India’s cosseted nuclear programme has been shielded from parliamentary scrutiny and CAG audit. So, it is hard to reliably determine whether India’s sole thermonuclear test fizzled out quickly or was a success, however modest. But some facts speak for themselves.

One telling fact is that more than 11 years later, India has still not weaponized the thermonuclear technology, even though the test in 1998 was supposed to have catapulted the country into the big-power league. The thermonuclear test, obviously, was not intended merely as a technology demonstrator. Therefore, it is legitimate to ask: What has been the security benefit for the country from that test?

Even more glaring is another fact: More than 35 years after Pokharan I, India stands out as a reluctant and tentative nuclear power, still lacking even a barely minimal deterrent capability against China. Given the growing military asymmetry with China, a proven and weaponized Indian thermonuclear capability, backed by long-range missiles, is critical to deter the assertive and ambitious northern neighbour. But today, India does not have a single Beijing-reachable missile in deployment.

Had India developed and deployed a minimal but credible nuclear-weapons capability, China would not have dared to mess with it. But the increasing Chinese bellicosity, reflected in rising border incursions and the hardening of Beijing’s stance on territorial disputes, suggests China is only getting emboldened against a weaker India.

Consider yet another unpalatable fact: No country has struggled longer to build a minimal deterrent or paid heavier international costs for its nuclear programme than India.  The history of India’s nuclear-weapons programme is actually a record of how it helped establish multilateral technology controls. Pokharan I, for example, impelled the secret formation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). India’s space programme helped give birth to the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Yet, before it has built a credible minimal deterrent, India came full circle when it entered into a civilian nuclear deal with the US and secured an exemption from the NSG last year to import high-priced commercial nuclear power reactors and fuel. In doing so, it had to accept nonproliferation conditions that aim to stunt its nuclear-deterrent development.

Through this deal, India is seeking to replicate in the energy sector the very mistake it has made on armaments. Now the world’s largest arms importer, India spends more than $6 billion every year on importing conventional weapons, some  of dubious value, while it neglects to build its own armament-production base.

Conventional weapons simply cannot deter a nuclear adversary. Deterrence against a nuclear foe can only be built on nuclear capability, especially a second-strike capability that can survive the enemy’s first strike to inflict massive retaliation.

More broadly, Indian policymakers have yet to recognize that no nation can be a major power without three attributes: A high level of autonomous and innovative technological capability; a capacity to meet basic defence needs indigenously; and a capability to project power far beyond its borders, especially through intercontinental-range weaponry. India is deficient in all the three areas.

It is not an accident that all the countries armed with intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are permanent members of the UN Security Council. But rather than aim for a technological leap through a crash ICBM programme, India remains interminably stuck in the Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) stage.

Against this background, the latest claim that the 1998 thermonuclear test performed well under par can only further damage the credibility of India’s nuclear posture. The controversy over the thermonuclear test, however, is nothing new. No sooner had the test been conducted than a former head of the Indian nuclear programme, P.K. Iyengar, questioned official claims of success.

In such a setting — with critics within and outside the country questioning the success of the test — India must be ready to convincingly re-demonstrate its thermonuclear capability, should a propitious international opportunity arise from a nuclear test conducted by another power. Nuclear deterrence, after all, is like beauty: It lies in the eyes of the beholder. It is not what India’s nuclear establishment claims but what outsiders, especially regional adversaries, believe that constitutes deterrence (or the lack of it).

Brahma Chellaney is a nuclear and strategic affairs expert.

Substandard Capabilities

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, July 29, 2009

In India, no technological advance is too small to be celebrated nationally. The launch of a nuclear-powered submarine for underwater trials is an important step forward in India’s quest for a minimal but credible nuclear deterrent. But India still has a long way to go. After all, it will be some years before India can deploy its first nuclear sub armed with sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Yet the mere flooding of the dry dock to begin the harbour trials of INS Arihant became an occasion for national jubilation, with the prime minister present at the event to hail it as “a historic milestone in the country’s defence preparedness.” It is as if India already has joined the club of nations with nuclear subs.

To be sure, nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarines (known in American argot as SSBNs) can help India bridge the yawning gap in its deterrent against China. Moreover, only such subs can underpin India’s no-first use (NFU) posture. For an NFU to be credible, the country needs a second-strike capability. If a country does not have the capability to retaliate after surviving an enemy’s first strike on its nuclear assets, a NFU would make no sense. Nuclear-propelled subs, with their high endurance, serve as a stealthy, least-vulnerable and cost-effective launch-pad for nuclear weapons. Deterrence can be achieved with a lesser number of missiles at sea than if they are land-based.

Still, some harsh facts stick out. India has paid a tremendous international price for its nuclear programme without reaping the kind of security benefits it should have. And the gaps in its deterrent posture remain glaring. Indeed, among nuclear-armed states, India stands out as the country with the slowest-rate of progress in deterrent development. Can it be forgotten that India’s nuclear programme is the oldest in Asia and that its first nuclear test happened more than 35 years ago? Yet, India’s “credible minimal deterrent,” far from being credible, has yet to deliver minimalist capabilities against China. India still does not have a single deployed missile of any type that can reach Beijing.

Let’s face it: No country in history has struggled longer to build a minimal deterrent than India. There are multiple reasons for that, including the absence of a resolute political leadership, the country’s accountability-at-a-discount culture, Western technology sanctions, the non-existence of independent oversight or audit, creeping politicization of topmost scientists and the bureaucratization of strategic establishments. Also, unlike Britain, China, Israel and Pakistan, India received no assistance from another nuclear power and has had to develop everything indigenously while facing a rising tide of technology controls.

In the absence of a reliable nuclear deterrent, India remains irredeemably dependent on imports of conventional weapons, spending more than $5 billion annually on such purchases, some of questionable utility. Among important states, India is the only one that relies on imports to meet basic-defence needs, to the extent that it has become the world’s top arms buyer.

Yet that record has not stopped India from being boastful. The start of Arihant’s underwater trials ought to have been a quiet affair, not a national event. After all, 11 years after a thermonuclear test, that technology is yet to be weaponized. Take another example. The Agni 3 has still to be deployed, yet the DRDO chief held a news conference earlier this year to brag about the likely first test next year of the Agni 5, which is still at the design stage. The press then went totally gaga, portraying the Agni 5, with a maximum range of 5,000 kilometres, as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) when, in reality, it is just another intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) in India’s agonizingly incremental missile-development path.

Which other country in the world advertises every technological move or brags about a missile still on the drawing board? To the contrary, the long-standing tradition in the nuclear world is to quietly develop and deploy capabilities. India is the lone exception to that tradition.

Instead of launching a crash ICBM project drawing on the intercontinental-range capabilities of the space programme, India remains stuck in the IRBM arena, where its frog-like paces have taken it — two decades after the first Agni test — to Agni-3, a non-strategic system. In fact, if everything goes well, India’s first SSBN will be deployed with a non-strategic weapon — a 700-kilometer SLBM under development. That would further underpin the regional and stunted character of India’s deterrent.

