Nuke Kids on the Block, Part II (The Hidden Friedman)

Tom Friedman takes a look at the US-India nuclear deal in Letting India Into the Club? (full column accessible to Times Select subscribers) and comes away with the same assessment as his NYTimes editorial cohorts--it stinks like 8-day old paneer cheese:

I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran. But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

What's the problem? India has never signed the N.P.T., which is the international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been very consistent: we do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country that has not signed the N.P.T. And since that included India, India could never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.

But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the U.S. eager to build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the Bush team wanted — rightly — to find a way to get India out of the corner it put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other 8 free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.

This is a troubling deal for two reasons. First, it could only undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yes, I know, the Bush team doesn't believe in treaties and says the treaty isn't restraining the rogues anyway. But this treaty is the legal basis by which we have been able to build coalitions against the nuclear rogues to restrain them from spreading W.M.D. One of the key legal bases for isolating Saddam Hussein was that he'd violated the N.P.T., which Iraq had signed. The legal basis by which we are building a coalition against Iran's going nuclear is the N.P.T. Under the N.P.T., we board ships suspected of carrying W.M.D. Japan, Brazil and Argentina all chose to forgo nuclear weapons to gain access to foreign nuclear technology by abiding by the N.P.T. What are they going to think if India gets a free pass?

What should we have done? Bob Einhorn, who has worked on nonproliferation for every administration since Nixon's, has the right idea: Tell India that it can have this deal — provided it does something hard that would clearly reinforce the global nonproliferation regime. And that would be halting all production of weapons-grade material, thereby capping India's stockpile of nuclear bomb ingredients where it is. That could be a lever to get Pakistan to do the same. The fewer bomb-making materials around, the less likely it is for any to fall into the hands of terrorists.

"The Bush administration proposed such a production cutoff in negotiations, but dropped the idea when India balked," Mr. Einhorn said. "India says it is willing to adopt the same responsibilities and practices as the other nuclear powers. It so happens that the five original nuclear powers — U.S., U.K., France, Russia and China — have all stopped producing fissile material for weapons. If we are going to bring India into the club, it should do so as well."