NEW DELHI, March 3 (UPI) -- India has secured a stunning diplomatic success that changes the geopolitics of Asia with the nuclear cooperation agreement concluded Thursday with the visiting U.S. President George W. Bush.
The main price to be paid will be the separate international diplomatic effort to constrain Iran's nuclear development program, since the India deal sets a precedent that drives a coach and horses through the existing system of international legal controls over nuclear proliferation.
Rules that have been so openly bent for India will now have less credibility as they are applied to Iran.
In diplomatic terms, the main loser from the historic Indo-American deal is China, which now sees India as its main rival for the future dominance of Asia forging a serious strategic partnership with the United States, China's main rival for the future dominance of the western Pacific.
India has paid remarkably little for this deal, winning almost every point in the small print of the agreement and reversing the efforts by the U.S. State Department's arms control specialists to minimize India's military nuclear capabilities and to maximize the controls of the International Atomic Energy Authority over India's civilian nuclear program.
Under the deal, India will separate its civilian from its military nuclear programs, but it has until 2014 to put this fully into effect. India will declare 14 of its 22 existing and building nuclear reactors to be for civilian use and place them under IAEA controls. But India has managed to keep its new fast-breeder reactors out of the control system, which means that there will be no nuclear fuel shortages to constrain India's future manufacture and development of nuclear weapons.
Moreover, India will reserve the right to determine which parts of its nuclear program will be subject to IAEA controls and which will not. India will thus be able to shield its own nuclear research labs and their unique and groundbreaking work on thorium as a nuclear fuel out of the IAEA system. India has also re-interpreted the U.S. insistence that the deal be made "in perpetuity" by making this conditional of continued supplies of enriched uranium, of which India is very short, to fuel its reactors.
The only concession India made was cosmetic. It agreed not to be considered by the United States and the IAEA as coming into the category of the five recognized nuclear weapons states (the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China). But India has also blocked the State Department's proposed draft of the agreement which demoted India to the category of a non-nuclear weapons state.
India thus becomes a special case, but has been given a free hand to develop its nuclear weapons systems, and to develop its nuclear power stations with full access to the fuel and technology monopolized by the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group. And India gets all this with the blessing of the IAEA, thus negating the efforts of the international community since the 1970s to constrain India's nuclear ambitions by putting sanctions on its access to nuclear fuel and technology.
India broke the controls of the Non-Proliferation Treaty system (which India never signed) with its first nuclear test in 1974 and its full-scale weapons tests in 1998, and it has now got away with it. This lesson is unlikely to be lost on other countries with nuclear ambitions in the future.
The U.S.-India deal has been hailed by Britain and France, and given the nod by IAEA chief Mohamed el-Baradei, which means that it is likely to be a done deal on the international level. There may be some opposition from Russia and China and from other members of the NSG who may have to amend their own laws to accommodate India's new status, but in the fact of IAEA acceptance this is unlikely to block the deal.
"It (the agreement) would be a milestone, timely for ongoing efforts to consolidate the non-proliferation regime, combat nuclear terrorism and strengthen nuclear safety," el-Baradei commented.
The only body that seems to have much chance of disrupting this deal is the U.S. Congress, where concerns have already been voiced by leading members of both parties who are concerned for its impact on the non-proliferation system.
"The president has blown a hole in the nuclear rules the whole world has been playing by," commented senior Democratic Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who called the agreement a "historic nuclear failure" that compromised American security.
President Bush acknowledged that "It's difficult for the American President to sell to our Congress. There's some people who just don't want to change with the time."
"I'm looking forward to working with the U.S. Congress to change the law," Bush added. "This agreement is in our [American] interest. I am confident I can sell this to our Congress."
Asked at his joint press conference in New Delhi with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh why he was "rewarding" India for its 1998 nuclear tests and for not signing the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and what kind of message it sent out to other countries, Mr. Bush replied, "What the agreement says is that things change, times change."
Indian security officials could scarcely contain their glee over the deal, which secured all the "red lines" they had drawn when the far less accommodating U.S. draft of the deal was delivered to Delhi last fall. But there is some nervousness among India officials about the diplomatic impact of the deal, and its symbolic importance as heralding a new U.S.-Indian strategic alliance that could shape the future of Asia much as the founding of the NATO alliance in 1949 shaped the future of Cold War Europe.
Indian officials in a series of interviews with UPI over the past ten days have stressed that their country does not want to be taken for granted. Nor does India wish to be seen as a guaranteed American ally in any efforts to 'contain' China, and is likely to seek considerable freedom of maneuver in its own relations with Beijing. The last thing India wants is for a new Cold War to emerge in Asia, with India committed to the U.S. side and put in the front line against China.
But that seems to be the logic behind President Bush's decision to overrule the objections of his own arms control experts and agree to the Indian deal. Bush has put America's strategic interests in securing the Indian partnership over and above America's interests in maintaining the international non-proliferation regime.
