Japan, India sign landmark security agreement on October 22, 2008

Posted on November 1, 2008 by Chellaney

Toward Asian power equilibrium

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, November 1, 2008

Last week’s Indo-Japanese security accord is momentous, with Tokyo and New Delhi having concluded such an agreement with only one other country each — Australia and the U.S., respectively. Its significance actually parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defence framework accord. But while the latter seeks to mould India into America’s junior partner, the former is between equals to help contribute to Asian power stability.

The India-Japan security agreement signed last week marks a significant milestone in building Asian power equilibrium. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests is becoming critical to instituting power stability at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges.

What Tokyo and New Delhi have signed is a framework agreement, to be followed up with “an action plan with specific measures to advance security cooperation” in particular areas, ranging from sea-lane safety and defence collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism. How momentous this accord is can be seen from the fact that Japan has such a security agreement with only one other country — Australia.

Tokyo, of course, has been tied to the United States militarily since 1951 through a treaty that was designed to meet American demands that U.S. troops remain stationed in Japan even after the end of the American occupation of Japan. Today, that treaty — revised in 1960 — is the linchpin of the American forward-military deployment strategy in the Asian theatre.

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit, is actually modelled on the March 2007 Japan-Australia defence accord. Both are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And both, while recognising a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate the two sides to work together to build not just bilateral defence cooperation but also security in the Asia-Pacific.

But unlike distant Australia with its relatively benign security environment, India and Japan are China’s next-door neighbours and worry that Beijing’s accumulating power could fashion a Sino-centric Asia. Canberra, quite the opposite, wishes to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing, and loves to cite the new reality that, for the first time, Australia’s largest trading partner (China) is no longer the same as its main security anchor (the U.S.).

But there is nothing unique about this situation. It is a testament to Beijing’s rising global economic clout that China is also Japan’s largest trade partner now and is poised to similarly become India’s in a couple of years. On the other hand, two of India’s most-important bilateral relationships — with Russia and Japan — suffer from hideously low trade volumes.

Trade in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political differences — unless political barriers have been erected, as the U.S. has done against Cuba and Burma, for example. In fact, as world history testifies, booming trade is not a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states. The new global fault lines show that that it was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve international geopolitics. Better politics is as important as better economics.

Canberra has consciously sought to downplay its defence accord with Tokyo to the extent that, nearly a year after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office, a visitor seeking to access the text of that agreement on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) website is greeted by this message: “Sorry, the page you asked for has been temporarily removed from the site — Following the recent Australian federal election, the content of this page is under review until further notice.” Indeed, Mr. Rudd’s Labour Party, while in opposition ranks, had openly cast doubt on the diplomatic utility of that agreement.

In that light, it is no surprise that beyond their similarly structured format, including the mirrored requirement for a follow-up action plan, the Japanese-Australian and Indo-Japanese agreements carry different strategic import. The one between Tokyo and New Delhi is plainly designed to contribute to building Asian power equilibrium. The Indo-Japanese partnership, as the two Prime Ministers said in their separate joint statement, forms an “essential pillar for the future architecture” of security in the Asia-Pacific.

By contrast, the Australian-Japanese agreement carries little potential to become an abiding element of a future Asian-Pacific security architecture, given the two parties’ contrasting strategic motivations and Canberra’s attempts from the outset to package it as a functional arrangement devoid of geopolitical aims. Tellingly, the push for that accord had come from the then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the architect of the Quadrilateral Initiative. And it was Mr. Rudd who this year pulled the plug on that initiative, founded on the concept of democratic peace.

The significance of the Indo-Japanese agreement truly parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defence framework accord, which signalled a major transformation of the once-estranged relationship between the world’s most populous and most powerful democracies. Both those agreements focus on counterterrorism, disaster response, safety of sea-lanes of communications, non-proliferation, bilateral and multilateral military exercises, peace operations, and defence dialogue and cooperation. But the former has not only been signed at a higher level — prime ministerial — but also comes with a key element: “policy coordination on regional affairs in the Asia-Pacific region and on long-term strategic and global issues.”

This is an agreement between equals on enhancing mutual security. By contrast, the U.S.-India defence agreement, with its emphasis on U.S. arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing, aims to build India as a new junior partner (or spoke) in a web of interlocking bilateral arrangements meshing with America’s hub-and-spoke alliance system, designed to undergird U.S. interests.

It is, however, doubtful that the U.S., despite the defence accord and the subsequent nuclear deal, would succeed in roping in India as a new ally in a patron-client framework. In a fast-changing world characterised by a qualitative reordering of power — with even Tokyo and Berlin seeking to discreetly reclaim their foreign policy autonomy — U.S. policymakers are unlikely to be able to mould India into a new Japan or Germany to America, notwithstanding the help from Indian neocons.

In keeping with its long-standing preference for strategic independence, India is likely to retain the option to forge different partnerships with varied players to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings. That means that from being nonaligned, India is likely to become multialigned. The security agreement with Japan — still the world’s second largest economic powerhouse after the U.S. — jibes well with India’s desire to pursue omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players.

Japan and India indeed are natural allies, with no negative historical legacy and no conflict of strategic interest. Rather, they share common goals to build stability and institutionalised cooperation in Asia and to make the 20th century international institutions and rules more suitable for the 21st century world. They are establishing a “strategic and global partnership” that is driven, as their new agreement states, “by converging long-term political, economic and strategic interests, aspirations and concerns.”

Such is the fast-developing nature of this relationship that the two, besides holding a yearly summit meeting, have instituted multiple strategic dialogues involving their Foreign and Defence Ministers and national security advisers, as well as “service-to-service exchanges including bilateral and multilateral exercises.” After all, the balance of power in Asia will be determined by events as much in the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia. The Indian and Japanese space agencies are also to cooperate as part of capacity-building efforts in disaster management.

It will be simplistic to see such cooperation one-dimensionally, as aimed at countervailing China’s growing might. Beijing itself is pursuing a range of bilateral and multilateral initiatives in Asia to underpin its strategic objectives and help shape Asian security trends — from weapon sales to countries stretching from Iran to Indonesia and port building projects in the Indian Ocean rim, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and north-south strategic corridors through Pakistan and Burma.

Given China’s territorial size, population (a fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism, few can question or grudge its right to be a world power. In fact, such is its sense of where it wishes to go that China cannot be dissuaded from the notion that it is destined to emerge, in the words of the then President Jiang Zemin, as “a world power second to none.”

Against that background, why begrudge the efforts of Asia’s two largest and most established democracies to work together to avert an Asian power disequilibrium? Never before in history have China, India and Japan been all strong at the same time. Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. But there can be no denying that these three leading Asian powers and the U.S. have different playbooks: the U.S. wants a unipolar world but a multipolar Asia; China seeks a multipolar world but a unipolar Asia; and India and Japan desire a multipolar Asia and multipolar world.