Of the three technologies — nuclear propulsion, SLBM and ICBM — the most complex are the first two. Developing a nuclear-weapon-strike capability from under water is far more difficult than firing missiles from the ground. Yet, while seeking to develop an SLBM-armed nuclear sub, India still does not have an ICBM project, even on the drawing board. India wants to go down in world history as the first nation to deploy an SSBN without having developed an ICBM. “Incredible India” indeed.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/OPINION/Edit-Page/Top-Article-Substandard-Capabilities/articleshow/4830783.cms

Elaborate, dual charade tumbles out in the open

Pakistan’s terror-exporting and nuclear-smuggling record has come full circle with its non-inquiry in the name of an inquiry into the Mumbai attacks and the release of A.Q. Khan

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, February 11, 2009

A key parallel can be drawn between the most dangerous nuclear-trafficking operation in history (innocuously labelled “the A.Q. Khan affair”) and Pakistani-fomented terrorism against India. In both cases, Islamabad has doggedly sought to shield the role of state institutions by pinning the blame on a few individuals. But neither occurrence could have been possible without the active involvement of its military and intelligence.

Quasi-failed Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect. While the Pakistani nuclear-weapons programme was founded on illicitly acquired blueprints and items from overseas, with Abdul Qadeer Khan as the spearhead, the instrument of transnational terrorism was fashioned by dictator Zia ul-Haq. But so addictive is illicit activity that the clandestine nuclear importers later took to covert exports, while some of the military-raised terrorist figures branched off into independent enterprise.

Little surprise thus that U.S. President Bill Clinton called Pakistan “the most dangerous place on earth,” while his successor, George W. Bush, said “this is wilder than the Wild West.” Yet this artificially created country, still in search of a national identity, has had a congenital problem facing up to the truth on its own actions. No sooner had Pakistan been established than it militarily invaded Kashmir but claimed the attackers were tribesmen. Such penchant to pursue aggression and denial in chorus continues to this day.

But truth chases those that run away from it. Pakistan’s broken promises of “transparent,” “time-bound” inquiry into the November 26-29 Mumbai terrorist assaults and the state-engineered circumstances of Khan’s recent release from five-year house detention blow the lid off the government cover-up. In both instances, concerted efforts to deny the involvement of any state agency have only helped point to the role of official institutions.

Take Khan. Restrictions on Khan had gradually lessened, but now the house-arrest pretence has ended with a court decision spurred on by a government submission — that Khan was not under formal house detention but merely under guard for his own security. The court thus ruled that with no charge and no detention order against him, Khan had the right to move freely.

If Khan was really the wayward scientist who almost singlehandedly sold Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to other renegade states, why was he never charged or even allowed to be questioned by international investigators? How come he was made to confess on national television at midnight, only to be instantaneously pardoned? The truth is that Khan was held incommunicado to shield him from international inquiry and to stop him from spilling the beans on the state’s role.

Now that international investigations have unravelled, he has been freed on the condition that he would not speak in public about the illicit ring, let alone implicate others as accomplices. As Khan’s Dutch-born wife has admitted, he will not be able to speak out as “part of an agreement that has been reached”.

Such a deal saves from exposure the plethora of accomplices that go right up to the top echelons of Pakistan’s political and military establishments. No wonder the Pakistani foreign ministry has peremptorily declared, “The so-called A.Q. Khan affair is a closed chapter.” But history’s worst nuclear scandal won’t go away that easily. That is because the cover-up extends far beyond Pakistan’s borders.

The ring was unearthed in 2003 after admittedly operating for 16 long years. Such was the extent of its transnational operations that blueprints of a Chinese-designed nuclear bomb supplied to Pakistan were found on computers in Switzerland and Dubai. Yet, with the much-touted international investigations in shambles, no significant figure in the ring has been convicted or put on trial.

The principal reason is that the U.S. has not been interested in fully investigating the network or in bringing the ringleaders to justice. Indeed, European allies have accused the U.S. of withholding crucial documents and seeking to suppress facts about a ring that may have shared nuclear secrets with more countries than just Libya, Iran and North Korea and, perhaps, with non-state actors as well.

Take the Swiss release last month of the two Tinner brothers, who along with their father were important conduits in the Pakistani ring. The Swiss government has played a double game: While saying Washington has withheld critical evidence needed to convict the three, it has admitted destroying — on national-security grounds dubbed specious by a parliamentary panel — thousands of files of evidence. One of the brothers, Urs Tinner, acknowledges that he had been working undercover for the CIA.

Or take the earlier disclosure that the CIA shielded Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986. The Dutch government, according to former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, did not take Khan into custody on the CIA’s plea that it wanted “to follow him.”

Khan was sentenced in absentia by Amsterdam judge Anita Leeser in 1983 to four years in prison for stealing enrichment secrets from the Netherlands to build Pakistan’s Kahuta plant. After the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the CIA apparently influenced the Dutch decision not to bring new charges against Khan, whose case files, according to judge Leeser, disappeared “on purpose.”

Just as the CIA has had cozy ties with the Inter-Services Intelligence — an agency it helped train and fatten — it shielded Khan for long, thereby assisting the underground Pakistani bomb programme for the very reason China aided Islamabad’s nuclear and missile ambitions. Now, the chickens have come home to roost. According to ex-CIA chief George Tenet’s 2007 book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, two senior Pakistani nuclear scientists, Bashiruddin Mahmoud (who once served as Khan’s boss) and Abdul Majeed, provided Al Qaeda with a rough sketch of a nuclear-bomb design.

Tellingly, the Obama White House’s reaction to Khan’s release has not been to seek his re-arrest or to reverse the Bush administration’s kid-gloves approach by demanding that Islamabad allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to interrogate Khan about his past activities. Rather, it has merely sought assurances on what seems inconceivable — that Khan “is not engaged or involved in any of the activity that resulted in his house arrest earlier.”

Now consider Pakistan’s non-inquiry in the name of an inquiry into the Mumbai attacks. After weeks of alleged investigations and misleading clues planted in the media, it has ingeniously sought to buy time ad infinitum by declaring that “without substantial evidence from India, it will be exceedingly difficult to complete the investigation and proceed with the case.” It believes it can hide from the damming evidence that the coordinators of the Mumbai strikes, like the organizers of the Indian embassy bombing in Kabul, “remain clients and creations of the ISI,” in the words of the Indian foreign secretary.

However vexing the denouement, the non-investigation of the Mumbai attacks and the release of the central figure in the nuclear-smuggling ring prove that Pakistan is seeking to neither be a normal state nor adhere to international norms of civilized behaviour. Indeed, by getting Khan to claim sole responsibility for the ring in his 2004 teary-eyed confession and by presenting the two Mumbai-attack planners, Zarrar Shah and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, as independent operators, Islamabad has laid bare its objective: Make a few individuals the fall guys to help preserve its illicit-activities infrastructure.

