US-India nuclear deal called “foolish and risky”

The US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement approved by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in Vienna is a “foolish and risky deal” that will make every country free to sell nuclear technology to India while “asking virtually nothing from India in return”, in the process undermining the very international system that India so ardently seeks to join, according to a critical assessment published here on Sunday.Mira Kamdar, a fellow at Asia Society, New York, writes in the Washington Post that while India needs energy, “this foolish, risky deal is not the way to get any of these things. India’s democracy has already paid a crippling price, and now the planet may too”. The Indo-US nuclear co-operation agreement was approved by the NSG at its meeting in Vienna this weekend. However, it still has to find congressional approval, an exercise that it may not be possible to complete during the short time left to do that. The deal, Kamdar argues, risks triggering a new arms race in Asia. If it passes, a “miffed and unstable Pakistan will seek nuclear parity with India, and China will fume at a transparent US ploy to balance Beijing’s rise by building up India as a counterweight next door”. The pact will gut global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear materials and encourage other countries to flout the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that India is now being rewarded for failing to sign. Kamdar believes that the deal will divert billions of dollars away from India’s real development needs in sustainable agriculture, education, health care, housing, sanitation and roads. It will also distract India from developing clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, and from reducing emissions from its many coal plants. Instead, the pact will focus the nation’s efforts on an energy source that will, under the rosiest of projections, contribute a mere 8 percent of India’s total energy needs — and that will not happened until 2030. The deal will generate billions of dollars in lucrative contracts for major US and Indian companies as well as help resuscitate the moribund US nuclear power industry. France and Russia, both of which support the deal, will reap huge profits in India. According to one estimate, the deal will generate more than $100 billion in business over the next 20 years, as well as a large number of jobs in India and the United States..Kamdar writes that India will get unfettered access to nuclear fuel and technology without doing anything in return. It will not have to open all its reactors to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which means that both the new technologies India will now be able to acquire and the fuel it now has on hand can be ploughed into its nuclear weapons programme. “More ominously, the deal will tell other would-be nuclear powers — and nuclear rogues — that the old barriers to non-proliferation need not be taken seriously. They certainly have not been taken seriously by the US. Other, less high-minded powers will surely follow the shortsighted example being set by Delhi and Washington. Russia has emphatically signalled that it has had enough of global norms that it considers unfair and is keen to return to old-fashioned realpolitik. The prospect of meaningful steps toward disarmament by the existing nuclear powers is slim and dwindling.” The deal will not magically transform India into China’s economic or military equal. Even if India managed to match China reactor for reactor and missile for missile, it could do so only at the expense of precisely the investments in human and physical infrastructure that could make India into a truly great power, prosperous and secure. This is the real tragedy of the US-India nuclear deal, she concludes. .