(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.)

If engagement has helped create a more-open China, does it make sense to apply different standards to Russia?

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Chellaney

Remember the China lesson

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

Each visit to China is a reminder of the power of global liberalizing influences. China has come a long way since the Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy activists nearly two decades ago. It has opened up to the extent that it hosted this month an Asia-Europe conference of nongovernmental organizations and scholars that focused in several of its sessions on the global challenges of democratization and human rights.

The old mind-set and suspicion of outsiders, of course, haven’t disappeared. After all, power rests with the same party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters and political witch hunts.

That the Communist Party continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses indeed is remarkable, if not unprecedented in modern world history. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. Yet, the China of today is a far cry from the Mao Zedong era or even the Deng Xiaoping period when reforms coincided with brutal political suppression that Tiananmen Square came to symbolize.

What this country has achieved in the last generation in terms of economic modernization and the opening of minds is truly exceptional.

The state’s continuing repressive impulse, however, is mirrored in the tightly controlled domestic media (which, for example, was ordered not to deviate from official accounts in reporting the recent scandal over contaminated infant formula), the pervasive security apparatus and the brutal crackdown of the monk-led uprising across the vast Tibetan plateau.

Since the Tibet unrest flared in March, Beijing has allowed only a small group of foreign journalists to visit the plateau — that too on a Foreign Ministry-guided tour. China also remains highly intolerant of Han dissent, especially of any attempt to challenge the one-party rule.

This shows that although China has moved from being a totalitarian state to an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things have changed for the worse, such as the whipping up of nationalism and turning it into the legitimating credo of the communist rule.

In fact, relentless attempts to bend reality to the illusions that the state blithely propagates risk turning China into a modern-day Potemkin state.

Still, with the wearing away of the hukou system that tied citizens to their place of birth, Chinese can now relocate within the country, enjoy property rights, travel overseas, make use of the latest communications technologies and do other things that were unthinkable a generation ago. Indeed, the biggest change has been in the people’s thinking, reflected in a greater readiness to express oneself freely and shape one’s own destiny.

China’s opening up owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square but instead to try to integrate Beijing with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma — to pursue a penal approach centered on sanctions — in the period following the ruthless suppression of prodemocracy Burmese protests 10 months before the Tiananmen Square killings.

Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China internationally, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and destabilizing China. Of course, the contradictory approaches were driven by the West’s commercial interests.

Yet, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, the lesson from the correct choice made on China is in danger of getting lost. The rhetoric in some quarters in America and Europe for a tougher stance against Moscow is becoming shriller.

Little thought has been given to how the West lost Russia, a now-resurgent power that had during its period of decline in the 1990s eagerly sought to cozy up to the U.S. and Europe. Instead, turning a blind eye to the way the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is being expanded right up to Russia’s front yard and the U.S.-led action in engineering Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence last February, the new focus is on how to punish Moscow for recently intervening in Georgia and sponsoring the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The foreign policy-centered first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain stood out for the way each of the two U.S. presidential candidates spit fire on Russia, with not a single question being asked about an increasingly assertive China. It is as if the U.S., not content with setting up military bases and a missile-defense system in Russia’s periphery and seeking to encroach on Russia’s historical dependencies and protectorates, seems intent on rediscovering Moscow as an adversary.

A self-fulfilling prophesy that ushers in a second cold war can only damage long-term U.S. interests. Europe, whose interests are closely tied to peace and cooperation with Moscow, is sadly split and adrift on Russia.

If today there is a push for a policy of containment, it is not against China but against Russia. Even on the democracy issue, it is Russia, not China, that is the target of constant hectoring.

U.S. President George W. Bush, in fact, is leaving the White House in his father’s footsteps — with a China-friendly legacy. Nothing illustrates this better than the way he ignored the bloody suppression of the most-powerful Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule since 1959 and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It is thus little surprise that President Hu Jintao, in a telephonic conversation with Bush this month, praised the "good momentum" in U.S.-China relations established during the Bush presidency.

China’s rise has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an immense strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s was China’s gain. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades — a period that significantly has coincided with China’s ascension.

Whether Obama or McCain wins next month’s presidential election, America will continue to have closer economic and political engagement with China than with, say, India, the latest Indo-U.S. nuclear deal notwithstanding.

Today, the American economy is inextricably linked with China. The financial meltdown has only increased U.S. reliance on Chinese capital inflows, thus adding to China’s leverage, even if a possible American recession hits Chinese exports. With Chinese foreign-exchange reserves swelling by one-third in the past year to a world record $1.906 trillion at the end of September, China is better positioned than any other major economy to weather the current global financial crisis.

Any U.S.-led attempt to contain Russia may mesh well with China’s ambitions but can hardly contribute to international security. If engagement has helped create a more-open China, does it make sense to apply different standards to Russia, with Moscow’s 13-year effort to join the World Trade Organization now in jeopardy and the U.S.-Russian nuclear deal put on indefinite hold by Washington?

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

The world clearly is at a turning point

Posted on October 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Defining moment in world history

Long touted as the twin answer to all ills, democracy and markets today are under serious strain.

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times, October 16, 2008

Rising geopolitical risks have been underscored by today’s multiple global crises — from a severe global credit crunch and financial tumult to serious energy and food challenges.

Add to that the international failure to stem the spreading scourge of terrorism and the specter of a renewed Cold War arising from the deterioration in relations between the West and Russia since Moscow’s August retaliatory military intervention in Georgia and subsequent recognition of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

The world clearly is at a turning point, underscored by the ongoing tectonic shifts in political and economic power. Tinkering won’t help because the global crises cry out for fundamental changes in international rules and institutions.

That was the broad conclusion at the Oct. 6-8 World Policy Conference in Evian, France, attended by a number of heads of state or government, policymakers and intellectuals, including this writer. The common theme in many of the presentations was that the grave challenges the world faces today demand major fixes, including the revamping of the institutional structure.

If existing institutions are not adapted to the new power realities in the world, greater instability is likely to ensue. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy pointed out, a 21st-century world is saddled with 20th-century institutions. Consequently, there is great uncertainty over how to address the pressing challenges.

In addition to the imperative to enlarge the U.N. Security Council and the Group of Eight, the failing Bretton Woods system for governing monetary relations needs to be overhauled. The various crises have shown, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev highlighted, that no single power or institution can claim exclusive rights to set the rules.