The Pakistani system is bound to produce more A.Q. Khans, Zarrar Shahs and Lakhvis unless it is thoroughly reformed, including by bringing the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments under civilian oversight, as is the custom in any normal country.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

The Impotent Bomb

Has India’s crucial strategic asset been fatally compromised?

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, September 16-30, 2008

At a time when India’s asymmetry with China in conventional-military capability is becoming wider, India’s need for a reliable nuclear deterrent that can survive a first strike is becoming greater. India imports virtually all its conventional weapons and is in no position to deter China conventionally. Not only are conventional weapons highly expensive, but also no other large country in the world is so dependent on weapon imports to meet basic defence needs as India. The only way India can deter Chinese aggression or threat to use force is through an adequate nuclear-weapons capability.

            Yet, instead of stepping up work on building a credible but minimal nuclear deterrent, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government blithely put India’s nuclear programme — the country’s only strategic asset — on the negotiating table to clinch a civil nuclear deal with the United States. Through this insidious deal, India is accepting qualitative and quantitative constraints on its indigenous deterrent’s development.

            Such fetters come when India has yet to build and deploy even a barely minimal deterrent against China. No government leader has claimed, or can assert, that the country today can effectively deter China, its primary challenge. Indeed, the key task India faces today is to build a stout deterrent, however small, that can help deter an increasingly assertive China that has gone from preaching the gospel of its “peaceful rise” to taking its gloves off.

            India’s priority today should its security. Yet India is compromising its future deterrent capability by concluding a deal with the U.S. whose touted energy benefits are dubious and dispensable. The partisan rancour over the deal has only helped obscure facts, allowing shibboleths and fantasies to substitute for an informed debate on a critical issue. Even as the government attempts to place India’s energy needs above its national defence, myths continue to be repeated untiringly.

The notion that India can build energy “security” through imports of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors is a travesty of facts. That would be a path to energy insecurity.

Just as cheap oil now appears fanciful, cheap nuclear power for long has been a mirage. More than half a century after then U.S. Atomic Energy Agency Chairman Lewis Strauss claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter”, the nuclear power industry everywhere subsists on generous state subsidies. The current electricity-market liberalization trends spell trouble for the global nuclear-power industry because they threaten the state support on which it survives. As a 2005 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) study by Ferenc Toth and Hans-Holger Rogner warns, “nuclear power’s market share might indeed follow a downward trajectory” if state subsidies abate and more cost-effective reactors are not designed.

Other international studies have shown that nuclear power, although a long-matured technology, has demonstrated the slowest rate of learning in comparison to other energy technologies, including newer sources like wind and combined-cycle gas turbines. Instead of the price declining with nuclear power’s maturation, the opposite has happened. Power reactors also remain very capital-intensive, with high up-front capital costs, long lead times for construction and commissioning, and drawn-out amortization periods that discourage private investors.

In the U.S., two separate studies by the University of Chicago (2004) and MIT (2003) showed new nuclear power remaining comparatively more expensive. In India, all the power reactors built since the 1990s have priced their electricity at between 270 and 285 paise per kilowatt hour or higher, despite inbuilt state subsidy. In comparison, the coal-fired Sason plant project in central India \has contracted to sell power at 119 paise per kWh.

            Wishful thinking and official spin, however, are clouding the national discourse, opening the path to damaging compromises on the integrity of the country’s nuclear-deterrent capability. The deal will impede India’s deterrent plans and eliminate the leeway the country enjoyed in 1974 and 1998 when it tested. Dr. Singh, however, pooh-poohs the nuclear-military implications and recites the deal’s supposed energy benefits. His government has also taken to chanting the disarmament mantra, although disarmament fell off the global agenda long ago. The United Nations’ Conference on Disarmament (CD) — the main disarmament negotiating forum — has been bereft of real work for 12 years now.

            India, in fact, has a rich history of floating disarmament proposals that come back and haunt it as non-proliferation pacts. It was India that put forth the ideas of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Add to that its record of not acting when the time is right.

Had India done a test in the mid-1960s when it first acquired nuclear-explosive capability, it would have beaten the NPT trap. Had Indira Gandhi pressed ahead with weaponization after Pokhran I, India would not have faced a rising tide of technology sanctions for the next quarter-century. Had Atal Bihari Vajpayee dangled a test moratorium as a diplomatic carrot post-Pokhran II, instead of gifting it away gratuitously, the U.S. would have hesitated to slap an array of new sanctions on India. And had Manmohan Singh sought to plug the yawning gaps in capability, instead of pushing a divisive deal with the U.S. that offers questionable energy benefits to help neuter India’s deterrent, a more-confident New Delhi today would not have had to propitiate China or any other power.

No country in history has struggled longer to build a minimal deterrent or paid heavier international costs for its nuclear programme than India. Yet, by sheltering behind calcinatory and delusional rhetoric, Dr. Singh overlooks a central reality: In today’s world, another country can impose its demands on India not necessarily by employing direct force but by building such asymmetric capabilities that a credible threat crimps the other side’s room for manoeuvre. Nothing better illustrates this danger than New Delhi’s own political timidity in the face of rising Chinese provocative actions. The government has gone to the extent of needlessly downplaying the increasing cross-border Chinese military incursions. The more India falls behind its minimum-deterrence needs, the more likely will such fecklessness get deeply ingrained in its foreign policy.

            Unlike conventional weapons, systems of nuclear deterrence have to be developed indigenously and without the lure of kickbacks. More than a decade after declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state, India stands out as a reluctant and tentative nuclear power. India’s primary focus remains more on buying high-priced conventional weapons from overseas (reflected in its emergence as a top arms importer in the world) than on plugging gaps in its nuclear deterrence. Consequently, India’s goal of erecting a credible and survivable nuclear deterrent, as the private intelligence service Stratfor put it, is at least a decade away.

            The history of India’s nuclear-explosive programme is actually a record of how it helped mould multilateral technology controls. The 1974 detonation impelled the secret formation of the London suppliers’ club (later renamed the Nuclear Suppliers Club), the reshaping of the non-proliferation regime, and export bans on dual-use items. That test helped remake U.S. policy, spurring major reforms in export policy, the passage of the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act (NNPA), the attachment of non-proliferation conditions to foreign assistance, and the emergence of the sanctions approach. India’s space programme helped give birth to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).

The more India got hit with technology controls, the more it sank into its proverbial indecision, instead of doggedly pressing ahead. Almost a quarter-century passed between Pokhran I and II, as a stock-still India masochistically put up with punitive actions. A decade after Pokhran II, the present leadership is more interested in deal-making than deterrent-building. Exactly 25 years after the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) was launched, Dr. Singh’s government has announced its mysterious closure — without a single Beijing-reachable missile in deployment, and even as Pakistan has conducted countless missile tests since last year.

