we (the NDA) had left behind three and a half years ago, what has been done in these three and a half years for them to prove that there are also enthusiastic about the nuclear weapons programme, then I would say, personally, to go forward with the deal because I am not so critical of the US for following this particular policy. I am critical of the government bending to the wishes of the US.”

The real pressure is coming from the BJP’s “natural allies”—its supporters and well-wishers in the corporate and business world who are unable to comprehend the party’s stand. No one knows what has driven that stand which reflects the views of the xenophobic right of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Apparently Mr. Arun Shourie is its key mentor within the party’s core committee that decides policy. Why he, or for that matter Mr. Yashwant Sinha are there is a bit of a mystery since neither have any political base.

The BJP now has the option of simply backtracking and supporting the deal “in the national interest” or negotiating an arrangement with the Congress that could see the Parliament pass a “sense of Parliament” resolution underlining India’s belief in an “independent” foreign policy. The problem, however, is that the Congress and BJP are not on talking terms—the PM literally does not talk to the leader of the opposition. It is in such circumstances, of course, that the extremes of the Left flourish.

Confronted with the possibility that it may be left holding the can, the Left has changed tune. CPI(M) Party chief Prakash Karat who virtually accused Manmohan Singh of being an American stooge says in The Telegraph that he respects his integrity.

New Delhi, Oct. 30: In his first public overture to Manmohan Singh since the bitter stand-off began in early August over the Indo-US nuclear deal, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat today underlined the Left’s “respect” for the Prime Minister and appreciated his “unquestioned integrity”.

Is that a climb-down? Or an effort to get on to the "statesmanship" horse, after unhorsing the PM? You decide.