About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Aging leadership, ailing foreign policy

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Chellaney

Foreign policy on its knees

Brahma Chellaney
Mint, April 20, 2011

The “incredible India” of the tourism ad campaign is increasingly showing itself in reality as a “credulous India” — one that refuses to learn from past mistakes or realize the costs of a meandering, personality-driven approach to policymaking. India’s foreign policy kowtows to two of its neighbours on the same day last week highlight this.

It has become tradition for any Indian prime minister visiting China to make an important concession to his hosts. Though Manmohan Singh travelled to Sanya ostensibly for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) meeting held last Wednesday, he still delivered a gift-wrapped, two-in-one concession to Chinese President Hu Jintao — a double Indian climbdown on bilateral defence exchanges.

In resuming defence talks, India agreed both to delink them from the stapled-visa issue and, in deference to Beijing, to dilute the makeup of representation in its military delegation to China. Recall that India had frozen defence exchanges in response to two Chinese actions. One was Beijing’s policy of questioning India’s sovereignty in the Indian-controlled part of Jammu and Kashmir (China controls one-fifth of the original princely state) by issuing visas on a separate leaf to its residents. The other was its refusal to issue a normal visa to the Indian Army’s Northern Command chief, who was to lead the military team to China last summer.

Singh travelled to China just days after the new Northern Command chief publicly said that an influx of People’s Liberation Army troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir had created a Chinese military presence along Pakistan’s line of control with India. He wondered, “If there were to be hostilities between us and Pakistan, what would be the complicity of the Chinese?”

Singh, however, ignored all that by blithely delinking the resumption of military talks from China’s use of the J&K card against India. Beijing has not yielded even on the stapled-visa issue, with Singh’s national security adviser acknowledging that the matter remains under discussion.

Furthermore, New Delhi has agreed to leave out the leader of the military delegation to China — again the Northern Command chief. Instead, it will send in June a team led by a less-senior Northern Command officer, but also including representatives from other military commands.

If India is so ready to appreciate Chinese sensitivities on multiple matters, why did it suspend military exchanges in the first place? After all, in the months since the exchanges were frozen, China has only tightened its iron fist, extending its military footprint in Pakistan-held Kashmir to the line of control. Should respect for another country’s sensitivities produce abject spinelessness?

Take the second kowtow — the decision to resume bilateral cricket ties with Pakistan without having secured any anti-terror commitment. Indeed, Islamabad has had the last laugh: the Pakistan-based masterminds of the Mumbai terror attacks remain untouched and the terrorist-training camps near the border with India continue to operate. Yet, New Delhi has returned to square one by resuming cricket ties and political dialogue at all levels.

The use of cricket to re-engage Pakistan at the highest level, with Mohali representing only the first step, mocks the memory of 26/11. Since Pakistan launched its proxy war against India in the 1980s, New Delhi has blended cricket with politics to court Pakistan on three separate occasions, with Singh the architect of two of those.

Tellingly, only the victim of terror has practised cricket diplomacy, not the terrorist sponsor, which refuses to make any amends. In doing so, the victim has in fact rubbed salt in its own wounds. The decision to resume cricket ties, for example, followed Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s disclosure before a U.S. court that he had acted on behalf of Pakistani state agencies in carrying out advance reconnaissance for the 26/11 attacks.

Whereas the culpability of the Pakistani state in scripting, aiding and abetting 26/11 is clear, the culpability of Indian decision-makers in letting Islamabad off the hook over those attacks has received little public attention. New Delhi actually responded to 26/11 by fashioning a new and unique tool — dossier bombing. The weighty dossiers, delivered at regular intervals, only persuaded Pakistan to stick to its ground, with India eventually climbing down.

The cyclical pattern of dealing with Pakistan — terror strikes, followed by suspension of talks, renewed bonhomie after a gap, and more terror attacks — predates Singh. In fact, no prime minister followed a more frequently shifting policy on Pakistan than the weak-in-the-knees Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who went down on his knees to propitiate Pakistan, only to get kicked in the face. In a mid-2003 visit to Beijing, he even surrendered India’s remaining leverage on Tibet.

For more than two decades, scandal-tarred geriatric leaders have fostered an ailing foreign policy. In truth, India is paying the wages of corruption, which is softening the state, hollowing out institutions, and undermining national security. The more corruption has grown, the more national security has come under pressure.

Today, amid the unending carousel of mega-corruption scandals, an important distinction has been lost: It’s one thing to seek peaceful relations with scofflaw neighbours, but it’s entirely different to invite more pressures by presenting India as a weak, vacillating, inconsistent state that is unable to uphold principles, objectives or even national self-respect.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

America’s third war plays into China’s hands

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Chellaney

The Geopolitical Message from Libya

Brahma Chellaney
Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

Will “mission creep” in the West’s intervention in Libya end up creating, inadvertently, a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep?

Of course, the Western powers must be applauded for their efforts, with the support of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to prevent a slaughter of Libya’s civilian population. The democratic world should never stand by idly while a tyrant uses military force to massacre civilians. But, if despots are to be deterred from untrammeled repression, any intervention — whether military or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The current political upheaval in the Arab world could transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But, in the decades since, the Arab world’s rulers, regimes, and practices seemed to have remained firmly entrenched.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet, two decades on, the global spread of democracy has been encountering increasingly strong headwinds. Only a small minority of states in Asia, for example, are true democracies.

In fact, a new bipolar, Cold War-style ideological divide has emerged. The rise of authoritarian capitalism — best symbolized by China, but also embraced by countries as disparate as Malaysia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, and Qatar — has created a new model that competes with (and challenges) liberal democracy.

The popular upsurge in the Arab world shows that democratic empowerment hinges on two key internal factors: the role of security forces and the technological sophistication of the state’s repressive capacity. In recent weeks, security forces have shaped developments in different ways in three Arab states.

Yemen’s popular uprising has splintered the security establishment, with different military factions now in charge of different neighborhoods in the capital, Sana. In Bahrain, by contrast, the monarchy has used the foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on demonstrators, who are predominantly Shia.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with former President Hosni Mubarak that helped end his 30-year dictatorship. Long used to wielding power, the military had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Yet today’s heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s “revolution” has so far led only to a direct military takeover, with the decades-old emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain.

As for the second key internal factor, a state’s ability to police mobile and electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. China, for example, is a model of despotic efficiency: its internal-security system extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols that look out for troublemakers.

In response to calls by some overseas Chinese for people to gather on Sundays at specific sites in Shanghai and Beijing to help launch a molihua (jasmine) revolution, China has revealed a new strategy: preemptively flood the protest-designated squares with police to leave no room for protesters. More importantly, as the world’s leader in stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications, China is strongly placed to block any Arab contagion from reaching its shores.