While China ploughs 28 per cent of its mammoth, rapidly-growing military spending into defence research and development, geared toward modernizing its deterrent, India’s total annual budget outlays for the nuclear deterrent make up less than one-tenth of the $11 billion profit in the first quarter of 2008 of one U.S. company, Exxon-Mobil. Yet India does not shy away from squandering several billion dollars annually in importing questionable conventional weapons. Consider some recent examples.

The Indian air force barely inducts the first batch of the British Hawk jet trainer — an obsolescent system in which India invested $1.8 billion ostensibly to help minimize crashes — and a Hawk crashes. No sooner the U.S. had sold India a 1971-vintage amphibious transport ship junked by its navy than a gas leak kills an Indian officer and five sailors on board. Defence Minister A.K. Anthony disclosed, nine months after the delivery date had passed, that Russia wants $1.2 billion more and another three years to deliver a refurbished Soviet-era aircraft carrier that India had agreed to buy for $1.5 billion in early 2004, although it had been rusting since a mid-1990s boiler-room explosion.

            Is India seeking to build a first-rate military with strategic reach and an independent deterrent, or a military that will remain irredeemably dependent on imports and serve as a money-spinning dumping ground for antiquated and junked weapons? The defence of India is becoming an unending scandal just when new threats are emerging and chinks in the Indian armour are obvious. Even indictments by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) seem to make little difference.

            Today, instead of investing in the rapid development of a credible and comprehensive deterrent, New Delhi acts peculiarly. In an action that ominously harks back to the 1991-95 period when Dr. Singh as finance minister starved the nuclear programme of necessary funds for expansion, the government’s 2008-09 budget slashes the funding of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) by $529 million. No explanation has been offered to the nation for this action.

            Rather than aim for a technological leap through a crash intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) programme, India remains stuck in the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) arena, where its frog-like paces have taken it — nearly two decades after the first Agni test — to Agni-3, a non-strategic missile in deterrence argot. Instead of securing India’s interests on planet earth, the government has embarked on a $3.4 billion lunar dream, preparing excitedly to launch the first lunar orbiter.

            By disproving the prophets of doom and launching the country on a rising trajectory, Pokhran II was supposed to have lifted India from its subaltern mindset and helped focus its energies on deterrent-building. Critics like Dr. Singh had warned in 1988 that the tests would seriously impair the economy. But India’s foreign-exchange reserves multiplied five times in seven years and its GDP growth accelerated sharply. Who looked at India as a rising power before 1998? Pokhran II thus was a watershed. A decade later, however, India doesn’t have much to celebrate. Nuclear diffidence continues to hold it down. It still doesn’t have minimal, let alone, credible deterrence. Its military asymmetry with China has grown to the extent that many in its policymaking community seem to be losing faith in the country’s ability to defend itself with its own means.

            It is against this background that the strategic implications of the nuclear deal must be viewed. The core implications are two-fold. Firstly, the deal will ensure that India stays a second-rate nuclear power, with its stunted, regionally confined capability unable to aid its world-power ambitions. Secondly, more than commercial nuclear power, it is U.S. arms exports and closer strategic ties with India that the deal is likely to promote. In other words, India’s arms-imports dependency will only intensify at the expense of an independent nuclear deterrent.

From the time it was unveiled more than three years ago as an agreement-in-principle, the deal has been anchored in broader strategic objectives — from intelligence sharing and building of interoperability between U.S. and Indian forces, to roping in India as a key player both in the “Global Democracy Initiative” and a disaster-response initiative with military orientation. India has agreed to fully support U.S. non-proliferation initiatives and consider participating in “multinational operations”. New Delhi is now set to sign three agreements that U.S. officials say are critical to forge closer bilateral military ties. These will facilitate cooperation on logistical operations, provide for monitoring of the end uses of transferred weapons systems, and enhance communications interoperability.

Not many will question India’s efforts to build a stronger relationship with the world’s sole superpower. A durable Indo-U.S. partnership is desirable, but it can be built not on Indian strategic obsequiousness or joint opportunism in relation to a third country but on shared national interests. Shared interests mean far more than shared democratic values, which in practice can look very different. For instance, it is a tribute to the vitality of U.S. democracy that Congress is to closely scrutinize the nuclear deal again, after having passed an India-specific legislative waiver — the 2006 Hyde Act. In contrast, the Indian Parliament has had little role to play, although the deal’s actual terms impinge on the long-term credibility of the country’s nuclear deterrent.

New Delhi has agreed to put more than two dozen of its existing nuclear facilities and all its future civilian reactors under international inspections of a kind that only non-nuclear-weapons states accept — invasive, everlasting and legally irrevocable. In addition, India has agreed to shut down by 2010 the newly refurbished Cirus research reactor — the supplier of plutonium for India’s 1974 test and now the source of 30 per cent of the country’s weapons-grade plutonium production. In fact, as Paul Nelson, T. V. K. Woddi and William S. Charlton of the Texas A&M University point out in a U.S. government-funded study, much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960.

            The Cirus shutdown decision alone disproves the prime minister’s oft-repeated claim that “this deal has no bearing on our strategic programme”. Speaking in the Lok Sabha on March 10, 2006, Dr. Singh contended that, “While the Cirus reactor was refurbished recently, the associated cost will be more than recovered by the isotope [production] and the research we will be conducting before it is closed”. But he still hasn’t answered the key question: Why did he succumb to U.S. pressure over a reactor that remains crucial to India’s strategic programme?

It is true that India is free to build a replacement reactor. But thus far work on a replacement reactor has not begun, even though India needs to sharply accelerate its rate of weapons-grade plutonium production in view of the pressures it faces to declare a production moratorium and support the early conclusion of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). The Cirus dismantlement in two years’ time will certainly lead to a significant shortfall in military-grade plutonium production.

Furthermore, the watertight civil-military separation the deal is imposing will destroy what then Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Chidambaram in 1996 described as “the lateral synergy” that exists between these two parts of the Indian nuclear programme. The officially sponsored history of the DAE titled, Atomic Energy in India: 50 Years by C. V. Sundaram et al, quotes Dr. Chidambaram as follows: “India has comprehensive nuclear capability, some of which is latent, some of which we have exercised to a limited degree and some of which we have exercised fully. And this goes over into development of nuclear power reactors, building research reactors, non-electricity applications of radiation, spinoff technologies and also keeping open this nuclear option. And all these are in some fashion linked together. And the kind of lateral synergy which exists between the one and the other is, of course, very difficult to define or identify even for insiders. But it exists. You can’t have one without the other”.

