India’s Prized Right, at What Cost?

The U.S.-India civil nuclear partnership is in the throes of what one can characterize as labor pangs. The Hindu reported that officials from the two states are at an impasse regarding India’s right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The Hyde Act (discussed below), now being deliberated in Congress, is the enabling legislation for the nuclear partnership. In this bill, the U.S. would prefer to restrict India’s ability to reprocess spent uranium. A byproduct arising from this process is weapons-grade material. India argues that it has a right to reprocess fuel and has offered to place such a facility under “international safeguards”.  It further argues that the July 2005 joint-statement declaring the partnership contemplated such a right and that the U.S. now seeks to dilute it significantly. One way the Hyde Act attempts this is by requiring U.S. presidential certification for reprocessing a plant’s fuel. Not at all bashful, several high-level nuclear scientists in India have dug their heels in the ground and demonstrated a troubling fervor with which they’re willing to defend this right. One scientist quoted in the Hindu expressed his frustration with the Hyde Act and its implications:

“Here is another example that the U.S. remains bound by its terms and intends to invoke them to bludgeon India into agreeing [to the Act's terms]“.

Although India agreed to maintain a moratorium on weapons-testing, officials seem to want a stockpile of weapons-grade material as a safety net.

Pakistan Who?

In related news, the Guardian and several other news agencies reported that Pakistan is building a third plutonium reactor according to satellite images of Khushab, a town 100 miles south of Islamabad. Plutonium weapons pack a greater explosive charge than their uranium counterparts and are delivered in a relatively compact vessel. In a report authored by the Washington-based Institute of Science and International Security, David Albright, a former U.N. inspector, warned that this development should be viewed as an indication of Pakistan’s intent to accelerate its weapons proliferation and usher in a generation of enhanced nuclear strike capability. New Delhi shrugged off the report as another attempt by the partisan non-proliferation camp to stir up more controversey around the Indian nuclear partnership with Washington. A former director of India’s Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), K. Santhanam, was quoted in the Hindustan Times as saying,

“[The civil nuclear partnership] and suggestions of an arms race is a complete non-sequitur,–There is no connection with this and the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. This is part of the non-proliferation, ayatollah brigade jargon.”

 For its part, Pakistan maintains that it is pursuing this program for peaceful purposes according to an official who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. In short, we can expect more of the same from both of these regional rivals who exhibited strikingly similar behavior while on the road to nuclear-weaponhood. Also present for this chapter is the United States and a flabbergasted Western world that can’t seem to squelch its hunger for money even when faced with the most perilious of circumstances. A word of advice to Washington- back away slowly or demand that all of India’s spent fuel, past and present must come under complete IAEA safeguards in order for the deal to go forward.

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