Changing the international institutional structure, however, is no easy task. The existing institutions were born of crises and now represent entrenched interests of some players. It will be difficult to reform or replace them until a serious, sustained crisis makes change inescapable. The financial meltdown could be one such crisis that facilitates an overhaul of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund at a time when Asia and the Middle East have emerged as the world’s main creditors.

As the futile efforts to reform the Security Council for more than two decades illustrate, revamping any institution is a Herculean task. Even reforming the International Energy Agency is proving daunting. Meantime, great powers continue to impose their will on weaker nations or limit their freedom of action.

For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, democracy and markets have been touted as the twin answer to all ills, nationally and regionally. Today, both have come under serious strain.

Democracy is in retreat globally after the successes of the 1990s in spreading political freedoms to Eastern Europe and overturning dictatorships in Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. In fact, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The financial crisis, for its part, has helped turn free-market principles on their head.

After having dispensed one prescription to all — liberalize, privatize and emulate the Anglo-American practices of financial and corporate governance — the U.S. has taken the lead to precipitously embrace principles of financial socialism in the current crisis. The U.S. has swung from implicit faith in the power of markets to bailing out its troubled financial colossuses in a manner that seeks to keep the profits in private hands but nationalize the losses.

By palming off losses to the masses, the U.S. has not only backed away from its own model of capitalism, but also set in motion new practices that some European economies have been to quick to emulate. Nothing better illustrates the troubling turn of events than London’s use of an anti-terrorism law to freeze the British assets of an Icelandic bank.

The U.S.-government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bailout of AIG and moves to partially nationalize some banks mark the end of America’s trust-the-markets capitalism. Henceforth, the U.S. will have no face to preach laissez-faire capitalism.

In fact, the global financial mayhem has resulted from the excesses of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, symbolized by unbridled risk-taking, which created a liquidity problem before manifesting itself as a solvency problem.

The lesson: High living on borrowed Asian money is just not sustainable.

The gap between principle and practice, unfortunately, has also extended to the political-diplomatic realm. The West, for example, has supported the inviolability of international borders while contradictorily backing the right of self-determination.

Having sponsored Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence from Serbia in February 2008, the U.S. and some of its allies now find themselves in the awkward position of opposing the right of self-determination of the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — today self-declared independent entities under Russian protection. It is as if the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depends on which great power sponsors the action.

The present global fault lines and crises carry significant security risks. The most pressing challenges today are global in nature and thus demand international responses and solutions. Yet the representational deficit of the existing institutions and their inadequacy to play an effective and forward-looking approach has become glaring.

The events of September 2008 that set in motion the financial meltdown and now threaten global recession have proven no less significant than 9/11.

While 9/11 involved terrorist attacks on symbols of U.S. power, the events since last month are an insidious assault on U.S. financial might, which helps underpin America’s global strategic heft. Along with the other crises, they signal an end to the leadership role the U.S. has played economically and politically since World War II ended. The multiple crises are proof that America, with its own internal mess, is no longer able to play global guardian.

Until a new world order emerges, we will continue to live, to quote Sarkozy, in "a dysfunctional world with outdated set of rules." Only revamped institutions and new rules can deal with the root causes of the present crises, not just the symptoms.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

The Japan Times

How the Indian prime minister broke his promises to Parliament

Posted on October 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Parliament Ambushed

New Delhi has embraced a nuclear deal with no binding fuel-supply assurance; no operational reprocessing right; no permission to build strategic fuel reserves; no entitlement to take corrective measures; and no escape hatch from legal obligations. Worse, solemn commitments to Parliament stand jettisoned.

Brahma Chellaney

The Asian Age, October 15, 2008

Do promises made to Parliament have no sanctity? With the government hastily signing the flawed 123 Agreement with the US last weekend, it is important to recall Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurances that after having completed the negotiating process, he would bring the nuclear deal to Parliament and “abide” by its decision. But no sooner had the process been over than Singh proceeded to sign the 123 Agreement while sidelining Parliament.

This is what Singh had pledged in the Lok Sabha during the brief July session marred by the cash-for-votes scandal: “All I had asked our Left colleagues was: please allow us to go through the negotiating process and I will come to Parliament before operationalising the nuclear agreement. This simple courtesy which is essential for orderly functioning of any government worth the name, particularly with regard to the conduct of foreign policy, they were not willing to grant me”.

Earlier, at a June 30 book-release function at his official residence, Singh had elaborated on his pledge: “I have said it before, I will repeat it again, that you allow us to complete the process. Once the process is over, I will bring it before Parliament and abide by the House”.

Lest there be any ambiguity, he expanded: “I am not asking for something that the government should not be doing. I am only saying you allow me to complete the negotiations. I agree to come to Parliament before I proceed to operationalise. What can be more reasonable than this?” He then added: “All that I want is the authority to proceed with the process of negotiations through all the stages… If Parliament feels you have done some wrong, so be it”.

Singh had repeatedly promised to take Parliament into confidence before formalizing the deal. For instance, way back on March 10, 2006, he said in the Lok Sabha: “There should be no reason for anyone to doubt that anything will be done at the back of Parliament, or that we will do anything which would hurt the interests of the country as a whole”.

But that is precisely what he did — sign the 123 Agreement behind Parliament’s back, to the extent that he skipped its traditional monsoon session, setting a precedent that could be detrimental to the future of Indian democracy. Now any future government can skip a session of Parliament — or two — besides turning its back on the solemn promises it made to the legislative body.

The contrast between Singh and President George W. Bush in the way they handled the deal could not have been starker. From the time he introduced a legislative-waiver bill in March 2006 to last week’s signing ceremony, Bush worked in a spirit of bipartisanship, forging an impressive political consensus at home.

The Hyde Act was the product of such consensus-building and political co-option, with the administration holding closed-door briefings for lawmakers and allowing its three-and-a-half-page bill to be expanded to a 41-page litany of India-specific conditions. Bipartisan support also was the key to the recent passage of the ratification legislation, the “US-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act”, which imposes Hyde Act-plus obligations on India.

After the Senate approved this Hyde Act-plus legislation on October 1, Bush said: “I commend the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for their leadership in crafting this important bipartisan legislation”. The bipartisanship was on full display at the October 8 White House ceremony, when Bush signed that legislation into law in the presence of Democratic and Republican leaders.

By contrast, Singh’s approach was blatantly partisan, subordinating national interest to personal agenda. Although the deal has divided India like no other strategic issue since independence, Singh did not hold a single all-party meeting on the subject ever since he sprung the accord as a surprise on the nation in 2005. However, he was quick to hold more than one all-party meeting on the parallel summertime agitations that wracked Jammu and the Kashmir Valley.

In the long, tortuous process of deal-making, he went from one stage to the next by relying on a supine national media to help create a juggernaut of “inevitability”. At the same time, he meretriciously kept assuring the nation that he would build a broad political consensus.