By acquiescing to a status less than that of a nuclear-weapons state even as it retains a nuclear military programme, India can expect the IAEA to enforce fail-safe, verifiable civil-military “firewalls” and maximize its inspectors’ intrusive ability to detect the smallest possible diversion from the civilian sector.  The “Additional Protocol” the IAEA will conclude with India will offer this Agency the means to create such firewalls and deter the transfer of specialized equipment, trained personnel, designs and operating manuals to the strategic programme. With the invasive access it grants, the Additional Protocol is a much-more useful tool for the IAEA than even special inspections.

The deal, with its many eclectic conditions designed to firmly tether India to the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime, is set to crimp Indian deterrent-building. The Hyde Act, in fact, has less to do with nuclear-energy cooperation and more with seeking to fashion wide-ranging non-proliferation controls on India, including fetters on the Indian nuclear military capability.

While the Hyde Act’s bar on Indian testing is explicit, the one in the NSG waiver is implicit, yet unmistakeable. The NSG waiver is overtly anchored in NSG Guidelines Paragraph 16, which deals with the consequence of “an explosion of a nuclear device”. The waiver’s Section 3(e) refers to this key paragraph, which allows a supplier to call for a special NSG meeting, and seek termination of cooperation, in the event of a test or any other “violation of a supplier-recipient understanding”. The recently leaked Bush administration letter to Congress has cited how this Paragraph 16 rule will effectively bind India to the Hyde Act’s conditions on the pain of a U.S.-sponsored cut-off of all multilateral cooperation. India will not be able to escape from the U.S.-set conditions by turning to other suppliers.

Both the U.S.-legislative and NSG waivers aim to constrict the Indian deterrent’s space by subjecting Indian actions and activities to the glare of international scrutiny. While the Hyde Act demands that “the President shall keep the appropriate congressional committees fully and currently informed” about “significant changes in the production by India of nuclear weapons or in the types or amounts of fissile material produced”, the NSG is to regularly “confer and consult” with India on “all aspects” of its pledges. Contrast this with Dr. Singh’s assurance to the Rajya Sabha on August 17, 2006: “We have made clear to the U.S. that India’s strategic programme is totally outside the purview of the July Statement, and we oppose any legislative provisions that mandate scrutiny of either our nuclear-weapons programme or our unsafeguarded nuclear facilities”.

Dr. Singh is willing to bring the deal into force despite the U.S. making it explicit that if an Indian government tested, fuel and spare-part supplies and other cooperation would cease “immediately”. He is also willing to saddle the country with a host of legally irrevocable obligations — from accepting permanent international inspections on all its civilian facilities to adhering to U.S.-led cartels from which India has been excluded. There were no such conditions when India first entered into civil nuclear cooperation with the U.S. in 1963. Yet, when America unilaterally walked out of its 123 Agreement with India in 1978, why did New Delhi not exercise its right to terminate IAEA inspections at Tarapur, the sole plant set up under that accord?

Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA had correctly assessed that India would not end its obligations even after America had broken its word, but instead would seek U.S. help to find a substitute fuel supplier to keep electricity flowing to the Mumbai region. That is exactly what happened. In that light, ask yourself: Having invested tens of billions of dollars in importing a series of nuclear power reactors and having created electricity dependency, would India be able to test, when the basis of new cooperation is an explicit test prohibition written into Hyde Act’s Section 106, an unequivocal U.S. “right of return” enshrined in the 123 Agreement’s Article 14(4), and the threat of multilateral sanctions manifest in the NSG’s Paragraph 16 rule?

Recent developments are a testament to the fact that the powerful anti-deterrent lobby within India has not fully reconciled to the country’s overt nuclearization. A reminder of that came four months ago when no government celebrations marked the 10th anniversary of India going nuclear. Forced to accept India’s nuclear-weapons-state status as a fait accompli, this lot is indifferent to the long-term strategic implications of the nuclear deal.

It is worth pausing to remember that no nation can be a major power without three attributes: (i) a high level of autonomous and innovative technological capability; (ii) a capacity to meet basic defence needs indigenously; and (iii) a capability to project power far beyond its borders, especially through intercontinental-range weaponry. With its strategic-vision deficit compounded by a leadership deficit, India’s deficiencies in all the three areas are no secret.

If this deal takes effect, India can forget about emerging as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state or a strategic peer to China. At best it will be a mediocre nuclear power whose quest for a credible minimal deterrent will be locked at the level of a retarded undersized deterrent, with functionality equivalent to a mentally challenged child.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (HarperCollins, 2007).

http://www.covert.co.in/brahma.htm

Non-Proliferation as Disarmament

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 26, 2008

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/assets/graphics/proliferation-race

It is the very utility of nuclear weapons that serves as the main proliferation incentive. In the years ahead, it won’t be easy to stop more countries from pursuing nuclear-weapons ambitions if the present nuclear-armed states do not begin to denuke.

Yet, nuclear weapons, as the last U.S. posture review in 2002 stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties.” The growing attraction of missiles — which are much cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than manned bomber aircraft — flows from the fact that the attacking nation does not have to bring its forces in harm’s way.
 

Even as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorism have emerged as the two most pressing issues in international relations, the global strategic environment today is more competitive than ever, with technological advances producing new destructive capacities.

It is against this background that one should examine a joint U.S.-Russia proposal to globalize their 1987 Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (the so-called INF Treaty). That proposal raises at least three basic questions:

■ The first issue is whether the U.S. and Russia are seeking to promote non-proliferation or disarmament through their interest in a global treaty outlawing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

■ The second question is whether such a proposal could actually act as a spur to the development of more deadly weapons by encouraging states to rely completely on long-range systems. Conversely, what is the military or technological logic to make strategic missiles preferable to intermediate-range missiles (IRBMs)?

■ The third question is whether this proposal is an earnest idea, given the new U.S.-Russian tensions over America’s missile-shield plans in Eastern Europe and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 10, 2007, statement that the INF Treaty no longer serves Russian interest. In fact, just four days after Mr. Putin’s statement, the Russian military’s chief of general staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, had warned that Moscow could pull out of the INF Treaty if the U.S. proceeded to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

If the INF Treaty does not mesh with Russian interests today, can Moscow seriously be seeking to globalize it? The proposal was first put forward through a scrappy October 2007 U.S.-Russian joint statement in the UN General Assembly. Earlier this month, the proposal was discussed at a workshop at Reykjavik, Iceland.

            Let us begin with the first question. With disarmament off the international radar screen, the focus of the major powers increasingly has been on more stringent non-proliferation. Too often, we are seeing non-proliferation proposals being speciously packaged as disarmament.

          Historically, technological progress has created the spur to eliminate by bilateral or multilateral treaty a type or class of weapons overtaken by newer discoveries. The Chemical Weapons Convention, for example, became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD.

         During the Cold War era, the unfettered arms racing, with its action-reaction cycle, led to the build-up of such surplus armaments that many of the weapons in national stockpiles became obsolescent or redundant. That encouraged arms-control efforts from the 1970s.