External factors are especially important in smaller, weaker countries. Nothing illustrates this better than Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia — which has contributed more than any other country to the spread of global jihad — sent forces under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s effort to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to bolster a besieged allied regime — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-scripted arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists.

Libya, too, is a weak, divided country. Indeed, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding the rebels there, the danger is that the West could be creating another jihadist haven. After all, the broadening of the NATO-led mission from a limited, humanitarian goal to an all-out assault on Libya’s military signals to some Arabs that this war is really about ensuring that the region does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a geopolitical imperative to bottle up or eliminate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi so that his regime cannot exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear. But Barack Obama’s administration apparently has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the United States to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

Unfortunately, this double standard sends a message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the interest of the great powers. No one has a greater interest in broad acceptance of this noxious idea — that promotion of human freedom is nothing more than a geopolitical tool — than the world’s largest, oldest, and most powerful autocracy, China.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (Harper Paperbacks, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Specious distinctions between “good” and “bad” despots

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Chellaney

Thursday, April 7, 2011

West is on a slippery slope

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times

From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers’ military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risks that it could end up creating — however inadvertently — a jihadist citadel at the southern doorsteps of Europe.

After having tacitly encouraged and endorsed the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush peaceful protests against a totalitarian monarchy, the military intervention in a tribally divided Libya indeed has helped highlight a selective approach to the promotion of freedom and the protection of civilians — an approach reinforced by these powers’ continuing support to other Western-backed Arab regimes that have employed disproportionate force to quell popular uprisings or unrest.

The Western powers must be applauded for enunciating the goal to prevent civilian slaughter. The free world cannot stand by while tyrants use military forces to massacre civilians. But any intervention — whether military in nature or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality, if despots are to be stopped from unleashing untrammeled repression.

Ivory Coast — where rampant abuses and widespread killings have led up to one million residents to flee Abidjan, as strongman Laurent Gbagbo openly defies the international community — was clearly a more-pressing case for international intervention than Libya. But because it lacks strategic importance or oil, the exodus of Ivorians into Liberia and the influx of Liberian mercenaries have continued unchecked.

The political upheaval in the Arab world is tectonic in nature, with the potential to transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way that the 1989 Berlin Wall’s fall fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was such a watershed in world history that the most profound geopolitical change has occurred in the period since in the most compressed historical time frame. Yet, with the same regimes and practices firmly entrenched for decades, the Arab world had escaped change.

Now, the tumult in the Arab world represents a belated reaction — a yearning for change that signals a grassroots democratic awakening. But will this awakening lead to democratic empowerment of the masses? After all, there is a wide gulf between democratic awakening and democratic empowerment.

The air of expectancy in the Arab world today parallels the new hope that emerged in the East bloc in 1989. Yet history rarely moves in a linear or predictable fashion. While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition from the present order, it is not clear what it is in transition to.

In 1989, an American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, smugly claimed in an essay that made him famous that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet two decades after the Cold War’s end, the global spread of democracy is still encountering strong head winds, with only a small minority of states in Asia, for example, being true democracies.

In fact, a new bipolar, Cold War-style ideological divide has re-emerged in the world. The rise of authoritarian capitalism — best symbolized by China but embraced by countries as disparate as Malaysia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Qatar in different forms, soft or hard — has created a new international model that competes with (and openly challenges) liberal democracy.

Latest developments indeed are a reminder that democratic empowerment hinges on complex factors in any society — both endogenous and exogenous. Internally, two factors usually hold the key: the role of security forces, and the technological sophistication of a state’s repressive capacity.

In recent weeks, security forces have helped shape developments in different ways in three Arab states. While the popular uprising in Yemen has splintered the security establishment there, with different military factions now in charge of different neighborhoods in the capital San’a, the Bahraini monarchy has employed foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on the predominantly Shiite demonstrators.

Today, the heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s revolution in Egypt thus far has spawned only a direct military takeover, with the 30-year emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain. Although the ruling military council has scheduled parliamentary elections in September, the fact is that is no country has the military voluntarily ceded power without mass protests or other pressures.

As for the second key internal factor, an autocracy’s ability to effectively police cell-phone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet has become as important as a well-oiled security apparatus. The use of social networking sites and instant messaging to organize mass protests has made national capability to enforce stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications critical.

Take China: its internal-security system extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols looking out for troublemakers. In response to Internet calls for people to gather on Sundays at specific sites in Shanghai and Beijing to help launch a jasmine revolution, China has bared a new strategy: pre-emptively flood the protest-designated squares with police to leave no room for protesters.

As the world leader in stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications, China appears strongly placed to block the contagion from the Arab world reaching its shores.

External factors are especially important in small or internally weak countries. Nothing illustrates this better than Bahrain: The House of Saud sent forces into that nation under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests, yet it is civil war-torn Libya that became the target of an international military attack.

The blunt fact is that no nation has contributed more to the spread of global jihad than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, this terror-bankrolling state’s military intervention to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged Afghan regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-scripted arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaida.

Yet, as the CIA conducts covert operations in Libya to aid rebels, Washington is in danger of coming full circle and spurring the rise of a jihadist haven at Europe’s southern gates.

Yet few have examined the costs the free world is made to pay — in the form of rising Islamic extremism and terrorism — for the overpowering U.S. intent to have only puppet Arab regimes, an objective that has fostered an alliance with inimical Wahhabi forces.

At a time when America needs comprehensive domestic renewal, it has slid — under a president who won a Nobel peace prize in his first year in office — into a third war when the other two wars already carry an aggregate $150 billion annual price tag. A quick military victory in Libya is what President Barack Obama badly needs to reverse his declining popularity at home and win re-election.

But even if the Gadhafi regime collapses quickly under the mounting military attacks, re-creating a unified, stable Libya free of Islamist groups may prove difficult. Saddam Hussein’s ouster by the invading U.S. forces did not yield the desired results. Instead, a once-stable, secular Iraq has been destabilized, radicalized and effectively partitioned.

With Libya set to become Obama’s Iraq, a plausible scenario there is a protracted stalemate, coupled with a tribally partitioned country. The paradox is that while aiding Libyan contras even at the risk of creating another Afghanistan, the U.S. is desperately seeking a deal with medieval forces — the Taliban — to stave off certain defeat in the decade-long Afghan war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently rebuked allies for effectively abandoning the Afghan war. Why blame allies when the U.S. itself has abandoned the goal of victory and now seeks only a face-saving exit? And even as the U.S. fires hundreds of missiles at Libyan targets, its policy on Pakistan — the main sanctuary for transnational terrorists — is unraveling fast, with Washington clueless on how to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in a country that is now its largest aid recipient.

