Strategic Sell Out : Indian-US Nuclear Deal

Description

The controversial civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the United States fueled controversial civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the United States fueled controversy and opposition to in a way that no foreign policy issue has done in recent memory. This happened for the good reason that the country`s “Janes-faced“ or dual-purpose nuclear energy programme is the jewel in the crown of the Indian state and spearheads the longstanding policy of government to make Indian an advanced scientific and technological power. The nuclear deal has come to be seen as undermining this national intent and ambition by substituting self-reliance with risky dependence on foreign Countries and Companies. The deal promised facilitation of trade and commerce in frontline nuclear technologies. But the only technology readily on offer is seen to be the light water reactor that are finding it difficult to be peddled elsewhere, including in their own countries, to their own people, because of the widespread concerns about nuclear accidents, radiation hazards, and environmental damage, a `la Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The fact that India was unlikely easily to access other technologies after the enabling US law the so-called “Hyde Act“, was legislated in December 2006 by the US Congress. This Act expressly forbids sale or transfer of any technology related to uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, and heavy water production. Worse, even for this limited nuclear deal, Washington extracted some very onerous terms requiring, among other things, that India separate its hitherto integrated nuclear energy programme into its military and civilian components and erect “firewalls“ between them thereby, at a stroke, destroying its cohension and the scheme of the best and most economical use of scarce human, financial, and material resources; agree to put the bulk of hte civilian-use reactors under international safeguards; and, to accept the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty strictures even though India is not a signatory and not bound by it terms. Most worryingly, however, is the Indian government`s acceptance of the no-testing condition as the basis for the deal. It amounts to India signing, de facto, the Comprohensive Test Ban Treaty strategically the worst thing the country can do at a time when further testing, particularly of the thermonuclear warheads and weapons is an urgent imperative, considering that the test of the fusion device in 1998 had fizzled out. Without more tests, India`s deterrent will lack credibility and its thermonuclear armaments will neither be reliable nor safe. This is intolerable from the point of view of national security. The four authors three of them stalwarts of the nuclear programme and the fourth, a highly regarded strategic expert-wrote extensively about these and other negatives of the nuclear deal. This is a compilation of their writings in newspapers and journals critical of the deal ands why it will turn out to be aliability.