Disarming Conflict

The first test is an India-only event. On July 22 India’s Parliament will vote to determine whether the new Parliamentary coalition that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has built around his Congress Party will give the deal approval at home.

If the deal passes there, it will then face two multilateral tests. First, the Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) must approve a new safeguards agreement with India to cover the nuclear facilities that are to be newly designated as civilian under the deal. Then the deal will need approval of an exemption for India to the stringent rules governing civilian nuclear cooperation established by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Canada will be involved in both the IAEA and NSG decisions – in fact, at the NSG Canada essentially holds a veto inasmuch as decision-making is by consensus. Canadian officials indicate there is still no final decision on what position Canada will take in either forum.

If the deal is not stopped at either the IAEA or the NSG it will still face one more test in the US Congress – that is, an up or down vote on the final package. And if that doesn’t happen before Congress shuts down for the US election, the deal will essentially be dead.

The arguments in favour of the deal tend to focus on the importance of forging a new strategic relationship between the US and India (and, incidentally, in India the primary opposition to the deal also focuses not on proliferation issues but on opposition to a new strategic relationship with the US, which opponents fear will link Indian foreign policy too closely to that of the US).[i] The US Administration has argued that the deal will bring India into the non-proliferation mainstream – but, given that the deal exempts India from key non-proliferation rules, it is not a convincing argument in the non-proliferation community. Accordingly, arguments against the deal focus on its violation of established non-proliferation rules and on its implicit assumption that some nuclear proliferation is quite acceptable.

The deal violates non-proliferation standards on several counts:

1. The deal extends to India privileges that have hitherto been reserved for Parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India has never signed the Treaty and to date it has been understood that it therefore could not be the beneficiary of civilian nuclear cooperation unless it were to fulfill all the obligations of non-nuclear weapon state parties to the NPT.

2. The proposed deal actually treats India as if it were a nuclear weapon state (NWS) party to the NPT, even though the NPT explicitly precludes any additional state joining as a NWS. Furthermore, even though the deal proposes to treat India as if it were a nuclear weapon state, it does not require India to accept the basic commitments that the current five NWS Parties to the Treaty (China, France, Russia, UK, US) have made – namely:

-a moratorium on all warhead testing, and

-a moratorium on the production of fissile material for weapons purposes.

These two measures are minimum requirements for preventing an Asian nuclear Arms race – and should be minimum conditions for supporting the deal. Since the deal would give India access to uranium from foreign sources for its civilian nuclear programs, it would free up its domestic uranium to be used entirely for its weapons program and accelerated warhead production (and possible testing) – a prospect not likely to be ignored by either Pakistan or China. Because any US, or Canadian, provision of uranium to India would facilitate accelerated warhead production it would arguably be in violation of Article I of the NPT which says that states must “not it any way...assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.”

3. The proposed deal would also violate the agreement reached at the 1995 NPT Review Conference, and the current guidelines of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, that civilian nuclear cooperation is acceptable only with states that adhere to full-scope safeguards (that is, safeguards that apply to all of a country’s nuclear programs). In other words, any country with a military nuclear program, which by definition are not under safeguards, is not eligible for civilian nuclear cooperation. It is from this provision that NSG members will be asked to provide India an exemption.[ii]

4. The draft safeguards agreement also allows India to use foreign supplies “to develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply.” The disruption of supply would be linked to an Indian nuclear test, thus the strategic reserve would allow India to essentially ignore any international sanction stemming from a new test. Current US legislation requires US cooperation to end in the event of a test, but if India has been allowed to accumulate a strategic reserve of fuel such a termination of cooperation would have no real consequence.

5. The deal also overlooks the fact that India is still in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1172, passed after its 1998 nuclear tests, calling on India and Pakistan “immediately to stop their nuclear weapon development, to refrain from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons….”[iii]

While the on-again-off-again US-India civilian nuclear cooperation deal is once more on the agenda, whether it survives there depends on the choices states like Canada make. A vote, either at the IAEA or the NSG, to keep the deal going is a vote against nuclear non-proliferation. If non-proliferation is Canada’s primary concern it will use the opportunities it has to vote against the deal – unless, and only if, amendments can be added to at least require India to hold to a permanent end to testing warheads and to producing fissile material for weapons purposes.

References

Jayantha Dhanapala and Daryl Kimball, “A Nonproliferation Disaster,” July 10, 2008, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=20292).

Henry Sokolski, “Negotiating India’s Next Nuclear Explosion,”   July 10, 2008, The Wall Street Journal Online (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121562768791139877.html).

Nuclear Verification: The Conclusion of Safeguards Agreements and Additional Protocols, “An Agreement with the Government of India for the Application of Safeguards to Civilian Nuclear Facilities,” July 9, 2008, International Atomic Energy Agency   Board of Governors (GOV/2008/30).

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