08-30-2008, 12:34 AM
<b>Sunk deal</b>â¦
<i>Unless the PM is prepared to sell-out on the Indian deterrent, says N.V.Subramanian.</i><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->. India was expecting China to object, but some of the closest allies of the United States, Japan, The Netherlands, Ireland, Norway and New Zealand, among twenty NSG states, have brought fifty-some unacceptable amendments and modifications in the waiver necessary to do nuclear commerce with India. Unless the Manmohan Singh government is planning a sell-out on India's military nuclear programme, it cannot accept the NSG conditions.
....
If so, the Manmohan Singh government is more incompetent than it appears, and is certainly not to be trusted with strategic negotiations and on foreign-policy matters. If the deal had gone through, the US would have been able to sell some reactors, but more crucial, India would have been brought into the non-proliferation regime though unconditional facility-specific safeguards, explosive testing would effectively have been banned forever, and this environment, plus the review and reporting processes, and the softening of successive Indian governments, would have eventually made it impossible to keep our deterrence. There's still an outside chance that the Manmohan Singh government will sell out to the NSG, and only effective opposition in and outside Parliament may stop the PM, although he wasn't stopped before.
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<i>Unless the PM is prepared to sell-out on the Indian deterrent, says N.V.Subramanian.</i><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->. India was expecting China to object, but some of the closest allies of the United States, Japan, The Netherlands, Ireland, Norway and New Zealand, among twenty NSG states, have brought fifty-some unacceptable amendments and modifications in the waiver necessary to do nuclear commerce with India. Unless the Manmohan Singh government is planning a sell-out on India's military nuclear programme, it cannot accept the NSG conditions.
....
If so, the Manmohan Singh government is more incompetent than it appears, and is certainly not to be trusted with strategic negotiations and on foreign-policy matters. If the deal had gone through, the US would have been able to sell some reactors, but more crucial, India would have been brought into the non-proliferation regime though unconditional facility-specific safeguards, explosive testing would effectively have been banned forever, and this environment, plus the review and reporting processes, and the softening of successive Indian governments, would have eventually made it impossible to keep our deterrence. There's still an outside chance that the Manmohan Singh government will sell out to the NSG, and only effective opposition in and outside Parliament may stop the PM, although he wasn't stopped before.
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