LBJ School News Brief

The U.S.-India
nuclear deal was
an opportunity lost

Austin American-Statesman, March 10, 2006

James B. Steinberg, Dean, LBJ School of Public Affairs

The recent U.S.-India nuclear deal marks a watershed in our strategy toward non-proliferation.

For years, there has been a growing recognition that denial was simply an inadequate approach to India's (and Pakistan's) nuclear weapons program. India wasn't about to give up the bomb, U.S. sanctions were not achieving their objective, and there was little stomach to continue them.

The stalemate was proving a serious impediment to improving overall U.S.-India ties, which have important economic, political and strategic dimensions as India sheds it Nehruvian "non-aligned" past, frees up its economy and plays a growing role on the global stage. Beginning with President Clinton, and accelerating under President Bush, a search for a new framework was underway.

But the deal reached by the United States and India last week is not a new framework. Even if the deal generates short-term benefits in the U.S.-India relationship, it is simply the United States throwing up its hands in the face of a difficult problem — and in ways that will seriously undermine the longer-term effort to rein in the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons programs.

The problem is not so much the recognition that we need to come to grips with India's nuclear program. Rather, it's the failure to recognize that by agreeing to provide India with nuclear technology outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty "bargain" — no technology unless countries forego their right to build nuclear weapons — the Bush administration has abandoned the one incentive that states have to stay in the treaty. And it did it without providing an alternative framework to sustain the effort to control proliferation.

What was — and is — needed is to place the Indian deal in the context of a broader re-conceptualization of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which recognizes the necessity for broader international control over the production of fissile material, including material that India will continue to produce for its weapons program outside of International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

At last year's treaty review conference, the administration passed up a timely opportunity to offer proposals that would allow for a new approach — one that focuses on safeguarding fissile material through an internationalization of the "front" and "back" ends of the nuclear fuel cycle (the production of fissile and its disposal). Such an approach could be used to deal with the Iranian and North Korean demands for civilian nuclear programs.

Unfortunately, the message coming out of the recent U.S.-India agreement is that if you are determined enough to build a bomb, the world eventually will have to accept that reality and let you join the club. Some argue that it's possible to distinguish Iran from India on the (legitimate) grounds that one is a law-abiding democracy and the other a destabilizing supporter of terrorism.

But this distinction might not be terribly compelling to the mullahs, or even the ordinary Iranians, who will conclude that they might as well push ahead, suffer the short-term penalties associated with building nuclear weapons, and then negotiate their way back into the international community's good graces afterward.

If they do draw that conclusion, the policy choices left to the United States and its allies are unattractive indeed — acquiesce to Iran becoming a nuclear weapon state, or confront the unsatisfactory choices posed by the use of military force to disrupt Iran's program.

10 March 2006

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