Nuke curbs a sore point

Non-proliferation is likely to be a major point of disagreement between India and the United States in the next five years and New Delhi will come under pressure to come on board with Washington’s views.

US president Barack Obama is a staunch believer in non-proliferation. He had moved an amendment to the Indo-US nuclear deal in Congress, but was persuaded to drop it and let it go through.

This is why prime minister Manmohan Singh was keen to get the nuclear deal sewed up before George Bush’s term ended, knowing that a Democratic administration would bring in amendments unacceptable to India.

Now that the nuclear deal is done, Washington will do its best to get New Delhi to become an integral member of the non-proliferation group. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the ambitious Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), are the three main items in the non-proliferation agenda. India has reservations on all three.

“We should work to realise a vision articulated by generations of Indians, Americans, and recently by president Obama, of a nuclear-free world. The civil nuclear agreement helped us get over our defining disagreement, and it should also serve as the foundation of a productive partnership on non-proliferation,’’ US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said at a conference in Washington on Wednesday ahead of her visit to India in July.
With the 2010 review conference of the CTBT in New York looming, pressure on India to come on board will increase. The US signed the CTBT during president Bill Clinton’s second term, but the Republican administration of George Bush was not keen on it; so the bill has to be ratified by Congress.

India has refused to sign the CTBT, saying the treaty, like the NPT, is an unequal document because the permanent Security Council members (the US, the UK, Russia, China and France) would retain their nuclear arsenals.

While New Delhi is committed to negotiating a multilateral FMCT, it again has reservations.

At the disarmament convention in Geneva earlier this month, Indian envoy Hamid Ali Rao made it clear that while New Delhi was willing to participate in the fissile negotiations, it would not accept obligations that hinder “strategic programme” research and development, or those that “place an undue burden on our military’s non-proscribed activities.”