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India agreed to a cap on its nuclear arsenal?
India may have agreed secretly to what the country never agreed in the last thirty-five years. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance to US President George Bush on segregation of Indian civilian and military nuclear facilities makes it impossible for India to produce unlimited fissile material for the purpose of nuclear arsenal.
According to defense experts in India, by effecting a separation between civilian and nuclear facilities, India would in fact be agreeing to the basic provision of a future fissile material cut-off treaty even before an international treaty on that crucial subject is negotiated and put into effect by other nuclear weapon states.
Segregation of Indian civilian and military nuclear facilities will make India weaker compared to China. India’s nuclear arsenal is minuscule compared to that of America, Russia and China. This new agreement may never allow India to catch up. The simple fact is India under this new agreement cannot use fissile material for arsenals indiscriminately from all existing and future reactors.
Those familiar with the internal discussions inside the Bush Administration say US non-proliferation hardliners wanted a limit on the size of India’s nuclear weapons material as a precondition for civilian nuclear cooperation with India. At the political level, the American leadership recognized that such a precondition would be a non-starter and rejected it out of the negotiating framework.
Under the pact it is India’s sovereign right to define which of its facilities are civilian and which are military. The joint statement makes it clear that it is India’s call to first “identify” which are the civilian facilities and then “separate” them from the military program. The pact with the US obliges India only to “file” a notification with the International Atomic Energy Agency on what it considers are its civilian facilities.
Like other nuclear weapon states, India is under no obligation to spell out which of its facilities are “military”.
The language of the joint statement is plain enough to suggest that it is entirely up to India to choose which of its facilities it would put under “voluntary” international safeguards.
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