The morality bomb

Both sides had hoped that a nuclear cooperation deal could be signed as the centrepiece of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper’s visit to India (November 15 to 18). 

Although this proved impossible, the two prime ministers did resolve all outstanding issues and announced the conclusion of the deal when they meet during the Commonwealth summit meeting in Trinidad and Tobago. But Australia still refuses to sell uranium to India because of the latter’s alleged violation of the global anti-nuclear norm.

This despite India remaining committed to nuclear abolition. It demands and supports a nuclear weapons convention that is truly universal, non-discriminatory between those who already have the bomb and others who do not, verifiable and enforceable. Canada and Australia have always sheltered under the US nuclear umbrella and support the continuation of the NPT so that the status quo of nuclear apartheid between the five powers who have the bomb with the NPT’s blessing and all others can be maintained indefinitely. At one time, Australia even allowed Britain to test on Australian territory.
And India should be ashamed of nuclear immorality while Canada and Australia pat themselves on the back for their virtuous nuclear purity?

Moreover, it is okay for uranium to be sold to China but not to India. Granted, India betrayed its earlier agreement with Canada in conducting the nuclear test of 1974. (True to its perverse tradition, India paid an international political and technology-denial price by testing but sacrificed the chance for security gains by insisting on the test having been peaceful and not weaponising. But that’s another story.) No amount of sophistry by New
Delhi can wash away the stain of having misappropriated Canadian technology.

This I get. But it is history. Ottawa should get over it and get on with building a broad-based relationship with today’s India. Canada needs India more than the other way round.

Leaving that aside, India has an impeccable record of not proliferating nuclear-sensitive material or skills to anyone else. China on the other hand is the willing source of Pakistan’s nuclearisation. Thomas Reed, a former nuclear weapons designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, secretary of the air force under presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and special assistant to president Ronald Reagan for national security policy, has claimed that Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon test was carried out for it by China on May 26, 1990. “We believe that during [Benazir] Bhutto’s term in office, the People’s Republic of China tested Pakistan’s first bomb for her in 1990. That’s why the Pakistanis were so quick to respond to the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. It only took them two weeks and three days.”

This was reported in the US News & World Report on January 2 this year. On November 13, a report in the Washington Post was appropriately headlined “A nuclear power’s act of proliferation.” It revealed that the “deliberate act of proliferation” by China began in earnest in 1982 with the transfer of weapons-grade uranium and a blueprint for making a bomb that China had already tested. Thus began the chain of proliferation that extended later to Iran and Libya.

And China is to be sold uranium and co-opted into the group that will lecture India on nonproliferation responsibility and act as an enforcer of the international nuclear order? And US president Barack Obama has the temerity — or is it ignorance — to seek China’s help in resolving India-Pakistan relations when Beijing has stoked the fires of subcontinental rivalry with nuclear-tipped tongs?

Am I missing something?

The arms control NGO lobby has campaigned loudly and actively against the civil nuclear cooperation deal with India unless and until India signs the NPT as a non-nuclear power.  This is also what Security Council resolution 1887 (24 September) demanded. Excuse me? The country that exercised restraint for the longest period should be ostracised and punished by those that committed the nuclear sin much earlier?

If the bomb is intrinsically bad, it should be banned for all. No qualifications, no caveats, no delays, no ifs and buts. If it can be justified on national security grounds for some and not others, India, China, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, Iran and the US will make the cut, but not Britain and France.

The NGO activists are so convinced of their moral rectitude that they fail to spot their intellectual laziness in painting India as the nuclear villain. Logical clarity and moral courage might point them towards supporting India’s call for serious nuclear abolition talks to begin now, for all. And governments should recalibrate relations with India based on enduring interests, not self-serving and selective morality. Australia should follow Canada in lifting restrictions on uranium sales to India.