In fact, with popular revolts sweeping much of the Arab world, the White House has concluded that the Arab monarchs are likely to survive but the Arab presidents are more likely to fall and, therefore, it is OK for the U.S. to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

The effort to draw specious distinctions between “good” or valuable despots and “bad” or discardable despots is redolent of the manner in which the arming of “good” contras has exacted heavy international costs.

The resort to different standards and practices in the name of promoting human freedom, unfortunately, sends the message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the great powers’ geopolitical interest. This also plays into the hands of the world’s largest, oldest and most-powerful autocracy, China, which has long accused the West of using promotion of democracy as a geopolitical tool.

More fundamentally, the issue is whether there should be a rules-based international order or an order pivoted on military might and driven by the narrow interests of the most powerful.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (Harper Paperbacks) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

The Japan Times: Thursday, April 7, 2011

Geopolitics behind humanitarian cover

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Chellaney

Saving civilians: Murky geopolitics

The mission creep in the Western military intervention in Libya shows how narrow geopolitical interests, even at the risk of creating another Iraq or Afghanistan, are driving a professed humanitarian campaign.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, April 6, 2011

From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers’ military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risk that it could end up creating a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. After having tacitly encouraged and endorsed the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush peaceful protests against a totalitarian monarchy, the military intervention in a tribally divided Libya indeed has helped highlight a selective approach to the promotion of freedom and the protection of civilians — an approach reinforced by these powers’ continuing support to other Western-backed Arab regimes that have employed disproportionate force to quell popular uprisings or unrest.

Ivory Coast — where rampant abuses and widespread killings have led about one million residents to flee Abidjan city alone — was clearly a more pressing case for international intervention than Libya, given strongman Laurent Gbagbo’s months-old defiance of the United Nations writ. But because Ivory Coast lacks strategic importance or oil, the exodus of Ivorians to Liberia and the influx of Liberian mercenaries continued unchecked, triggering civilian massacres.

The political upheaval in the Arab world is tectonic in nature, with the potential to transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way as the 1989 Berlin Wall’s fall fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most-profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But the Arab world, with the same regimes and practices firmly entrenched for decades, had escaped change. Now, the tumult represents a belated reaction — a yearning for change that signals a grassroots democratic awakening.

But will this awakening lead to democratic empowerment of the masses? After all, there is a wide gulf between democratic awakening and democratic empowerment. The air of expectancy in the Arab world today parallels the new hope that emerged in the East bloc in 1989. Yet history rarely moves in a linear or predictable fashion. While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear.

In 1989, an American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, smugly claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet two decades after the Cold War’s end, the global spread of democracy is still encountering strong headwinds.

In recent weeks, security forces have helped shape developments in different ways in three Arab states. While the popular uprising in Yemen has splintered the security establishment there, with different military factions now in charge of different neighbourhoods in the capital Sanaa and the United States seeking to replace the Yemeni president with his No. 2, the Bahraini monarchy has employed foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on the predominantly Shiite demonstrators.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with Hosni Mubarak that helped end that ex-air force commander’s three-decade-long dictatorial rule. The military, long part of the political power structure, had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Today, the heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s revolution in Egypt thus far has spawned only a direct military takeover, with the 30-year emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain. Although the ruling military council has scheduled parliamentary elections in September, the fact is that in no country has the military voluntarily ceded power without mass protests or other pressures.

As for the second key internal factor, an autocracy’s ability to police cellphone calls, electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. The use of social networking sites and instant messaging to organize mass protests has made a nation’s capability to enforce stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications critical.

External factors are especially important in small or internally weak countries. The House of Saud sent forces into Bahrain under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests, yet it is civil war-torn Libya that became the target of a Western military attack. The blunt fact is that no nation has contributed more to the spread of global jihad than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, this terror-bankrolling state’s military intervention to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged Afghan regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-sponsored arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Yet today, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding rebels, Washington is in danger of coming full circle, having failed to learn from past mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, where quick initial military victories proved deceptive.

The broadening of the Libya intervention from a limited, humanitarian mission to an all-out assault on the Libyan military suggests that this war is really about ensuring that the Arab world does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a cold geopolitical calculation: to bottle up or eliminate Muammar Qaddafi so that his regime doesn’t exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. Yet few have examined the costs that democracies are being made to pay — in the form of rising Islamic extremism and terrorism — for the overpowering U.S. intent to have only puppet Arab regimes, an objective that has fostered an alliance with inimical Wahhabi forces.

At a time when America needs comprehensive domestic renewal, it has slid — under a president who won a Nobel peace prize in his first year in office — into a third war when the other two wars already carry an aggregate $150-billion annual price tag. A quick military victory in Libya is what Barack Obama badly needs to reverse his declining popularity at home and win re-election.

But even if the Qaddafi regime collapses quickly under the mounting military attacks, recreating a unified, stable Libya free of Islamist groups may prove difficult. Saddam Hussein’s ouster by the invading U.S. forces did not secure the desired political objectives; rather a once-stable, secular Iraq has been destabilized, radicalized and effectively partitioned. With Libya set to become Obama’s Iraq, a plausible scenario there is a protracted stalemate, coupled with a tribally partitioned country.

The paradox is that while aiding Libyan contras even at the risk of creating another Afghanistan, the U.S. is desperately seeking a deal with medieval forces — the Taliban — to stave off certain defeat in the decade-long Afghan war. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently rebuked allies for effectively abandoning the Afghan war. Why blame allies when the U.S. itself has abandoned the goal of victory and now seeks only a face-saving exit? And even as the U.S. fires hundreds of missiles at Libyan targets, its policy on Pakistan — the main sanctuary for transnational terrorists — is crumbling, with Washington clueless on how to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in a country that is now its largest aid recipient.

Still, with popular revolts sweeping much of the Arab world, the White House has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the U.S. to continue to coddle tyrannical kings. The effort to draw specious distinctions between “good” or valuable despots and “bad” or discardable despots is redolent of the manner in which the arming of “good” contras has exacted heavy international costs.

If tyrants are to be stopped from unleashing untrammelled repression, any international intervention — whether military in nature or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The resort to different standards and practices in the name of promoting human freedom, unfortunately, sends the message that any society’s democratic empowerment is possible only if it jibes with the great powers’ geopolitical interest. The fundamental issue is whether there should be a rules-based international order or an order pivoted on military might and driven by narrow, politically expedient interests of the most powerful.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

Singh’s cricket diplomacy

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Chellaney

Mocking the memory of 26/11

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, April 1, 2011

In a fundamentally competitive world marked by assertive advancement of national interest, India has stood out over the past six decades for not learning from mistakes and continuing to operate on ingenuous premises. Spanish-born US philosopher George Santayana’s saying is particularly applicable to India: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Ad hoc, personality-driven policymaking has long been India’s curse.

