ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Expert calls for 'nuclear bargain' between US and India

In a bid to end the emerging US-India confrontation on the nuclear issue, a leading South Asia expert has suggested a formula, that envisages transfer of American civilian nuclear technology to India in return for three major concessions by New Delhi, including a promise to agree to a test ban.

Selig S Harrison, who prefers to call his proposal "nuclear bargain", in an article in Washington Post, says as a beginning the Clinton administration should offer to seek Congressional approval for civilian nuclear technology transfers to India, now barred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act.

In return, he says India should give the following concessions.

First, India would agree to extend the application of international inspections, now limited to one US-supplied reactor near Bombay, to all seven of its civilian nuclear power reactors and any new power and medical research reactors supplied by US or other foreign companies.

This would prevent the diversion to military purposes of fissile material produced with US co-operation.

In accordance with the then defence secretary William Perry's acceptance in 1995 of India as a nuclear-capable power, the research reactors and reprocessing facilities where India's militarily applicable nuclear stock-piles are produced would remain exempt from inspections until the conclusions of a pending international accord capping such stockpiles.

Secondly, India would make some form of binding de jure commitment not to export nuclear technology, formalising its present de facto policy. This would place India in accord with a key provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Thirdly, India would have to reach a compromise with the United States on the issue of a nuclear test ban. New Delhi has refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that initiated in 1996, insisting that it be linked with a timetable for the reduction of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear powers.

Harrison says India might agree to sign the treaty or to make some other form of international commitment not to test without formally signing it, now that it has conducted the tests it regarded as essential to make its nuclear option credible.

Such an agreement, he points out, would set the stage for broader negotiations in which the United States would seek commitments by India and Pakistan to cap the further accumulation of weapons-grade fissile material and to continue refraining form the deployment of nuclear weapons.

He makes it a point to refer to India's announcement last week expressing its readiness to join negotiations on the pending global fissile material cutoff agreement, which would commit signatories to freeze their stockpiles of weapons grade nuclear material and submit to international inspection.

But Indian and Pakistani commitments not to deploy nuclear weapons or limit the level and nature of developments would be unlikely unless the United States and Russia moved much more rapidly to reduce their own nuclear weapons as the prelude to multilateral reductions embracing China, Britain and France, Harrison observes.

He says the US would benefit politically and economically from a compromise with India that would open up the transfer of civilian nuclear technology to India in return for a cessation of testing and a cutoff of fissile material stockpiling.

Harrison says the US nuclear industry needs foreign contracts to keep its technical work force intact and to survive in the face of competition. India's quest for $ 50 billion in foreign investment to build nuclear reactors could mean enormous profits.

He wants US President Bill Clinton should go ahead with his projected autumn mission to South Asia not only to carry forward negotiations on nuclear issues but to demonstrate a new American interest in a long-neglected part of the world. This would be the first visit of an American president since Jimmy Carter's in 1978.

He says it would come at a hopeful moment when American investment commitments in India exceed eight billion dollars and cultural links between the world's two largest democracies are growing.

Harrison says the sanctions imposed by Clinton will only make India more intransigent unless they are accompanied by realistic diplomatic trade-offs.

He says Indian leaders have made it clear that they are ready to end testing and cut off stockpiling of plutonium for nuclear weapons if the Clinton administration will end sanctions and give India, as it has given China, access to US civilian nuclear technology to help satisfy the burgeoning energy demands of an exploding population, now nearing one billion.

UNI

Tell us what you think of this report