Just two days after signing the agreement-in-principle on July 18, 2005, he said: “It goes without saying that we can move forward only on the basis of a broad national consensus”. On August 17, 2006, he told the Rajya Sabha: “Broad-based domestic consensus cutting across all sections in Parliament and outside will be necessary”. Subsequently, he reassured Parliament that he will “seek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken”.

Instead of any attempt at consensus-building, the nation witnessed a polarizing single-mindedness. The zealous partisanship only helped undermine India’s negotiating leverage.

The upshot was the progressive US attachment of tougher conditions at every stage. That partly resulted from U.S. bipartisan efforts to make the deal more palatable to the non-proliferation constituency. But the gradual attachment of more and more conditions also flowed from the belief in Washington that a deal-desperate Singh would accept such a final product, especially if its mortifying terms were cosmetically couched.

The US was so right. Just as Singh’s government had blithely picked on Bush’s December 2006 Hyde Act signing statement to claim relief from that Act’s grating conditions, it has now cited Bush’s statement signing the Hyde Act-plus legislation into law to assert an illusory reprieve.

But Bush’s statement last week could not have been clearer in underpinning the primacy of US law: “The bill I sign today approves the 123 Agreement I submitted to Congress — and establishes the legal framework for that agreement to come into effect. The bill makes clear that our agreement with India is consistent with the Atomic Energy Act and other elements of US law”.

It also makes plain that New Delhi has only a theoretical right to reprocess spent fuel and that the actual right “will be brought into effect upon conclusion of arrangements and procedures”, to be negotiated in the years ahead. And to help Singh spin reality at home, Bush said the new legislation “does not change the fuel assurance” as “recorded in the 123 Agreement” — without citing either his earlier statement that such a commitment is political, not legally binding, or the new legislation’s fuel-restrictive provisions, including Section 102(b)(2) that mandates limiting supply to “reasonable reactor operating requirements” and Section 102(b)(1) that requires that if the US terminates cooperation with India, it will ensure New Delhi does not secure supplies from “any other source”.

Put simply, India has no legally binding fuel-supply assurance; no operational reprocessing right; no permission to build strategic fuel reserves; no entitlement to take corrective measures, whatever the circumstance; and no escape hatch from the legal obligations it is assuming. All the key assurances Singh made in Parliament on August 17, 2006, thus stand jettisoned. Yet today he celebrates a deal that cannot survive the light of parliamentary scrutiny and sets a treacherous legacy.

History has a way of catching up with the truth. As a well-known proverb goes, “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small”.

Jakarta Post interview with Professor Brahma Chellaney

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Chellaney

Water, the future’s gold?

Jakarta Post, 09/30/2008

Attention is regularly paid to the energy crisis, especially in regards to world oil reserves — yet water continues to be taken for granted. Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, talked about averting water wars in Asia during a recent water seminar in Bali. He spoke with The Jakarta Post’s Stevie Emilia about the looming threat of the water crisis.

The Jakarta Post: It seems like the energy problem gets more attention than the water crisis. What are your thoughts?

Chellaney: If you look at the world 25 years ago, people did not believe that energy would become a major concern internationally, that there would be competition for energy, and that energy sources would become scarce.

The issue 25 years ago was about the price of oil, not about oil scarcity, not about demand outstripping supply. People thought that more and more oil would be discovered and there would be enough oil for all of us until new technology was developed for generating energy, especially technology to harness nature to generate electricity, for example.

It is similar about water today. We take water for granted. We do not recognize that many parts of the world are experiencing water scarcity, especially in Asia.

Large parts of Asia are water-stressed and unless this issue is taken seriously and we manage over water resources wisely, I think in years to come we will face acute water scarcity that will affect our economic development and in turn, other aspects in our life — from public health to sanitation.

Are you suggesting the water problem be given more attention?

You see, the battle 50 years ago was fought over land. The battle of today is over energy. The battle of tomorrow will be fought over water.

So the question is, do we wait until tomorrow arrives or do we prepare to address water issues today in a more sensible way because to some extent, the water scarcity is caused by poor water management by countries.

Will there be any alternatives?

This is the big difference between energy and water. If the energy supplies stop, the economy stops. If water supplies stop, then life itself stops because water is essential to our very existence. It is essential to good health, it is essential for the economy. Without water, we cannot survive.

We have developed technology to harness nature, there is wind power, solar power and geothermal energy, but for water, we have no such substitute. Water is irreplaceable. So sensibly conserving water, recycling water, rainwater harvesting and drinking water management are the only choices we have. We have no other options.

What is the water situation in Asia today?

Per capita availability of water in Asia today is rivalling water scarcity in the Middle East. People do not realize this. Water scarcity in the Middle East is acute. In Asia, uneven distribution of water makes per capita availability of water in countries like China and India almost close to water scarcity in the Middle East.

Do you think Asians are aware of such a fact? I don’t think so, because water is an issue which is looked at on a sub-regional or sub-national level. Water scarcity in Thailand, for instance, is already an issue there, but it is not an issue that the whole of Thailand is looking at. The situation is similar in India.

People take water for granted. Sadly, water is not priced properly. There is no market price for water.

Water will become an increasingly competitive commodity. There will be competition for water sources, competition within countries and between countries. This can create potential for water-related tension and water conflicts. Water insecurity in general is a factor that will create instability and tension.

How can a water crisis trigger a war?

Some countries are located upstream on international rivers and such countries have the control over the water sources.

They can, for instance, fashion water into a weapon against countries located downstream. They can do it by building dams, canals and other facilities that divert waters or help to control water flow to a co-riparian state.

How can we avert a water war in Asia?

There are three things that can be done. First is to efficiently manage water resources by looking at long-term implications of water and security. Water management will have to be an important policy priority. As part of water management, we’ll have to look at water conservation, water efficiency, recycling and rainwater harvesting.

Second is to build institutional cooperation over the sharing of international rivers — there are 57 interstate river basins in Asia — to ensure there will be no conflicts over sharing of river waters from interstate basins.

Third is to set international rules to govern shared water resources. At present, international law is very weak, almost nonexistent on water issues. We need to create international norms or international legal principles on issues like sharing of water from interstate rivers and aquifers.

When should we start doing these three things?

We have to start doing these things because if we do not grapple with these issues now, then in 10 to 15 years from now, water-security issues will become a very destabilizing factor in Asia.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/09/30/water-future039s-gold.html

U.S. Congress approves nuclear deal with India

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Chellaney

India saddled with a misbegotten deal

Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad, October 10, 2008

As illustrated by the Senate vote, the United States has pursued the civil nuclear deal with India through a strong bipartisan consensus at home. By contrast, the Indian Parliament has not only been sidelined — with the government skipping the traditional monsoon session — but also the deal is being thrust on the Indian nation in a blatantly partisan manner, making it a highly divisive issue.

