A legacy project

tauringhuang.

Sep 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Mourning an exemption that may defeat the rules


FOR India’s embattled prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and America’s soon-to-depart president, George Bush, the waiver for India agreed on September 6th by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is meant to build a lasting legacy: their own. Critics fear its real testament will be lasting damage to the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Hitherto NSG rules barred nuclear commerce with any country that had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or had not put all its nuclear industry under safeguards operated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear guardian. India, which rejects the NPT and has built and tested bombs, will do neither. Instead, in return for the NSG waiver it has merely promised to separate out some designated “civilian” nuclear reactors (the list has still to be formalised) for inspection.

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Some have opposed the deal outright, for undermining the NPT by giving nuclear India more rights than non-nuclear countries that have signed the treaty. Others, first America’s Congress and then a valiant rearguard of countries at the NSG, tried to attach damage-limiting conditions: that all nuclear trade with India should cease if it resumes nuclear testing; that nothing should be done to help India build up sufficient reactor-fuel stocks to ride out post-test sanctions; and that trade in especially sensitive skills and technologies for enriching uranium or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium (both useful in weapons-making) be explicitly banned.

The NSG waiver fails on all counts. It says only that nuclear sales can be for civilian nuclear facilities under safeguards (none of India’s existing enrichment or reprocessing operations is on the civilian list), though skills are easily transferable. It refers to a statement by Mr Singh that India will keep to its “voluntary” test moratorium. But that assurance is political, not legal, since India refuses to sign the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty; a future government might equally voluntarily decide to test again. India also refuses to cap its production of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium, as America, Britain, France, Russia and China have done.

A hard-fought agreement that the NSG operate unanimously has been overturned. Should India test again, India’s waiver will in effect let individual governments decide whether and how to curtail nuclear trade. That deal is done, whether or not Mr Bush wins a final nod from Congress before he steps down.