Pakistan, although widely perceived to be a failing state, is still able to outwit India diplomatically. It is India, not Pakistan, that has climbed down diplomatically and sought a cricket-inspired thaw in bilateral relations.

In fact, India has again demonstrated its inability to stick to its stated position. The new bonhomie with Pakistan in the form of cricket diplomacy actually mocks the memory of those killed in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist siege that was planned on Pakistani soil. Pakistan not only has done nothing to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice, but has also managed to get India to unconditionally resume dialogue at the highest level.

Singh was clearly motivated by a desire to divert attention away from a series of scandals that have destabilized his government and tarnished his reputation. So desperate was Singh to get a Pakistani leader to come to Mohali that he invited both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. Although Gilani effectively ranks No. 4 in the Pakistani power hierarchy after the Army chief, ISI chief and president, Singh and Sonia Gandhi leaned over backward to treat him as if he were Pakistan’s real power wielder.

Gushy expectations and wishful thinking have long blighted Indian foreign policy. In dealing with Pakistan, a succession of Indian leaders have assumed that the others do what they often do — jettison beliefs, perceptions and policies overnight. Singh’s initiative indeed serves as more evidence for Pakistan that Indian policy is inconsistent and confused and that there are no real costs to be paid for continuing to wage a “war of a thousand cuts” against India.

Few things stir greater public passions in India than cricket and politics. And yet Mohali represented the third occasion when an Indian prime minister blended cricket and politics to court Pakistan since it launched a proxy war against India. It was Rajiv Gandhi who first politicized cricket by playing host to Pakistani military dictator Zia ul-Haq at an India-Pakistan match in Jaipur in 1987. That example prompted Singh to similarly invite another Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, to a match in New Delhi in 2005. Tellingly, only India has practiced cricket diplomacy — that too to propitiate Pakistani rulers.

Singh’s shifting policy on Pakistan has actually drawn encouragement from the record of his sphinx-like predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, under whose leadership there was a troubling lack of both consistency and clarity on how to deal with Pakistan. India’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan between 1998 and 2004 exacted a heavy toll.

In that period, personal rather than professional characteristics defined India’s shifting Pakistan stance, as the policy jarringly traversed through Lahore, Kargil, Kandahar, Agra, Parliament House, Srinagar and Islamabad. In a situation with no parallel in modern world history, much of the Indian military was kept in war-ready position for nearly 10 months by Vajpayee and then demobilized without any results to show.

Vajpayee’s swinging policy pendulum undermined professionalism and institutionalized policy-making, and exposed India’s glaring inadequacy to set and unwaveringly pursue clear, long-term goals. Instead of replacing the cynicism that has now crept into the Indian system with a clearheaded, goal-oriented policy, Singh has gladly chosen to follow in Vajpayee’s footsteps.

In fact, at a time when multiple scandals have engulfed his government, Singh was eager to shift the public spotlight to a big diplomatic initiative. So the entry of India and Pakistan into the World Cup semi-finals came as a godsend opportunity for him, although he is no great cricket fan.

Singh’s unexpected gambit caught everyone by surprise, although impulsive moves (as Sharm el-Sheikh and Havana showed) are usually counterproductive to national interest. In diplomacy, preparatory work is a must.

For example, the ping-pong diplomacy that jumpstarted US-China relations in the early 1970s was part of careful, two-year policy groundwork. Ping-pong with China, in fact, was just a cover for the US to quietly initiate an alliance with Beijing to contain the Soviet Union.

Mohali, by contrast, represented a meeting of beleaguered leaders, bringing together two prime ministers that are politically wounded at home. The Indian and Pakistani governments are both battered by allegations of corruption, mismanagement and poor administration. Indeed, there is little prospect of any kind of breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations, given that Pakistan’s real power broker — army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — is considered one of the most anti-India generals in his country’s history.

Peace on the subcontinent thus remains as far off as ever. Dialogue between the two countries, in any case, is founded on conflicting expectations. India’s premise is that the process of dialogue will persuade Pakistan to cease sending armed terrorists into India and start building good-neighbourly ties. Pakistan, in contrast, has viewed the process as a means to nudge India to ‘make progress on Kashmir,’ a euphemism for Indian concessions.

Singh, for his part, has refused to learn from his past blunders at Sharm el-Sheikh (where he included Baluchistan) and Havana (where he turned the terror sponsor into a fellow victim of terror by setting up the infamous Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism). But if he thought he could use the Mohali hoopla to distract the Indian public from the swirling scandals, he is likely to be disappointed. No political stunt can help defuse the public anger in India over mega-corruption.

False Promise of Nuclear Energy

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Chellaney

Nuclear power no solution

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, March 23, 2011

Just when nuclear energy had come to be seen as part of the solution to energy and global-warming challenges, the serial reactor incidents in Fukushima have dealt a severe blow to the world nuclear-power industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms.

Even before the Fukushima No. 1 plant become the site of the world’s worst accident since Chernobyl, the share of nuclear power in worldwide electricity production had been stagnant for a quarter-century. In fact, after being constant at 16 to 17 percent from 1986 to 2005, the contribution of nuclear power in global electricity actually has dropped to 14 percent since then.

International studies have shown that nuclear power, although a 50-year-old mature technology, has demonstrated the slowest “rate of learning” in comparison to other energy sources, including newer technologies such as wind power and combined-cycle gas turbines. Nuclear power remains highly capital-intensive. It has high up-front capital costs, long lead times for construction and commissioning, and drawn-out amortization periods that put off private investors.

The industry’s trumpeting of a global nuclear renaissance thus has been premature. But after Fukushima, the attraction of nuclear power is likely to dim worldwide. Inherently risky, water-intensive and vulnerable to natural disasters, nuclear-power plants will now face greater public scrutiny.

Many nuclear-power reactors are located along coastlines because they are highly water-intensive. Yet natural disasters like storms, hurricanes, and tsunami are becoming more common, owing to climate change, which will also cause a rise in ocean levels, making seaside reactors even more vulnerable.

For example, many nuclear-power plants located along the British coast are just a few meters above sea level. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew caused significant damage at the Turkey Point nuclear-power plant on Biscayne Bay, Florida, but, fortunately, not to any critical system.

All energy generators, including coal- and gas-fired plants, make major demands on water resources. But nuclear power requires even more. Light-water reactors (LWRs) like those in Japan and the United States, which use water as their main coolant, produce most of the world’s nuclear power. The huge quantities of local water that LWRs use for their operations become hot-water outflows, which are pumped back into rivers, lakes and oceans.