With the Senate vote, the U.S. congressional ratification process is over, but the deal can be brought into force only after the U.S. President has fulfilled requirements specified in the ratification legislation titled, United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act (full text below, with significant sections highlighted in red).

Before exchanging diplomatic notes to bring the deal into effect, the President has to certify to Congress that “it is the policy of the United States to work with members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), individually and collectively, to agree to further restrict the transfers of equipment and technology related to the enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel” [Section 204a].

Contrast this with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s solemn assurance to Parliament about the “removal of restrictions on all aspects of cooperation and technology transfers pertaining to civil nuclear energy, ranging from nuclear fuel, nuclear reactors, to reprocessing spent fuel.” Lest there be any ambiguity regarding this benchmark, he added: “We will not agree to any dilution that would prevent us from securing the benefits of full civil nuclear cooperation as amplified above.” He had said: “The central imperative in our discussions with the United State on civil nuclear cooperation is to ensure the complete and irreversible removal of existing restrictions imposed on India through iniquitous restrictive trading regimes over the years.” In fact, the Prime Minister had even pledged in Parliament: “Before voluntarily placing our civilian facilities under IAEA safeguards, we will ensure all restrictions on India have been lifted.” That pledge he is set to break.

The United States has come full circle: Having initiated a penal approach against India following the 1974 test, the U.S. has now created a special exemption for India from the very rules Washington helped fashion to punish India.

For India, the proffered deal raises troubling questions. It does not come with basic elements that any recipient state would want.

India has no assured fuel-supply guarantee. The United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act reaffirms that the fuel-supply assurances in the 123 agreement are “political commitments,” not legal assurances, as the U.S. President himself has attested.

Moreover, Section 102(b)(2) of this Act mandates that “any nuclear power reactor fuel reserve provided to the Government of India for use in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities should be commensurate with reasonable reactor operating requirements.”

It also states that “in the event that nuclear transfers to India are suspended or terminated pursuant to title I of such Act (22 U.S.C. 8001 et seq.), the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2011 et seq.), or any other United States law, it is the policy of the United States to seek to prevent the transfer to India of nuclear equipment, materials, or technology from other participating governments in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) or from any other source” [Section 102(b)(1)].

So, if the U.S. terminates cooperation with India, it will seek to ensure that New Delhi cannot secure supplies from “any other source.”

India has been granted no upfront reprocessing right, with the U.S. Congress empowering itself to carefully scrutinize any subsequent reprocessing-related arrangements with New Delhi. The title of Section 201 of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act is self-explanatory: “Procedures Regarding A Subsequent Arrangement on Reprocessing.”

Not only has Congress asserted its right to reject any subsequent arrangements to grant India the right to reprocess spent fuel [Section 201(c)], but also demanded from the President “a certification that the United States will pursue efforts to ensure that any other nation that permits India to reprocess or otherwise alter in form or content nuclear material that the nation has transferred to India or nuclear material and by-product material used in or produced through the use of nuclear material, non-nuclear material, or equipment that it has transferred to India requires India to do so under similar arrangements and procedures” [Section 201(b)(1)(c)].

India has inexplicably agreed to negotiate a separate Section 131 agreement on reprocessing later — an accord that will need to pass congressional muster — although Washington granted Japan and EURATOM the actual right to reprocess upfront in a 123 agreement. For example, the 1987 Japan-U.S. 123 accord was accompanied by a nine-page “implementing agreement” that gave effect to “advance, long-term consent for reprocessing, transfers, alteration and storage of nuclear material” by spelling out the reprocessing-related arrangements.

In fact, New Delhi has gratuitously agreed to route all “foreign nuclear material” through a new reprocessing facility. Now, the U.S. Congress is seeking to ensure that other supplier-states like France and Russia do not grant India a reprocessing right on terms less stringent than the U.S.

The ratification legislation strips the sanctity of the bilateral 123 Agreement by making it completely subservient to U.S. law. As the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act puts it: “Nothing in the Agreement shall be construed to supersede the legal requirements of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 or the Atomic Energy Act of 1954” [Section 102(d)]. In all fairness, it must be admitted that the United States for decades has held the position that a 123 agreement with any state is neither a treaty nor has force under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (which the U.S. hasn’t even ratified). After all, a 123 agreement is a requirement not under international law but under U.S. law.

In any event, the 123 agreement India has negotiated with the U.S. grants Washington an unfettered right to suspend all supplies forthwith. The 123 agreement only demands the serving of a one-year termination notice on any ground, however extraneous. Suspension of supplies can follow immediately. For the U.S., such an unconstrained right was vital to tether New Delhi to the eclectic non-proliferation conditions the deal imposes.

The deal on offer creates a Tarapur-style trap of gigantic dimensions. In fact, the latest United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act specifically empowers the U.S. to do what it did in 1978 — retroactively rewrite the rules of cooperation with India by enacting a new domestic law. Section 101(b) affirms that the agreement with India shall be subject not only to the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act but also to “any other applicable United States law.”

The notion that India can build energy “security” through imports of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors is an absurdity.

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 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.

Nuclear 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.

Three factors are likely to discourage private investment in Indian nuclear power. The first is the deal’s messy terms. The second is the political uncertainty in India, where national elections are approaching. The commercial deals will take long to finalize, but several parties have vowed to review or renegotiate the deal if voted to power.

Yet another factor is the continuing disarray that marks the Indian electricity market and energy policy. The nuclear-power industry in India is state run and subsists on generous government subsidies. But even the subsidized price of nuclear electricity is higher than the cost from most other energy sources. It is not clear to what extent the next Indian government will be able to guarantee similar subsidies or provide full accident-liability and regulatory-delay cover to encourage private investment at a time when the country is trying to promote electricity-market liberalization. In fact, to allow private players in the nuclear-power industry, India will have to amend its Atomic Energy Act in a process that would subject the deal finally to some parliamentary scrutiny, even if belatedly.

Official text of U.S. legislation ratifying civil nuclear deal with India

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Chellaney

United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and

Nonproliferation Enhancement Act

Passed the House of Representatives September 27, 2008, and the Senate October 1, 2008.

Beginning

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE AND TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Sec. 1. Short title and table of contents.

SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.

TITLE I–APPROVAL OF UNITED STATES-INDIA AGREEMENT FOR COOPERATION ON PEACEFUL USES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

SEC. 101. APPROVAL OF AGREEMENT.

SEC. 102. DECLARATIONS OF POLICY; CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENT; RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.