The INF Treaty was the product of such efforts to slash destabilizing surpluses by eliminating a class of weapons that threatened peace in Europe. Signed during the height of the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the INF Treaty later created misgivings in Moscow, where some saw it as slanted in America’s favour, both in terms of what it did not eliminate on the U.S. side, and the manner in which the American single-warhead Pershing II system got counted as equivalent to every multiple-warhead RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20) Soviet missile. To be sure, this treaty contained pioneering on-site inspection provisions.

         Tellingly, the INF Treaty was intended not to disturb the most-sophisticated weapon systems held by the two major powers, including long-range missiles and sea- and submarine-launched systems. A globalized INF Treaty, however, would mean decapitation of the nuclear deterrent of India or Israel because neither at present has sophisticated missile assets beyond ground-launched intermediate-range missiles.

            Today, the U.S. and Russian interest in working together to stop the proliferation of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles is understandable, given the potentially adverse consequences of such proliferation for their strategic interests. The spread of missile technology impinges on the capabilities of all the five ICBM-armed major powers (the Permanent Five) to police high seas or to intervene without incurring significant political or military costs.

          Such proliferation concerns are reinforced by the fact that, unlike other weapon systems, missiles, especially cruise missiles, are difficult to defend against. The progressive tightening of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) controls and the inclusion of civilian space and aerospace technologies within their clasp have only made it more difficult to build international consensus against the proliferation of missiles. Now, all delivery systems (other than manned aircraft) are banned for export.

           The MTCR-centred missile non-proliferation regime is actually more inequitable than the NPT due to an absence of any mutuality of obligations between the missile and non-missile states. The MTCR incorporates no commitment on the part of the missile powers — akin to NPT’s Article VI — to work toward complete missile disarmament. Indeed, it facilitates continued missile modernization, with the missile powers now increasingly focusing on advanced submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles.

        There are also no international monitoring and verification measures to detect and forestall interstate transfers of missile systems and production technology, as underscored by China’s covert transfers of INF-class M-9s and M-11s to Pakistan and its continuing production assistance to that country.

            The global INF Treaty proposal, in effect, aims to accomplish what the missile non-proliferation regime has failed to thwart. But given that the MTCR remains largely a cartel of supplier states outside the UN framework, the establishment of a globalized INF Treaty before the advent of a global missile non-proliferation regime is like putting the cart before the horse.

            Actually, greater inequities in the international security order risk undermining both nuclear and missile non-proliferation. Concerns are already growing in the developing world that the existing technology controls, through their progressive tightening and extension, are throttling legitimate civilian activities by the “have-nots.”

         These concerns centre on the manner key technologies and sensitive commerce are monopolized by a few. Civil nuclear trade today constitutes the world’s most politically-regulated and cartelized commerce, with a tiny syndicate of state-guided firms controlling all reactor, fuel and component sales — a monopoly sought to be only reinforced by the proposed creation of an international fuel bank.

       At the same time, MTCR controls are constraining civilian space cooperation, even as space assets are becoming critical for meteorology, civil communications, navigation, mapping of underground water resources, national defence and reconnaissance. Current export controls on inertial navigation system (INS) technology for commercial aircraft are just one example of the extension of controls to civilian fields.

            The MTCR guidelines require members-states to consider the “capabilities and objectives of the missile and space programmes of the recipient state” before agreeing to export any item or technology. Since an indigenous space-launch vehicle (SLV) arms its possessor with potential IRBM capability, the civilian space programme of a non-member seeking to independently place satellites in orbit automatically becomes a target of MTCR controls.

Against this background, caution should be exercised in promoting yet another layer of discrimination in the international security rules.

With nuclear disarmament looking a utopian idea, the world faces fundamental challenges relating to the preservation of norms on non-proliferation in an era marked by major shifts in global economic and political power. Such challenges are accentuated by the fact that surpluses from the past arms racing continue to be glaring. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America and Russia together still have nearly 25,000 nuclear weapons, including 6,000 long-range weapons on hair-trigger alert.

The growing proliferation and use of missiles does carry serious implications for regional and global security. But a global INF Treaty has to be weighed against some grim realities:

♦ First, missiles have come to symbolize power and coercion in international relations. They are useful not only to achieve military objectives, but also to realize aims through political intimidation and coercion.

♦ Second, there is no international legal structure to control missiles nor any taboo related to their use. While nuclear weapons have not been employed for more than 62 years, missiles have been used with increasing frequency. The role of cruise missiles is growing the fastest. The low-flying, slower cruise missiles, unlike the much-faster ballistic missiles, strike with a high degree of accuracy.

♦ Third, conflicts and interventions since the last decade are a vivid reminder of the high costs of being defenceless against a foe firing missiles and other high-tech, remotely-fired conventional weapons.

♦ Fourth, only nations without the capability to hit back are falling victim to missile strikes. In some cases, such states — as the history of the past two decades testifies — have been targeted as guinea pigs to test out new missile systems or to help correct flaws in existing ones.

♦ Fifth, there is only one effective way to deter missile terror and blackmail — a reliable missile-deterrent capability to ensure a calibrated but proportional response. Without the capacity to effectively strike back with missiles, a state would be vulnerable to the type of blackmail China mounted against Taiwan in 1996 or the kind of missile warfare that has been waged one-sidedly in other theatres.

♦ Sixth, a missile-defence shield is a far more expensive, complex and dubious scheme than a missile deterrent. Such a shield makes sense only for states that are already armed with a robust missile deterrent. Indeed, the institution of missile defences is likely to compel states to build more-sophisticated missiles that can foil defences of any kind, including by arming ballistic missiles with decoys and other countermeasures.

In that light, how realistic is the idea of globalizing the INF Treaty?

Firstly, a global INF Treaty would be a spur to the development of, and reliance on, intercontinental-range weaponry, even when a state’s security threats emanate from the immediate neighbourhood. What may be a proposal to preserve the technological superiority of a few may actually help speed up a challenge to such ascendancy. 

ICBMs are already an idiom of big-power status, playing a primary role in power-projection strategies. But with a global INF Treaty, the attraction of ICBMs would multiply.

Secondly, a global INF Treaty proposal runs counter to Russian threats to renew interest in intermediate-range missile forces if the U.S. installs a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

Would a globalized INF Treaty, as an incentive, sell surplus U.S. and Russian ICBMs to other states in lieu of the shorter-range missiles they eliminate? Such a trade-off might be a good way both to bring down the “overkill” arsenals that the U.S. and Russia still maintain, and to promote international cooperation and peace on the based of shared capabilities.

In the absence of tangible, compensatory incentives, the seriousness of the proposal is open to question. India, for example, has modest deterrent capabilities against a multitude of missile threats that few other countries face. Why would it accept decapitation under a globalized INF Treaty?