Because reactors located inland put serious strain on local freshwater resources — including greater damage to plant life and fish — water-stressed countries that are not landlocked try to find suitable seashore sites. But whether located inland or on a coast, nuclear power is vulnerable to the likely effects of climate change.

As global warming brings about a rise in temperatures and ocean levels, inland reactors will increasingly contribute to, and be affected by, water shortages. During the 2003 heat wave in France, operations at 17 nuclear reactors had to be scaled back or stopped because of rapidly rising temperatures in rivers and lake.

Paradoxically, the very conditions that made it impossible for the nuclear industry to deliver full power in Europe in 2003 and 2006 created peak demand for electricity, owing to the increased use of air conditioning.

Indeed, during the 2003 heat wave, Electricite de France, which operates 58 reactors — the majority on ecologically sensitive rivers like the Loire — was compelled to buy power on the European spot market. The state-owned EDF, which normally exports power, ended up paying 10 times the price of domestic power, incurring a financial cost of 300 million euro.

Similarly, water and heat problems caused by a heat wave in 2006 forced Germany, Spain, and France to take some nuclear power plants offline and reduce operations at others. Highlighting the vulnerability of nuclear power to environmental change or extreme-weather patterns, in 2006 plant operators in Western Europe also secured exemptions from environmental regulations so that they could discharge overheated water into natural ecosystems — an action that affected fisheries.

France likes to showcase its nuclear power industry, which supplies 78 percent of the country’s electricity. But such is the nuclear industry’s water intensity that EDF withdraws up to 19 billion cubic meters of water per year from rivers and lakes, or roughly half of France’s total freshwater consumption. Freshwater scarcity is a growing international challenge, and the vast majority of countries are in no position to approve of such highly water-intensive inland-based energy systems.

Seaside nuclear plants do not face similar problems in hot conditions because ocean waters do not heat up anywhere near as rapidly as rivers or lakes. And because they rely on seawater, they cause no freshwater scarcity. But as the Fukushima reactors have shown, coastal nuclear-power plants confront more serious dangers.

When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, it flooded India’s Madras Atomic Power Station. But the reactor core could be kept in a safe shutdown mode because the electrical systems had been installed on higher ground than the plant itself. But unlike Fukushima, the Indian plant did not bear the direct tsunami impact.

The central dilemma of nuclear power in an increasingly water-stressed world is that it is a water guzzler, yet vulnerable to water. And decades after Lewis L. Strauss, the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Agency, claimed that nuclear power would become “too cheap to meter,” the nuclear industry still subsists on munificent government subsidies.

While the appeal of nuclear power has declined considerably in the West, it has grown among the so-called nuclear newcomers, which brings with it new proliferation and safety challenges. Moreover, with nearly two-fifths of the world’s population living within 100 km of a coastline, finding suitable seaside sites for initiation or expansion of a nuclear-power program is no longer easy.

Without a breakthrough in fusion energy or greater commercial advances in breeder (and thorium) reactors, nuclear power is in no position to lead the world out of the fossil-fuel age. In fact, Fukushima is likely to stunt the appeal of nuclear power in a way similar to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident and the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Nuclear Proliferation” (Longman, 1993) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

The Japan Times: March 23, 2011
(C) All rights reserved

Bribes for Nuclear Deal

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Chellaney

Corrupt means taint the nuclear deal

The new bribery revelations, a rigged process to import reactors and safety-related concerns must lead to the long-blocked scrutiny of the nuclear deal by Parliament.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, March 23, 2011

The world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl raises troubling questions about India’s plans for a huge expansion of its nuclear power programme through reactor imports. Given its low per-capita energy consumption, India must generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it needs more nuclear-generated power. The real issue thus is safe and cost-competitive nuclear power.

What is disconcerting about India’s plans for massive imports is that they are not part of a well-thought-out strategy but a quid pro quo to the United States, France and Russia for bringing the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear deal to fruition, including through a Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver. For example, while keeping Parliament in the dark, the government faxed a letter to U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns on September 10, 2008 — just hours before the White House sent the deal to the U.S. Congress for ratification — committing India to import a minimum of 10,000MW of nuclear-generating capacity from the United States. New nuclear plans had to be prepared to accommodate the political commitments already made.

As the WikiLeaks’ revelations published by The Hindu underscore, the U.S. has a big stake in the nuclear deal and went to unusual lengths to drum up support in India and ensure the outcome it desired. And although the deal is loaded with largely one-sided and irrevocable conditions for India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked his premiership on getting the deal through.

The Wikileaks’ disclosures over the cash-for-votes scandal during the consummation process only confirm the role mucky money played in lubricating the deal. Now big money is influencing the opaque contract making.

Those who pushed the deal through without building national consensus or permitting parliamentary scrutiny now seem too invested in this deal to objectively gauge long-term safety or the cost competitiveness of reactor imports. One indication of this is the unabashed manner in which a nuclear park has been exclusively reserved — without any competitive-bidding process — for each of the four preferred foreign vendors. Yet after Fukushima, several major safety concerns stand out:

■India is committed to importing reactor models that are yet to be operated in any country, including state-owned Areva’s 1630MW European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) and the General Electric-Hitachi’s 1520MW Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), which is still to receive the final U.S. design certification.

There is no justification for importing untried reactor models. In the 1960s, GE sold India the first two prototypes of its Boiling Water Reactor (BWR), whose designs it later supplied for all six reactors at the now-crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant. India had little option then because nuclear power was relatively new. The GE-built Tarapur plant faced important operating and safety issues, in part because the Americans cut off supply of even safety-related replacement parts in response to the Pokharan I test. Today the rush to buy untried foreign-reactor technology is simply indefensible.

It is only after the Fukushima nuclear crisis unfolded that India’s nuclear chief belatedly acknowledged the need for an earthquake- and tsunami-related safety evaluation of Areva’s EPR design. Why wasn’t this done before committing India to buy the EPR prototype?

■The drive to build energy “security” by importing foreign fuel-dependent reactors — that too without transparency, open bidding and public accountability — is nothing but a money-spending boondoggle, with the potential to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks for the corrupt.

In an openly manipulated process, price negotiations are taking place only after each of the four chosen foreign vendors has been gifted an exclusive seaside nuclear park to build reactors. What bargaining power are the authorities left with when they have already reserved each park for a particular firm?

■With the rise of the corporate nuclear lobby, the line between the seller and the buyer has blurred. The nuclear deal was pushed through by the Prime Minister’s Office with the aid of some serving and retired nuclear officials, private-sector companies attracted to nuclear business, and interested foreign governments and vendors. The very entities and consultants that are set to reap major commercial gains helped build the dubious case for massive reactor imports by India.

