Disarming Conflict

Once the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) opened the door to civilian nuclear trade with India there was little doubt that Canadian industry would soon try to walk through it. Canada’s nuclear technology leader, AECL Ltd., has already been in India exploring options, and Saskatchewan’s uranium producing Cameco Corp is eying a major new market.[i]

The question therefore is no longer whether Canada should, after a 35 year interruption, resume nuclear cooperation with India; instead, it’s a matter of the conditions or limits that ought to govern civilian dealings with a nuclear armed India.

The nuclear suppliers did not attach direct conditions to their September action to exempt India from the core global nuclear nonproliferation principle – namely, that civilian nuclear co-operation is to be reserved for states that do not acquire nuclear weapons and that permit all their nuclear facilities to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). India is now the one exception to that nonproliferation rule,[ii]but the debate surrounding this policy change suggested suppliers still expect at least four specific constraints on nuclear trade and technology cooperation with India.

The first is the very basic expectation that India will not test another nuclear device and that if it does all cooperation must cease.

In a political pledge linked to the NSG action, India said it remained committed to “continue its unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing” (para 2.g. of the NSG decision) but it refused all efforts to make a permanent end to testing part of the deal. And given India’s clear commitment to continued nuclear warhead production, internal Indian demands for more testing could at some point become irresistible. US legislation requires any American nuclear cooperation to be halted in the event of another Indian test. Other suppliers were also adamant on the point, and Canada should certainly, obviously, write into any nuclear cooperation agreement that a test would end it.

Indeed, we should go further and join other states in mounting renewed pressure on India to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – it is India’s refusal to do so that is one of the central obstacles to the Treaty’s entry into force, a treaty that is repeatedly declared by the international community as one of the most urgently required measures to prevent further vertical and horizontal nuclear proliferation.

Secondly, Canada should, also in concert with other suppliers, ensure that any future supply of uranium to India not be at levels that would permit stockpiling. If India is able to build up a large reserve of imported fuel for its civilian reactors it would in effect build up immunity to any sanctions that would almost certainly follow another weapons test. Put another way, with a large stockpile of fuel at hand, India could feel emboldened to ignore the wrath of the international community and conduct further tests in support of its still growing weapons arsenal.

To be sanguine about that possibility would amount to what a Washington Post op-ed described “risking Armageddon for cold, hard cash.”[iii]It could also be seen as violating Article I of the Nuclear Non-Prolieration Treaty (NPT). Article I requires that states “not it any way…assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State [a definition that applies to India under the NPT] to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.” An unlimited ability to import uranium could, in addition to building this immunity to future sanctions, also facilitate accelerated warhead production by allowing India to preserve all of its domestic uranium for its weapons program.

A third caution raised by some of the same suppliers that agreed to resume nuclear cooperation with India is that such cooperation not include the supply of nuclear reprocessing or uranium enrichment technology – technology that can be used to produce fuel for civilian reactors and nuclear weapons alike. US domestic law prohibits the export of enrichment and reprocessing equipment and technology to any state outside the NPT and the coming NSG meeting will consider making a similar restriction part of its own supplier guidelines – a condition that Canada should certainly endorse.

Finally, it must be remembered that the new willingness to engage in civilian nuclear cooperation with India was ostensibly designed to win nonproliferation gains. India was to be brought into the nonproliferation club. As it turned out, India managed to avoid any new and binding commitments, but it did make a number of important and welcome political commitments. And those commitments now warrant close and continuing attention. In statements in 2005, when the change in policy toward India was first proposed, and in 2008 when the waiver decision was before the NSG, India made close to a dozen significant disarmament and non-proliferation commitments.

Besides agreeing to continue its testing moratorium and to separating civilian and military nuclear facilities and programs, placing the former under IAEA safeguards (para 2.a), India promised, among other things, to adopt the IAEA’s Additional Protocol (2.c), allowing more intrusive inspections of civilian nuclear facilities, to support negotiations toward a Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty (2.g), and to support the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and the negotiation of a convention toward that end.   These are political commitments, and while India rejected all efforts to make the NSG waiver conditional on any of them, paragraph 3 of the NSG waiver decision nevertheless insists that the decision is “based on” these and other commitments.

The question now is, what will Canada and the international community do to monitor the extent to which India actually makes good on its solemn promises. It is now the responsibility of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and any states entering into new civilian nuclear cooperation arrangements with India to ensure – logically through an annual review – that India acts on those commitments in support of global nonproliferation efforts.