SEC. 103. ADDITIONAL PROTOCOL BETWEEN INDIA AND THE IAEA.

SEC. 104. IMPLEMENTATION OF SAFEGUARDS AGREEMENT BETWEEN INDIA AND THE IAEA.

SEC. 105. MODIFIED REPORTING TO CONGRESS.

TITLE II–STRENGTHENING UNITED STATES NONPROLIFERATION LAW RELATING TO PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION

SEC. 201. PROCEDURES REGARDING A SUBSEQUENT ARRANGEMENT ON REPROCESSING.

SEC. 202. INITIATIVES AND NEGOTIATIONS RELATING TO AGREEMENTS FOR PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION.

SEC. 203. ACTIONS REQUIRED FOR RESUMPTION OF PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION.

SEC. 205. CONFORMING AMENDMENTS.

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE AND TABLE OF CONTENTS.

(a) Short Title- This Act may be cited as the `United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act’.

(b) Table of Contents- The table of contents for this Act is as follows:

Sec. 1. Short title and table of contents.

Sec. 2. Definitions.

TITLE I–APPROVAL OF UNITED STATES-INDIA AGREEMENT FOR COOPERATION ON PEACEFUL USES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

Sec. 101. Approval of Agreement.

Sec. 102. Declarations of policy; certification requirement; rule of construction.

Sec. 103. Additional Protocol between India and the IAEA.

Sec. 104. Implementation of Safeguards Agreement between India and the IAEA.

Sec. 105. Modified reporting to Congress.

TITLE II–STRENGTHENING UNITED STATES NONPROLIFERATION LAW RELATING TO PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION

Sec. 201. Procedures regarding a subsequent arrangement on reprocessing.

Sec. 202. Initiatives and negotiations relating to agreements for peaceful nuclear cooperation.

Sec. 203. Actions required for resumption of peaceful nuclear cooperation.

Sec. 204. United States Government policy at the Nuclear Suppliers Group to strengthen the international nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Sec. 205. Conforming amendments.

SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act:

(1) AGREEMENT- The term `United States-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy’ or `Agreement’ means the Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of India Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy that was transmitted to Congress by the President on September 10, 2008.

(2) APPROPRIATE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES- The term `appropriate congressional committees’ means the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate.

TITLE I–APPROVAL OF UNITED STATES-INDIA AGREEMENT FOR COOPERATION ON PEACEFUL USES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

SEC. 101. APPROVAL OF AGREEMENT.

(a) In General- Notwithstanding the provisions for congressional consideration and approval of a proposed agreement for cooperation in section 123 b. and d. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2153 (b) and (d)), Congress hereby approves the United States-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, subject to subsection (b).

(b) Applicability of Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Hyde Act, and Other Provisions of Law- The Agreement shall be subject to the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2011 et seq.), the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (22 U.S.C. 8001 et. seq; Public Law 109-401), and any other applicable United States law as if the Agreement had been approved pursuant to the provisions for congressional consideration and approval of a proposed agreement for cooperation in section 123 b. and d. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

(c) Sunset of Exemption Authority Under Hyde Act- Section 104(f) of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (22 U.S.C. 8003(f)) is amended by striking `the enactment of’ and all that follows through `agreement’ and inserting `the date of the enactment of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act’.

SEC. 102. DECLARATIONS OF POLICY; CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENT; RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.

(a) Declarations of Policy Relating to Meaning and Legal Effect of Agreement- Congress declares that it is the understanding of the United States that the provisions of the United States-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy have the meanings conveyed in the authoritative representations provided by the President and his representatives to the Congress and its committees prior to September 20, 2008, regarding the meaning and legal effect of the Agreement.

(b) Declarations of Policy Relating to Transfer of Nuclear Equipment, Materials, and Technology to India- Congress makes the following declarations of policy:

(1) Pursuant to section 103(a)(6) of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (22 U.S.C. 8002(a)(6)), in the event that nuclear transfers to India are suspended or terminated pursuant to title I of such Act (22 U.S.C. 8001 et seq.), the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2011 et seq.), or any other United States law, it is the policy of the United States to seek to prevent the transfer to India of nuclear equipment, materials, or technology from other participating governments in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) or from any other source.

(2) Pursuant to section 103(b)(10) of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (22 U.S.C. 8002(b)(10)), any nuclear power reactor fuel reserve provided to the Government of India for use in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities should be commensurate with reasonable reactor operating requirements.

(c) Certification Requirement- Before exchanging diplomatic notes pursuant to Article 16(1) of the Agreement, the President shall certify to Congress that entry into force and implementation of the Agreement pursuant to its terms is consistent with the obligation of the United States under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, done at Washington, London, and Moscow July 1, 1968, and entered into force March 5, 1970 (commonly known as the `Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’), not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce India to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

(d) Rule of Construction- Nothing in the Agreement shall be construed to supersede the legal requirements of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 or the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

SEC. 103. ADDITIONAL PROTOCOL BETWEEN INDIA AND THE IAEA.

Congress urges the Government of India to sign and adhere to an Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), consistent with IAEA principles, practices, and policies, at the earliest possible date.

SEC. 104. IMPLEMENTATION OF SAFEGUARDS AGREEMENT BETWEEN INDIA AND THE IAEA.

Licenses may be issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for transfers pursuant to the Agreement only after the President determines and certifies to Congress that–

(1) the Agreement Between the Government of India and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of Safeguards to Civilian Nuclear Facilities, as approved by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency on August 1, 2008 (the `Safeguards Agreement’), has entered into force; and

(2) the Government of India has filed a declaration of facilities pursuant to paragraph 13 of the Safeguards Agreement that is not materially inconsistent with the facilities and schedule described in paragraph 14 of the separation plan presented in the national parliament of India on May 11, 2006, taking into account the later initiation of safeguards than was anticipated in the separation plan.

SEC. 105. MODIFIED REPORTING TO CONGRESS.

(a) Information on Nuclear Activities of India- Subsection (g)(1) of section 104 of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (22 U.S.C. 8003) is amended–

(1) by redesignating subparagraphs (B), (C), and (D) as subparagraphs (C), (D), and (E), respectively; and

(2) by inserting after subparagraph (A) the following new subparagraph:

`(B) any material inconsistencies between the content or timeliness of notifications by the Government of India pursuant to paragraph 14(a) of the Safeguards Agreement and the facilities and schedule described in paragraph (14) of the separation plan presented in the national parliament of India on May 11, 2006, taking into account the later initiation of safeguards than was anticipated in the separation plan;’.