Now an incestuous and unethical relationship exists between the buyer and seller, underscored by the moves to place initial import contracts worth more than $10 billion without any competitive bidding. It may require the Supreme Court’s intervention to stop this brazen cronyism, or else a 2G-style scam would likely unfold, but with long-term safety ramifications.

■To compound matters, the line between the regulator and the operator has also blurred. And the secrecy enveloping the nuclear military programme has unwarrantably been extended to a purely commercial sector — nuclear power.

Structurally, the national regulator, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, is in no position to act independently because, like the operator, it is under the Department of Atomic Energy. More worrying, however, is the manner in which the Board has become the handmaiden of the political agenda set in New Delhi.

Before embarking on a major expansion of its program, shouldn’t India first create a strong, truly independent nuclear regulator?

■Worse still, the planned import of four different types of new Light Water Reactor (LWR) technology will make India’s nuclear-power complex the most diverse in the world. Technological diversity may be good to obviate reliance on one supplier. But the wide-ranging diversity India is getting into will make its safety responsibilities extremely arduous and complex, given the multiplicity of reactor designs it already has in place.

It takes a long time to create teams of experienced safety engineers for any reactor model. But when a particular reactor model is still not in operation anywhere, training of engineers cannot even begin. By contrast, India has immense experience in building, operating and safeguarding indigenous CANDU-style reactors.

■The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima Daiichi reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other. With a flareup at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures, and other radiation leaks.

This seriously calls into question India’s decision to approve the construction of six and more large reactors at each new nuclear park. The plans to build clusters of reactors must now be abandoned.

■At Fukushima, the spent-fuel rods — holding most of the highly radioactive uranium at the site — have proved a bigger radiation problem than the reactor cores. This shines a spotlight on the spent-fuel challenges at the sister but older plant in Tarapur, where the discharged fuel has been accumulating for over four decades because the U.S. has refused to either take it or allow India to reprocess it.

The mounting Tarapur spent-fuel stockpile poses greater safety and environmental hazards than probably at any other plant in the world. The spent-fuel rods — unlike the reactors — have no containment structure, and they endanger public safety in India’s densely-populated commercial heartland.

The spent-fuel bundles are kept under water in bays at a special facility at Tarapur. But such temporary pools have proven Fukushima’s Achilles heel.

The cost to move the spent-fuel rods in secure dry casks to a faraway desert area will be prohibitive. India already has borne high storage costs at Tarapur. Those costs should not only be billed to Washington, but India must exert pressure on America to agree to the immediate spent-fuel reprocessing under international safeguards — the only viable option to contain the risks.

■India’s nuclear accident-liability legislation has seriously burdened the Indian taxpayer by capping the liability of foreign suppliers at a modest level. With the foreign vendors also freed from the task of producing electricity at marketable rates, the taxpayer is to subsidize the high-priced electricity generated. For the foreign vendors, there is no downside risk; only profits to reap. Yet GE and Westinghouse are unhappy with the state operator’s right of recourse.

The legislation was passed after the BJP — a party too compromised to be able to withstand pressures — cut a deal with the government. But after Fukushima, it is important to tighten some provisions of the legislation, which goes beyond U.S. law to channel both economic liability and legal liability to the state and abridge victims’ legal rights.

More broadly, before signing multibillion-dollar contracts, India must first formulate a coherent nuclear-power policy that also addresses safety issues. After all, Dr. Singh is seeking to take India from a largely indigenous capacity to a predominantly import-based programme by implicitly jettisoning Dr. Homi Bhabha’s vision and strategy. Not only is the goal of a self-reliant thorium fuel cycle now pie in the sky, but India is also set to become dependent on foreign suppliers even for critical safety-related replacement parts.

Actually, the corrupt means employed in engineering the nuclear deal must now lead to its long-blocked scrutiny by Parliament. A larger question haunting the country is whether it has institutionally become too corrupt to be able to effectively uphold nuclear safety in the long run — a concern reinforced by the troubled state of internal security, high incidence of terrorism and politicization of the nuclear establishment.

A blow to the global nuclear-power industry

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Chellaney

Fukushima blast shows nuclear is not the answer

Inherently risky, water-intensive and unreliable — we must admit we cannot depend on nuclear power

Brahma Chellaney
guardian.co.uk, 15 March 2011

The troubles of the Fukushima nuclear-power plant — and other reactors — in earthquake-hit Japan have dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms that have been trumpeting a nuclear-power renaissance.

But the risks that seaside reactors like Fukushima face from natural disasters are well-known. Indeed, they became evident six years ago, when the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 inundated India’s second-largest nuclear complex, shutting down the Madras power station.

Many nuclear-power plants are located along coastlines, because they are highly water-intensive. Yet natural disasters such as storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis are becoming more common, owing to climate change, which will also cause a rise in ocean levels, making seaside reactors even more vulnerable.

For example, many nuclear-power plants located along the British coast are just a few metres above sea level. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew caused significant damage at the Turkey Point nuclear-power plant on Biscayne Bay, Florida, but, fortunately, not to any critical systems.

All energy generators, including coal- and gas-fired plants, make major demands on water resources. But nuclear power requires even more. Light-water reactors (LWRs) like those at Fukushima, which use water as a primary coolant, produce most of the world’s nuclear power. The huge quantities of local water that LWRs consume for their operations become hot-water outflows, which are pumped back into rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Because reactors located inland put serious strain on local freshwater resources — including greater damage to plant life and fish — water-stressed countries that are not landlocked try to find suitable seashore sites. But, whether located inland or on a coast, nuclear power is vulnerable to the likely effects of climate change.

As global warming brings about a rise in average temperatures and ocean levels, inland reactors will increasingly contribute to, and be affected by, water shortages. During the record-breaking 2003 heatwave in France, operations at 17 commercial nuclear reactors had to be scaled back or stopped because of rapidly rising temperatures in rivers and lakes. Spain’s reactor at Santa María de Garoña was shut for a week in July 2006 after high temperatures were recorded in the Ebro river.

Paradoxically, then, the very conditions that made it impossible for the nuclear industry to deliver full power in Europe in 2003 and 2006 created peak demand for electricity, as use of air-conditioning increased.

During the 2003 heat wave, Électricité de France, which operates 58 reactors — the majority on ecologically sensitive rivers such as the Loire — was compelled to buy power from neighboring countries on the European spot market. The state-owned EDF, which normally exports power, ended up paying 10 times the price of domestic power, incurring a financial cost of €300m.