To effectively tackle proliferation challenges, the world needs genuine disarmament. However, what a globalized INF Treaty would offer is the reinforcement of the present power and prerogatives of the P-5, armed as they are with intercontinental missile-strike capabilities and other power-projection assets, such as naval forces that patrol far from their shores, instruments of precision strike in the form of cruise missiles, and space-based information systems.

Those who cite hypothetical threats to justify continued WMD modernization should not be seen as seeking to disarm those that confront real threats. A central tenet of international law and the UN Charter is that it is the sovereign right of every nation to defend its security by appropriate means.

Today, it has become more difficult than ever to palm off non-proliferation as disarmament, or to label a cutback of surpluses as disarmament. What the world seeks today are concrete measures that would turn growing concerns about rearmament into new hopes for common security.

(c) Asian Age, 2008

Stop Chasing Illusions

Pursuing nuclear disarmament is a good pastime for retired men.

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, March 11, 2008

Nearly a century after chemical arms were introduced in World War I and more than six decades following the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is at the threshold of new lethal and precision weapons, as underlined by the ongoing research on lasers, information weapons, space-based platforms, anti-satellite weapons and directed energy systems. Technological forces are now shaping geopolitics and power equations in a way unforeseen before in history. 

We live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The global power structure reflects this reality. Only countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry are United Nations Security Council permanent members, while those seeking new permanent seats have regionally confined capabilities and thus are likely to stay condemned as mere aspirants. Japan, with one-tenth of the population, has a bigger economy than China, but the latter, because of its rising military prowess, gets more international respect.

The past century was the most momentous in history technologically, with innovations fostering not just rapid economic change, but bringing greater lethality to warfare. Consequently, the 20th century was the bloodiest. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missiles came to occupy a central military role. In the new century, the advance of technology and the absence of relevant safeguards or regimes evoke possible scenarios of deadly information and space warfare.

Such are the challenges from the accelerated weaponization of science that instead of disarmament, rearmament today looms large on the horizon, with the arms race being extended to outer space. Take, for example, America’s February 20 destruction of a crippled satellite by missile strike. Having criticized China’s January 2007 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test — the first ASAT kill by any power in more than two decades — the US set out to be the first to knock out a space-based asset from a mobile platform at sea, in an operation that resembled shooting down an ICBM, except that the target was larger and easier to destroy.

In a Cold War-reminiscent tone, outgoing President Vladimir Putin last month vowed that Russia will field new strategic weapons because “a new arms race has been unleashed in the world”.  Alluding to the US pressing ahead with a missile shield in Eastern Europe and working on new warheads, Putin declared: “We didn’t start it … funnelling multibillions of dollars into developing weapon systems”. The same day, the Russian foreign minister raised the spectre of “hundreds of thousands of missile interceptors all over the world … in the foreseeable future”.

            Disarmament fell off the global agenda long ago, with the UN’s Conference on Disarmament (CD) bereft of real work for nearly 12 years now. Yet, some in India continue to chase illusions. More flattering attention has been paid in India than anywhere else to two newspaper articles written by four senior ex-US officials, who in office were votaries of unbridled nuclear might but who now, while peddling a nukes-free world as a distant goal akin to an invisible mountaintop, suggest modest steps for US forces (like changing the antediluvian Cold War posture), only to advocate more rigorous non-proliferation.

India has a rich history of floating disarmament proposals that come back and haunt it as non-proliferation pacts. It was India that put forth the ideas of an NPT and CTBT. Add to that its record of not acting when the time is right. Had it tested when it acquired a nuclear-explosive capability in the mid-1960s, it would have beaten the NPT trap. Had Indira Gandhi pressed ahead and not baulked after the May 1974 test, India would not have faced a rising tide of technology sanctions for the next quarter-century. No nation perhaps has paid a heavier price for indecision than India.

India’s priority today should its security, given that it still does not have a minimal, let alone credible, nuclear deterrent against China, which is rapidly modernizing its arsenal. Yet India has placed its future deterrent capability at risk by concluding a nuclear deal with the US whose touted energy benefits are dubious and dispensable. It is also unable to control its proverbial itch to win brownie points, as shown by its recent submission of a seven-point proposal to the deadlocked CD, calling for, among other things, the outlawing of nukes. Such ardour is baffling, given that India imports virtually all its conventional weapons and is in no position to deter China conventionally in the long run.

Pursuing disarmament is like chasing butterflies — enjoyable for some retired old men but never-ending and beyond the pale. Nuclear weapons, as the last US posture review stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties”. Until such time as nukes remain the premier mass-destruction technology, disarmament will stay a mirage. The Chemical Weapons Convention became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD. Considering the rapid pace of technological change, a new class of surgical-strike WMD could emerge, even as nuclear weapons, with their unparalleled destructive capacity, stay at the centre of international power and force.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

© Times of India, 2008

Rudd’s rudderless reversal

Australia’s new government needs to deal pragmatically with India after its ideologically driven policy reversal on uranium exports

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 1, 2008

The rapidly developing India-Australia relationship has been underscored by the various agreements reached in recent years — from a trade and economic framework to cooperation on defence and counterterrorism. India has emerged as Australia’s fastest-growing merchandise export market, even as an increasing number of Indian students enrol in Australian educational institutions (more than 65,000 last year alone).

Amid a growing convergence of strategic interests, however, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has struck a jarring note. Rudd, the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government, has made public his intent to cosy up to the world’s largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world’s largest democracy.

Before he was voted out of office last November after 11 years as prime minister, John Howard had agreed to sell uranium ore to both China and India. Rudd has no problem with uranium exports to Beijing but, in one of his first actions in office, scrapped Howard’s decision to sell yellowcake to New Delhi, although such transfers (unlike to China) were to be covered by stringent international and bilateral safeguards.

Rudd’s reversal — egged on by the anti-uranium export lobby within his Labour Party — closes the door on India even if the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group carves out an exemption for India from its rules. Considering that Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and annually exports more than 10,000 metric tonnes of processed ore, the action undercuts India’s endeavour to prise open international civil nuclear trade. It thus represents a major setback to Indian diplomacy.

On some issues, Rudd has taken welcome steps — from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (an action that leaves the United States isolated as the only industrialized country not to have done so) to seeking to open a new chapter in Australia’s troubled relations with its indigenous, still-marginalized peoples by offering a national apology for past wrongs, albeit without addressing the issue of compensation (which led one newspaper writer to say it meant, “Blackfellas get the words, the whitefellas keep the money”).

On India, however, Rudd’s approach hasn’t been forward-looking. Indeed, his justification for disallowing uranium exports has been notably regressive. Consider the following:

■ Rudd has linked Australia’s U-turn on uranium exports to India’s non-membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although the NPT carries no prohibition on civil nuclear cooperation under safeguards with a state outside its fold.