(b) Implementation and Compliance Report- Subsection (g)(2) of such section is amended–

(1) in subparagraph (K)(iv), by striking `and’ at the end;

(2) in subparagraph (L), by striking the period at the end and inserting `; and’; and

(3) by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:

`(M) with respect to the United States-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy (hereinafter in this subparagraph referred to as the `Agreement’) approved under section 101(a) of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act–

`(i) a listing of–

`(I) all provision of sensitive nuclear technology to India, and other such information as may be so designated by the United States or India under Article 1(Q); and

`(II) all facilities in India notified pursuant to Article 7(1) of the Agreement;

`(ii) a description of–

`(I) any agreed safeguards or any other form of verification for by-product material decided by mutual agreement pursuant to the terms of Article 1(A) of the Agreement;

`(II) research and development undertaken in such areas as may be agreed between the United States and India as detailed in Article 2(2)(a.) of the Agreement;

`(III) the civil nuclear cooperation activities undertaken under Article 2(2)(d.) of the Agreement;

`(IV) any United States efforts to help India develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel as called for in Article 2(2)(e.) of the Agreement;

`(V) any United States efforts to fulfill political commitments made in Article 5(6) of the Agreement;

`(VI) any negotiations that have occurred or are ongoing under Article 6(iii.) of the Agreement; and

`(VII) any transfers beyond the territorial jurisdiction of India pursuant to Article 7(2) of the Agreement, including a listing of the receiving country of each such transfer;

`(iii) an analysis of–

`(I) any instances in which the United States or India requested consultations arising from concerns over compliance with the provisions of Article 7(1) of the Agreement, and the results of such consultations; and

`(II) any matters not otherwise identified in this report that have become the subject of consultations pursuant to Article 13(2) of the Agreement, and a statement as to whether such matters were resolved by the end of the reporting period; and

`(iv) a statement as to whether–

`(I) any consultations are expected to occur under Article 16(5) of the Agreement; and

`(II) any enrichment is being carried out pursuant to Article 6 of the Agreement.’.

TITLE II–STRENGTHENING UNITED STATES NONPROLIFERATION LAW RELATING TO PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION

SEC. 201. PROCEDURES REGARDING A SUBSEQUENT ARRANGEMENT ON REPROCESSING.

(a) In General- Notwithstanding section 131 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2160), no proposed subsequent arrangement concerning arrangements and procedures regarding reprocessing or other alteration in form or content, as provided for in Article 6 of the Agreement, shall take effect until the requirements specified in subsection (b) are met.

(b) Requirements- The requirements referred to in subsection (a) are the following:

(1) The President transmits to the appropriate congressional committees a report containing–

(A) the reasons for entering into such proposed subsequent arrangement;

(B) a detailed description, including the text, of such proposed subsequent arrangement; and

(C) a certification that the United States will pursue efforts to ensure that any other nation that permits India to reprocess or otherwise alter in form or content nuclear material that the nation has transferred to India or nuclear material and by-product material used in or produced through the use of nuclear material, non-nuclear material, or equipment that it has transferred to India requires India to do so under similar arrangements and procedures.

(2) A period of 30 days of continuous session (as defined by section 130 g.(2) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2159 (g)(2)) has elapsed after transmittal of the report required under paragraph (1).

(c) Resolution of Disapproval- Notwithstanding the requirements in subsection (b) having been met, a subsequent arrangement referred to in subsection (a) shall not become effective if during the time specified in subsection (b)(2), Congress adopts, and there is enacted, a joint resolution stating in substance that Congress does not favor such subsequent arrangement. Any such resolution shall be considered pursuant to the procedures set forth in section 130 i. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2159 (i)), as amended by section 205 of this Act.

SEC. 202. INITIATIVES AND NEGOTIATIONS RELATING TO AGREEMENTS FOR PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION.

Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2153) is amended by adding at the end the following:

`e. The President shall keep the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate fully and currently informed of any initiative or negotiations relating to a new or amended agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation pursuant to this section (except an agreement arranged pursuant to section 91 c., 144 b., 144 c., or 144 d., or an amendment thereto).’.

SEC. 203. ACTIONS REQUIRED FOR RESUMPTION OF PEACEFUL NUCLEAR COOPERATION.

Section 129 a. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2158 (a)) is amended by striking `Congress adopts a concurrent resolution’ and inserting `Congress adopts, and there is enacted, a joint resolution’.

SEC. 204. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT POLICY AT THE NUCLEAR SUPPLIERS GROUP TO STRENGTHEN THE INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION REGIME.

(a) Certification- Before exchanging diplomatic notes pursuant to Article 16(1) of the Agreement, the President shall certify to the appropriate congressional committees that it is the policy of the United States to work with members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), individually and collectively, to agree to further restrict the transfers of equipment and technology related to the enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

(b) Peaceful Use Assurances for Certain By-Product Material- The President shall seek to achieve, by the earliest possible date, either within the NSG or with relevant NSG Participating Governments, the adoption of principles, reporting, and exchanges of information as may be appropriate to assure peaceful use and accounting of by-product material in a manner that is substantially equivalent to the relevant provisions of the Agreement.

(1) IN GENERAL- Not later than six months after the date of the enactment of this Act, and every six months thereafter, the President shall transmit to the appropriate congressional committees a report on efforts by the United States pursuant to subsections (a) and (b).

(2) TERMINATION- The requirement to transmit the report under paragraph (1) terminates on the date on which the President transmits a report pursuant to such paragraph stating that the objectives in subsections (a) and (b) have been achieved.

SEC. 205. CONFORMING AMENDMENTS.

Section 130 i. of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2159 (i)) is amended–

(1) in paragraph (1), by striking `means a joint resolution’ and all that follows through `, with the date’ and inserting the following: `means–

`(A) for an agreement for cooperation pursuant to section 123 of this Act, a joint resolution, the matter after the resolving clause of which is as follows: `That the Congress (does or does not) favor the proposed agreement for cooperation transmitted to the Congress by the President on XXXXX .’,

`(B) for a determination under section 129 of this Act, a joint resolution, the matter after the resolving clause of which is as follows: `That the Congress does not favor the determination transmitted to the Congress by the President on XXXXX .’, or

`(C) for a subsequent arrangement under section 201 of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, a joint resolution, the matter after the resolving clause of which is as follows: `That the Congress does not favor the subsequent arrangement to the Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of India Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy that was transmitted to Congress by the President on September 10, 2008.’,

with the date’; and

(2) in paragraph (4)–

(A) by inserting after `45 days after its introduction’ the following `(or in the case of a joint resolution related to a subsequent arrangement under section 201 of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, 15 days after its introduction)’; and

(B) by inserting after `45-day period’ the following: `(or in the case of a joint resolution related to a subsequent arrangement under section 201 of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act, 15-day period)’.

Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate.

Water, the potential new battleground in Asia

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Chellaney

Averting Asian water wars

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

As the most pressing resource, water holds the strategic key to peace, public health and prosperity. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look more real than in Asia.

According to a 2006 U.N. report, Asia has less fresh water than any other continent other than Antarctica. In that light, water is emerging as a key challenge for long-term Asian peace and stability.

Although water covers two-thirds of Earth, much of it is too salty for use. Barely 2.5 percent of the world’s water is potentially potable, but two-thirds of that is locked up in the polar icecaps and glaciers. So, less than 1 percent of the total global water is available for consumption by humans and other species.

These freshwater reserves are concentrated in mountain snows, lakes, aquifers and rivers. Already, 1.5 billion people lack ready access to potable water, and 2.5 billion people have no water sanitation services.

In Asia, deforestation, poor management of river basins, environmentally unsustainable irrigation, overuse of groundwater and contamination of water sources have all helped aggravate water woes. The over-exploitation of subterranean water has resulted in a falling water table in several parts of Asia.

Depleting groundwater irreplaceably can dry up wetlands and lakes that depend on such sources. Saline seawater can flow in to replace the fresh water that has been pumped out, as is happening in some Asian coastal areas. In the Gangetic Delta, wells have tapped into naturally occurring arsenic deposits, leading to tens of millions of people in eastern India and Bangladesh being exposed to high levels of arsenic in drinking water and staple agricultural products like rice.

In fact, access to water illustrates the divide today between the rich and the poor in Asia. While the poor struggle to get basic access to water for their daily consumption and household chores, the rich now largely rely on bottled drinking water.

The quality and quantity of available fresh water indeed is becoming a critical component of Asian security-related challenges. Increasingly, dams built on transnational rivers are spurring interstate friction. If wars in the future are to be averted over these and other hydro-engineering projects, international norms and rules will have to be evolved.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears as the biggest flash point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrologic data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. The very future of some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion, frequent storm-related flooding and the climate change-driven rise of ocean levels. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, the world’s seventh-most populous nation faces the specter of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita availability, the scarcity in the Middle East.

Their rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute water scarcity if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages indeed threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except the Ganges is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems.

Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a line for much of an entire continent.

Through its control over Tibet, China controls the ecological viability of several major river systems tied to southern and southeastern Asia. But today, China is toying with massive interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects starting from the Tibetan plateau.

Its ongoing "Great South-North Water Transfer Project" is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through man-made canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist who owes his swift rise in the Communist Party hierarchy to the brutal martial-law crackdown he carried out in Tibet in 1989.

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity "threatens the very survival of the Chinese nation." But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong River basin, for example, can only become worse as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

While making halfhearted attempts to staunch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of River Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs.

A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters would begin no sooner than China began to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend.

Asia will continue to have the largest number of people without basic or adequate access to water. Such water stress in the face of rising demand and poor water management will sharpen competition between urban and rural areas, between neighboring provinces and between nations. As global warming accelerates, local, national and interstate disputes over water will become increasingly common in Asia, making cooperative institutional mechanisms over water resources essential within and between states.

Clearly, the way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbors. Such institutional arrangements ought to center on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of transboundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border water flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal rivers) are founded on such principles.

In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace would be the casualty in Asia if water became the new battleground. In the ominous words of Wang Shucheng, China’s former minister of water resources: "To fight for every drop of water or die, that is the challenge facing China."

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The Japan Times: Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

Coping Strategically With Climate Change

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Chellaney

Treat Climate Change As Matter of Security

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, October 1-14, 2008

Unlike other unconventional challenges the world faces, climate change is caused not by hostile forces but by our production and consumption patterns. For long, global warming had not been taken seriously, and even the few who did see its threat potential, viewed the matter as simply an environmental or economic issue. Today the silver lining is the ongoing attitudinal shift one sees in countries — from the United States and Australia, to China and Brazil. A prerequisite to any policy shift is an attitudinal shift. In the coming years, we will, hopefully, see policy shifting both at the national and international levels to help promote climate security.

Of course, without a change in U.S. policy, no international counteraction plan can emerge. Given President George W. Bush’s history of obstructionism on this issue despite a grudging admission by him of the human-induced causes of global warming, a more forward-looking U.S. approach would have to await a change of administration in Washington. In the developing world, the attitudinal shift is mirrored in the decision by a number of states to go in for energy-efficiency measures and climate-friendly technologies. The national action plans unveiled by China and India reflect this attitudinal shift. Limiting the scale of the climate problem is paramount. But as history testifies, action does not begin until a widely recognized crisis dawns on the world. And when that happens, it is the political ideas already around that get embraced. So now is a good time to begun formulating practicable proposals to combat climate change.

Fortunately, there is now greater clarity in the world on what needs to be controlled in order to protect the climate. The science of climate change is better developed, although it remains young, with some issues still unsettled. The economics of combating climate change is also now better understood, with the cost-benefit ratio clearly in favour of undertaking counteraction now. It is the politics that continues to lag behind, even as carbon emissions continue to grow 1.8 per cent annually. If the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were to be capped by 2030 at 400 parts per million so that the average temperature does not rise beyond 2 degrees Celsius, then concerted global action cannot be put off indefinitely.

Climate policy alone, however, will not solve the climate crisis. Unless we address energy issues, we cannot effectively combat climate change. Today, four-fifths of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels — coal, oil, natural gas. Given that nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse-gas emissions are due to the way we produce and use energy, we need to focus more on alternate energy policies. This imperative is also being underlined by the manner interstate competition over energy resources is noticeably influencing strategic thinking and military planning. Until we can either replace fossil fuels with cost-effective renewables or other alternative technologies or find practical ways to capture C0² emissions, the world would remain wedded to the fossil-fuel age.

While the reluctance of the rich countries to accept any diminution in their lifestyle comforts is understandable, there is a need to go beyond symbolic approaches. The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, has accomplished little more than re-jigger emission rights between the developed and developing worlds.

The hope was that such carbon trading would allow emission cuts to happen where they are the cheapest. But the evidence thus far is that it has done little more than provide a greener reputation to the states promoting the scheme. The global market in carbon trading now is nearing $40 billion. The bulk of the carbon trading involves the sale of allowances under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme.

To deal with its strategic implications, climate change needs to be embraced as a national security issue — but not in the way the Pentagon has toyed with the development of weather-modification technologies for military applications. Countries, especially in the developing world, ought to start seriously looking at ways they can innovate and get along in a climate change-driven paradigm. It will become imperative to build greater institutional and organizational capacity, along with efficient water management, early warning systems and new farm varieties.

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

India’s retarded nuclear deterrent

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Chellaney

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