Similarly, although the 2006 European heatwave was less intense, water and heat problems forced Germany, Spain, and France to take some nuclear power plants offline and reduce operations at others. Highlighting the vulnerability of nuclear power to environmental change or extreme-weather patterns, in 2006 plant operators in western Europe also secured exemptions from regulations that would have prevented them from discharging overheated water into natural ecosystems, affecting fisheries.

France likes to showcase its nuclear power industry, which supplies 78% of the country’s electricity. But such is the nuclear industry’s water intensity that EDF withdraws up to 19bn cubic metres of water per year from rivers and lakes, or roughly half of France’s total freshwater consumption. Freshwater scarcity is a growing international challenge, and the vast majority of countries are in no position to approve of such highly water-intensive inland-based energy systems.

Nuclear plants located by the sea do not face similar problems in hot conditions, because ocean waters do not heat up anywhere near as rapidly as rivers or lakes. And, because they rely on seawater, they cause no freshwater scarcity. But as Japan’s reactors have shown, coastal nuclear-power plants confront more serious dangers.

When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, the Madras reactor’s core could be kept in safe shutdown condition because the electrical systems had been ingeniously installed on higher ground than the plant itself. And, unlike Fukushima, which bore a direct impact, Madras was far away from the epicenter of the earthquake that unleashed the tsunami.

The central dilemma of nuclear power in an increasingly water-stressed world is that it is a water-guzzler, yet vulnerable to water. And, decades after Lewis L Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Agency, claimed that nuclear power would become “too cheap to meter”, the nuclear industry everywhere still subsists on government subsidies.

While the appeal of nuclear power has declined considerably in the west, it has grown among the so-called “nuclear newcomers”, which brings with it new challenges, including concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons. Moreover, with nearly two-fifths of the world’s population living within 100km of a coastline, finding suitable seaside sites for initiation or expansion of a nuclear-power programme is no longer easy.

Fukushima is likely to stunt the appeal of nuclear power in a way similar to the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 did, not to mention the far more severe meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. If the fallout from those incidents is a reliable guide, however, nuclear power’s advocates will eventually be back.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The Murky Politics of Nuclear Power in India

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Chellaney

Ghosts return to haunt nuclear deal

From the resurrected cash-for-votes scandal to a rigged process favouring four foreign vendors — and from new safety concerns to the special legislation that caps the foreign suppliers’ accident liability by burdening the Indian taxpayer — the nuclear deal’s future looks more troubled than ever

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, March 18, 2011

The unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan actually bears a distinct U.S. imprint: All six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were designed by General Electric. The prototype of this reactor model — known as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Mark I — was supplied to India by GE, which built the twin-reactor Tarapur station in the 1960s on a turnkey basis. Tarapur, one of the world’s oldest operating nuclear plants, has some of the same risk factors that played a role at Fukushima.

Since the Fukushima crisis erupted, several countries have announced steps to scale back or review nuclear power, with Germany temporarily shutting down seven of its pre-1980 plants and Switzerland suspending plans to build and replace nuclear reactors. Even China, known for its lack of respect for safety issues, has announced that it is suspending new plant approvals until it could strengthen safety standards.

In contrast, New Delhi’s response has been to launch a public-relations campaign to say Indian nuclear plants are safe and secure. The very persons who blurred the line between fact and fiction in the debate over the controversial Indo-U.S. nuclear deal are again engaging in casuistry.

A smarter, wiser and more-credible course for authorities would be to acknowledge that, given the gravity of the Fukushima crisis, India must review its nuclear-power policy and systems to ensure that long-term risks of nuclear accidents are contained.

To be sure, India — given its low per capita energy consumption — needs to generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it must tap all sources of power, including safe and cost-competitive nuclear power.

The consequences of a nuclear accident in a large, densely populated country like India are going to be greater than in an island nation such as Japan. The economics of reactor imports is also a key issue in India because the taxpayer must not be burdened with more subsidies.

Yet those who pushed the nuclear deal through without building a national consensus are now too invested in that deal to be able to take an objective view of cost competitiveness and long-term safety. One indication of that has been the brazen manner in which a nuclear park has been exclusively reserved, without inviting bids, for each of the four chosen foreign vendors.

The Wikileaks disclosures over the cash-for-votes scandal only confirm what has been well known — the role of big money in lubricating the nuclear deal. Now big money is influencing the opaque contract making.

Nevertheless India’s nuclear safety — and the wisdom of a massive import-based expansion of the nuclear power programme — will now come under closer scrutiny. In fact, given the way India handled the Bhopal gas catastrophe that killed at least 22,000, Fukushima holds important implications. Although the exact sequence of events at Fukushima is still not clear, consider some obvious nuclear dangers in India:

■The chain of incidents engulfing all six Fukushima reactors was triggered by their close proximity to each other. With a flare-up at one reactor affecting systems at another, Japan has ended up with serial blasts, fires, spent-fuel exposures and other radiation leaks at the Fukushima complex. The lesson: a string of events can quickly overwhelm emergency preparedness and safety redundancies built into reactor systems.

This seriously calls into question India’s decision to approve construction of six to 12 large reactors at each new nuclear park.

■The Fukushima spent-fuel fire and other problems shine a spotlight on the spent-fuel challenges at the sister plant in Tarapur, where the discharged fuel has been accumulating for over four decades because the U.S. has refused to either take it or allow India to reprocess it. At the so-called Spent Fuel Storage Facility, the Tarapur spent-fuel bundles are kept under water in specially engineered bays.

This mounting, highly radioactive spent fuel poses major space problems and safety and environmental hazards that are greater than at any other plant in the world. In fact, the spent-fuel rods — unlike the reactor — have no containment structure. Yet New Delhi has shied away from exerting pressure on Washington to resolve an issue that threatens environmental and public safety in India’s commercial heartland.

■The operating license of the aging Tarapur BWRs has been periodically extended by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Despite safety and equipment upgrades at Tarapur, the fact is that first-generation reactors have generally some dangerous weaknesses. In fact, much before the Fukushima incidents, several U.S. experts had warned that this BWR model was susceptible to explosion and containment failure.

The power shortages in the Mumbai area have influenced the decision to keep the two BWRs in operation up to 2030. But in the U.S., the utility running a BWR plant of the same vintage as in Tarapur — at Oyster Creek in New Jersey — recently decided to close it in 2019. And the Vermont State Senate last year voted to stop the less-old Vermont Yankee BWR plant from operating past next year.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

Fukushima nos recuerda las debilidades y amenazas de las centrales nucleares en el mundo

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Chellaney

TRIBUNA: BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Moraleja nuclear de Japón
Muchas centrales nucleares están situadas en las costas, porque necesitan una gran cantidad de agua. Sin embargo, los desastres naturales y el cambio climático hacen que resulten aún más vulnerables
BRAHMA CHELLANEY
El Pais, 17/03/2011

Los problemas de la central nuclear de Fukushima -y de otros reactores- en el noroeste de Japón han asestado un duro golpe a la industria nuclear mundial, poderoso cartel de menos de una docena de importantes empresas de propiedad u orientación estatal que han estado pregonando un renacimiento de la energía nuclear.