While it is true the Labour Party had pledged to scrap uranium exports to India if voted to power, election rhetoric often gives way to sober judgement when in office. Given that the Labour’s hostility to exports was founded on a legally untenable argument — India’s staying out of the NPT — Rudd, as PM, ought to have reviewed that opposition in the context of Australia’s geopolitical interests.

Instead, driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard’s decision, but his government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if it has not read the NPT text. In the words of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, “The current government … will not authorize the export of uranium to a country which is not a party to the NPT.”

In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states. All it requires is safeguards application, which its Article III (3) stipulates shall not hamper “international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use of production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of this Article and the principle of safeguarding set forth in the Preamble of the Treaty.”

The NPT has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil cooperation with a non-signatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy” (Article IV) so long as safeguards are in place on all peaceful nuclear activity.

Any restriction on civil cooperation with a country like India is not in the NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of a US-led cartel, the NSG. The NSG has amended its rules more than once since it was secretly formed in 1974, and today its founder, America, has come full circle by conditionally proposing that the group exempt India from its no-military-facility rule intended for non-nuclear-weapons states.

■ The Rudd government has opened itself to accusations of hypocrisy by deciding not to sell Australian uranium but at the same time saying it could back an NSG exemption that would allow other suppliers to export yellowcake to India.

Canberra has been at pains to clarify that its policy reversal does not mean it will oppose an NSG rule-change for India. On that issue, in Smith’s words, “the Australian government has not come to a concluded view on those matters. We will give consideration to those matters and will do that in an orderly way, having listened to the views of the Indian government … and the U.S. government.” Canberra, in fact, has hinted it won’t obstruct an NSG waiver.

However, in rushing to abandon uranium exports to India — that too on the pretext of wishing to defend the NPT — the Rudd government made no similar effort to go through “an orderly way” and solicit the views of others.

More significantly, how can Canberra justify its policy reversal and yet hold out the promise of backing an NSG waiver? Strange as it seems, Canberra won’t export uranium to India but may end up backing an NSG exemption that would encourage other potential suppliers to do business with New Delhi and “weaken” Rudd’s much-loved NPT.

■ While emphasizing an internationalist approach in foreign policy, Rudd has sought to plough a lonely furrow on India.

In promoting Australia’s greater participation in multilateral institutions and agreements, Rudd’s foreign-policy catchwords have been inclusion and internationalism. He moved quickly to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and announce the withdrawal of Australia’s 550 combat troops in Iraq by mid-2008.

Yet the policy reversal on India stresses exclusion and embargo as the key words. Worse, it puts Australia in the unenviable position of having taken the lead to isolate a rising India at a time when all other powers are courting New Delhi.

The Rudd government’s justification, inopportunely, comes out as a red herring to not reconcile with India’s decade-old status as a nuclear-armed state. Rudd sees no contradiction in keeping Australia ensconced under American nuclear and conventional deterrence while refusing to accept India’s sovereign right to build nuclear security in a highly troubled neighbourhood without any breach of its legal commitments. In that sense, he unflatteringly presents himself in holier-than-thou colours.

Australia has derived important security and other benefits from its alliance with Washington, and Australian public opinion strongly supports the so-called Anzus pact. Pragmatic considerations have prompted Rudd, despite his party’s left-wing support base, to affirm the centrality of the alliance with the US and to keep the roughly 1,000 Australian troops in Afghanistan. He could have taken an equally practical view of India’s security dynamics.

■ Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook — stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use.

Howard sought to boost uranium exports, declaring in 2006 that Australia, with its abundant natural resources, “had the makings of an energy superpower” — a point highlighted by the fact that it already is the world’s largest coal exporter and is set to become the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. As Howard put it, “With close to 40 per cent of the world’s known low-cost uranium deposits, for Australia to bury its head in the sand on nuclear energy is akin to Saudi Arabia turning her back on global oil developments.” At present, uranium makes up two-fifths of Australia’s energy exports in thermal terms.

Before it decided to export yellowcake to India, the Howard government finalized its uranium deal with China through two accords in 2006 — one a civil nuclear cooperation agreement and the other setting out the transfer terms. The uranium deal with India would have involved similar accords but on far more stringent terms because New Delhi has pledged to accept a host of legally irrevocable obligations that Beijing will not consider, including permanent international inspections on all civilian nuclear facilities.

While in China the civilian and military nuclear programmes overlap, India has, under the nuclear deal with the US, announced a watertight segregation of its civil and military parts. For Washington, the deal indeed has been a means to try and build, in the words of Australian analyst Robert Ayson, “a de facto NPT around India,” with the Howard government conditioning exports to New Delhi’s implementation of the various elements of the Indo-US deal. By contrast, exports to China will carry “zero real controls,” as the Australian Financial Review put it.

Yet the Rudd government has reversed policy on India while displaying the same zealousness as its predecessor to sell uranium ore to China. Canberra has turned a blind eye to the fact that, in contrast to New Delhi’s squeaky-clean record in not proliferating nuclear technology to other states, Beijing for long has played proliferation as a strategic card, with US intelligence identifying it as the “most significant supplier” of items and technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Given that Beijing is rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal and maintaining an opaque nuclear posture, Howard and now Rudd have overlooked concerns that uranium exports are likely to result in the diversion of more resources for China’s nuclear-weapons programme. Rather than insist that the International Atomic Energy Agency verifiably ensure that Australian uranium is used for nuclear-power generation, not for weapons purposes, Canberra has merely gone by the peaceful-use promise of a country that stands out for its egregious WMD record.

This is manifest from the two accords — one titled, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Transfer of Nuclear Material,” and the other headlined, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy.”

The accords do not require Beijing to go beyond the largely-symbolic inspections it accepts under a “voluntary safeguards” agreement with the IAEA. The facilities under “voluntary safeguards” can be withdrawn from inspection at any time of Beijing’s choosing. Also, Australian uranium will first go to Chinese fuel-fabrication facilities, which remain outside IAEA safeguards. As Annex B of the transfer accord states, it is only after “conversion to uranium hexafluoride” that China will use Australian-origin material in designated plants that may be subject to token IAEA inspections.

The new Rudd-introduced duality in export policy unfortunately signals that Canberra is more concerned about India’s rudimentary nuclear-weapons capability than with the growing sophistication and reach of China’s nuclear arsenal.

Indo-Australian cooperation can be elevated to close strategic bonds through forward-thinking pragmatism. Abstruse, retrograde ideology, as manifest in the uranium-exports reversal, can hardly aid Australian interests with a country that will remain a significant power in the Indian Ocean and a fast-growing market for Australian minerals and fuels. Rudd, with the China fixation he carries from his diplomatic career, needs to demonstrate a more-balanced appreciation of Australia’s long-term interests in an Asia that is unlikely to countenance any power’s hegemonic ambitions. Before long, he will have to deal pragmatically with the realities of Indian power without his NPT reflexes.

© Asian Age, 2008