Pero ya se conocen perfectamente los riesgos que corren los reactores costeros, como el de Fukushima, a consecuencia de desastres naturales. De hecho, resultaron evidentes hace seis años, cuando el maremoto habido en el océano Índico en diciembre de 2004 inundó el segundo complejo nuclear en importancia de India, con lo que quedó desconectada la central eléctrica de Madrás.

Muchas centrales nucleares están situadas a lo largo de las costas, porque en ellas se utiliza una gran cantidad de agua. Sin embargo, desastres naturales como las tormentas, los huracanes y los maremotos están resultando más frecuentes a causa del cambio climático, que también causará una elevación del nivel de los océanos, con lo que los reactores costeros resultarán aún más vulnerables.

Por ejemplo, muchas centrales nucleares situadas a lo largo de la costa británica están a tan solo unos metros por encima del nivel del mar. En 1992, el huracán Andrew causó importantes daños en la central nuclear de Turkey Point, en la bahía de Biscayne (Florida), pero no así, por fortuna, a ninguno de los sistemas decisivos para su funcionamiento.

Todos los generadores de energía, incluidas las centrales alimentadas con carbón o gas, requieren grandes cantidades de recursos hídricos, pero la energía nuclear más aún. Los reactores de agua ligera, como los de Fukushima, que utilizan el agua como refrigerante primordial, son los que producen la mayor parte de la energía nuclear. Las enormes cantidades de agua local que dichos reactores consumen para sus operaciones pasan a ser corrientes de agua caliente, que se bombean a los ríos, los lagos y los océanos.

Como los reactores situados en zonas del interior ejercen una grave presión sobre los recursos de agua dulce, incluidos daños mayores a la vida vegetal y a los peces, los países que tienen litoral y padecen escasez de agua procuran buscar emplazamientos costeros adecuados, pero, ya tengan o no litoral, la energía nuclear es vulnerable a los probables efectos del cambio climático.

A medida que el calentamiento planetario provoque un aumento de las temperaturas medias y del nivel de los océanos, los reactores situados en el interior contribuirán cada vez más a la escasez de agua y resultarán afectados por ella. Durante la ola de calor sin precedentes de 2003 en Francia, hubo que reducir o detener las operaciones en 17 reactores nucleares comerciales a causa del rápido aumento de las temperaturas de los ríos y los lagos. En julio de 2006, hubo que desconectar el reactor de Santa María de Garoña (España) durante una semana, después de que se registraran altas temperaturas en el río Ebro.

Así, pues, las propias condiciones que en 2003 y 2006 impidieron a la industria nuclear suministrar toda la energía necesaria en Europa fueron, paradójicamente, las que crearon una demanda máxima de electricidad a causa de un aumento de la utilización del aire acondicionado.

De hecho, durante la ola de calor de 2003, Électricité de France, que tiene 58 reactores en funcionamiento -la mayoría de ellos en ríos ecológicamente delicados, como el Loira- se vio obligada a comprar electricidad a los países vecinos en el mercado europeo al contado. EDF, empresa de propiedad estatal que normalmente exporta electricidad, acabó pagándola a un precio 10 veces mayor, con un coste financiero de 300 millones de euros.

Asimismo, aunque la ola de calor europea de 2006 fue menos intensa, los problemas de agua y calor obligaron a España, Alemania y Francia a desconectar algunas centrales nucleares y reducir las operaciones de otras. En 2006 las empresas propietarias de centrales nucleares de Europa occidental consiguieron también exenciones para incumplir la reglamentación que les habría impedido descargar agua recalentada en los ecosistemas naturales, lo que afectó a la pesca.

Francia gusta de exhibir su industria de energía nuclear, que suministra el 78% de la electricidad del país, pero la intensidad del consumo de agua de dicha industria es tal, que EDF retira todos los años 19.000 millones de metros cúbicos de agua de los ríos y lagos, es decir, la mitad, aproximadamente, del consumo total de agua dulce de Francia. La escasez de agua dulce es una amenaza internacional cada vez mayor y la inmensa mayoría de los países no están en condiciones de aprobar el emplazamiento en el interior de semejantes sistemas energéticos que hacen un consumo tan elevado de agua.

Las centrales nucleares situadas junto al mar no afrontan problemas similares en situaciones de calor, porque el agua de los océanos no se calienta ni mucho menos con la misma rapidez que la de los ríos o los lagos y, al contar con el agua del mar, no provocan escasez de agua dulce, pero, como han demostrado los reactores del Japón, las centrales nucleares costeras afrontan peligros más graves.

Cuando el núcleo del reactor de Madrás resultó afectado por el maremoto del océano Índico, se pudo mantenerlo a salvo desconectado, porque se había tenido la previsión de instalar los sistemas eléctricos en un terreno más alto que la propia central y, a diferencia de lo ocurrido en Fukushima, que recibió un impacto directo, la central de Madrás estaba alejada del epicentro del terremoto que desencadenó el maremoto.

El dilema fundamental de la energía nuclear en un mundo cada vez más afectado por la escasez de agua es el de que necesita enormes cantidades de agua y, sin embargo, es vulnerable ante el agua y, decenios después de que Lewis L. Strauss, el presidente del Organismo de Energía Atómica de Estados Unidos, afirmara que la energía nuclear llegaría a ser “demasiado barata para medirla con contador”, la industria nuclear sigue subsistiendo en todas partes gracias a muníficas subvenciones estatales.

Aunque el atractivo de la energía nuclear ha disminuido considerablemente en Occidente, ha aumentado entre los llamados “recién llegados nucleares”, con el acompañamiento de nuevas amenazas, incluida la preocupación por la proliferación de armas nucleares. Además, cuando casi dos quintas partes de la población mundial viven a menos de 100 kilómetros de una costa, ya no resulta fácil encontrar emplazamientos costeros adecuados para iniciar o ampliar un programa de energía nuclear.

Es probable que lo sucedido en Fukushima afecte irremisiblemente a la energía nuclear de forma similar al accidente en la central de Three Mile Island en Pensilvania en 1979, por no hablar de la fusión, mucho más grave, del reactor de Chernóbil en 1986. Sin embargo, a juzgar por lo sucedido después de aquellos accidentes, los defensores de la energía nuclear acabarán volviendo a la carga.

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney