Nuclear Thread - 2

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FORUM FOR SECULARISM & DEVELOPMENT (USA)
Subject: US Senate Bill on Nuclear Deal will make India subservient - India's sovereignty must not be surrendered or compromised in any sphere - nuclear, economic, national security or defense

Hon'ble Members of Parliament,
    Here are, for your information and action, two very recent and important analyses by India's two renowned experts on the Bill adopted by the US Senate relevant to the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. We strongly believe that the issues raised by these experts should receive very serious consideration by the Indian leadership particularly the Parliamentarians, as they deal with India's nuclear autonomy and sovereignty. 

a) Strategic reduction of India
- By Bharat Karnad (attachment A)

b) Was government aware of section 115? 
- By Dr A. Gopalakrishnan (attachment B)

    Given the serious nature of the nuclear issue and its profound impact upon India's national security, it will be crucially important that the Indian Parliamentarians deliver their patriotic responsibilities in assuring that:

a)  the “Indo-US Nuclear Deal” is fully scrutinized and not allowed to be formalized without full debate, discussion and inputs by the representative bodies, defense, nuclear, national security, diplomatic and judicial experts of the country; 

b) the Deal is equitable;

c) it does not compromise India's sovereignty in any sphere - nuclear, economic, national security or defense, and,

d) the leadership takes serious note of the Section 115 of the US Senate Bill which besides vastly enlarging the vulnerability of India makes the Indian Republic liable to the bodies of the US laws and the UN Atomic Energy Agency including its non-proliferation regimes. There exists a high degree of apprehension about the intent, details and spirit of the cleverly designed new Section 115 of the Senate bill and if it was actually discussed by the two governments, without taking the Parliament and the public in to confidence. Even so, the Secretary, DAE should have been party to that decision.

            A strong note should also be taken of the fact that after the recent elections in the US the political sands have been speedily shifting and democrats, who did not have any role in negotiating the provisions of this Deal with New Delhi, are about to take charge of the both houses of the US Legislature. On the other hand, reading the writing on the wall, the operatives of the Bush administration who negotiated the Deal with the Indian representatives are jumping the ship one by one. Therefore, any verbal or personal assurances given by them, without making such assurances an integral part of the provisions of the Deal itself, must be considered inoperative and meaningless.

    In conclusion we would like to re-emphasize that the Parliament is the supreme sovereign body in India. And it falls within this body's jurisdiction to exercise its paramount authority in defending national sovereignty, if and when it is threatened, without any regard to what branch of national interest that threat may relate to.

Best wishes.
Dr. Jagan Kaul
Krishan Bhatnagar

Forum for Secularism and Development (USA)
December 06, 2006
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<b>Attachment A</b>

Strategic reduction of India
Asian Age, Dec 07, 2006
By Bharat Karnad

The current Indian foreign policy is propelled mainly by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s conviction that becoming part of the "unipolar" international order presided over by the United States will benefit the country. Cooperation in the high-value nuclear technology field is seen as the cherry atop the new policy cake. <b>The PM has failed to see that Washington, for its part, is intent on using the nuclear deal to draw India into the 1967 Non-Proliferation Treaty net and to zero out the chances of India’s ever acquiring a consequential nuclear deterrent — a recipe for the strategic reduction of India.</b>

Given the insularity of our rulers, the wonder is that, other than getting the economists-playing-deterrence strategists in Manmohan Singh’s inner circle into a huff and rousing the Opposition parties in Parliament into a state of wakefulness, such warnings compelled Manmohan Singh to define in Parliament the red lines the US should not cross. But, this is precisely what the US Congress has done with the reconciled bill likely to retain at least some of the offensive clauses, confident that the Congress Party-led government will compromise to protect its considerable investment of political capital in this deal. <b>The reason for this American confidence may be the approach of the PM’s special envoy, Shyam Saran which, according to Washington insiders, was to seek enough room for "interpretation" to steer a manifestly unacceptable "123" agreement past a confused and confusable Opposition at home.

Apparently the Manmohan Singh regime’s tactics are to get the deal past Parliament by presenting it as a fait accompli.</b> Acting as if the nuclear deal was already a done thing, the minister of state in PMO Prithviraj Chavan claimed in Parliament that a new core was being fitted in the Apsara reactor in Trombay as part of what he called reciprocal actions required by the deal with the US. He also revealed that talks were underway with France, South Africa, etc., for civilian nuclear collaboration. Washington has also been promised that at least two reactors of the initial purchase of eight-light water reactors will be from American companies, leading to US nuclear industry representatives camping in the country, talking procedures and modalities with the Nuclear Power Corporation.

<b>The truth is, Saran was informed by the US under secretary of state Nicholas Burns of the offending Sections 105, 106, 107, 108, and 115 in the US Senate draft version of the bill before it was voted on, but other than pleading for a tempering of the language to provide Manmohan Singh the cover for accepting it, he raised no particular objection. This notwithstanding the fact that the aforementioned Sections, in breach of the understanding in the Joint Statement, have codified both India’s status and treatment as a non-nuclear weapon state under the NPT and, more significantly, India’s formal acceptance of such status and treatment by the US, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), and the International Atomic Energy Agency, signalling acceptance by India of the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty norms and restrictions without its being a signatory to either</b>!

These Sections, among other things, mandate IAEA safeguards in perpetuity for the designated "civilian" nuclear reactors and facilities, intrusive policing and inspection by IAEA and, when that’s not possible, by American personnel, monitoring of the activities relating to India’s mining its indigenous uranium ore, and verifiable evidence on an ongoing basis of India’s not encouraging proliferation by countries like Iran. Further, the stockpiling of uranium fuel for imported reactors will not be allowed — closing the option of stockpiling foreign low-enriched uranium or processed natural uranium far in excess of immediate needs in order to avoid the ill-effects of unexpected termination of fuel supply, and India will be unable to access the latest uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing and heavy water production technologies.

<b>Worse, the government’s original raison d’etre for the deal that imported reactors will make up the energy deficit in 20-25 years is patently false. Even with an additional 20 imported reactors, electricity from nuclear sources will still account for no more than 5%-6% of the total energy produced in the country in 2035 — not sufficient incentive, surely, to "freeze and cap" the Indian weapons programme. And should India test again which it will have to do, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on imported reactors will have to be written off, the "nuclear cooperation" will, willy-nilly, end, and all the imported materials and plants and assemblies will have to be repatriated to the original supplier at India’s cost. </b>

Considering that mostly adverse effects will follow from this deal, why is Manmohan Singh sticking to it, limpet-like, risking political rejection in Parliament and personal infamy for himself? Perhaps, because the PM is simply not clued into power politics. <b>How else to explain his acceptance, in the first place, of the Joint Statement predicating all civilian nuclear cooperation on India’s never testing again — a prohibition guaranteed to prevent this country from acquiring a credible deterrent, leave alone newer, more sophisticated, nuclear armaments in the future?</b>

The PM and his benighted advisers may, therefore, gain from a simple six point-primer in international relations and nuclear security:

<b>1. International relations is jungle-raj and, like in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, might is right.</b>

2. In this tussle, hard (thermonuclear military) power with reach matters the most, offering the country absolute security and immunity against pressure. It is decisive in the rank-ordering of countries; soft power only embroiders and augments this hard power of the state.

3. Powerful countries may humour weaker states but do not help them become strong, thereby adding to the competition.

<b>4. States generating cutting-edge technology do not sell or transfer it to any other country for any reason. Ask America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom about being denied the atom bomb in the Forties and, more recently, the set of critical Joint Strike Fighter technologies, both of which it helped finance and co-develop!

5. India’s economic card has historically been trumped by the foreigner’s military card, meaning the decisive military technology and capability of the day. India lacked a meaningful navy in the 17th century. It did not help that the country was an economic superpower at the time. The military card that cannot be beaten today is the triad of frightening megaton thermonuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered submarines, which has to be secured on a war footing. It will provide the security overhang beneath which the Indian economy can grow rapidly, unmolested.</b>

<b>6. Resumption of open-ended testing is a technical imperative, necessary to obtain boosted-fission and fusion weapons that are safe, proven, and reliable — qualities, incidentally, missing in the existing Indian deterrent. Ties with the West disrupted by the Indian tests will quickly return to normal, because the advanced economies are hooked profitably into the comparatively advantaged techno-economic sphere in India, because of the lure of huge profits that make the Indian market irresistible to NSG states and render long term embargoes unsustainable and, because, pushed to the wall, India could turn into a mean trouble-maker — the sort of entity former US President Lyndon Johnson advised it was better to have inside the tent pissing out rather than having it outside pissing in.</b>

So, Mr Prime Minister, straighten up, inject some steel into your spine, behave as the leader of a great power on the rise, one willing to deal with fellow big powers only on equal terms. Continue speaking softly, Manmohan Singhji, but see how much more traction you get by carrying a megaton thermonuclear weapon-spiked stick in your hand. You have so far acted the leader of a feeble country — an India of the past. Re-tooling your mind is of the essence. Obtaining political leverage and the military wherewithal to service India’s great power ambitions requires burying the nuclear deal.

Bharat Karnad is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research and author of Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, now in its second edition
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<b>Attachment B</b>
Was government aware of section 115? 

- By Dr A. Gopalakrishnan
Asian Age, Nov 28. 2006

The recent Senate Bill on the Indo-US nuclear deal (HR-5682.EAS) includes the highly objectionable Section 115 which was introduced for the first time and passed on November 16, 2006 (See Bill paves way for covert US operations, The Op-Ed Page, November 21, 2006). Recently, the DAE Secretary, Dr Anil Kakodkar, has described the new Section as "a matter of additional concern" that "got introduced in the last discussion" (PTI, November 24). He added, "The US is talking about a programme to be piloted by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and they call it a scientific threat-reduction programme, which has come as a surprise. We do not want to get into any activity that will be intrusive for our programme and that is why (we have) these concerns. The deal is for civil applications and it should not intrude into strategic areas." In spite of this, we are yet to get any reaction on this from government sources in Delhi.

The fact that Secretary, DAE was taken by surprise, could mean only one of two things. That Section 115 in the bill comes as a total surprise also to the Prime Minister and his advisers in Delhi. If so, why is there a delay in publicly rejecting this Section as unacceptable to India, without waiting for the reconciliation process? Or, is it that top echelons of the government — except the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and its Secretary — were aware of this subject matter, and had deliberately kept the DAE Secretary in the dark? The more the government maintains its silence, the more this latter suspicion will take root in public mind.

Section 115 of the Senate bill relates to the imposition of joint R&D with Indian scientists under a "program to further common non-proliferation goals, including scientific research and developmental efforts related to nuclear non-proliferation, with an emphasis on nuclear safeguards." DAE had never asked for such a joint effort, it is not acceptable to them, and it is entirely outside the scope of the July 18, 2005 inter-governmental agreement.

To understand how this situation has developed, we need to examine three aspects: First, we should be aware of the antecedents and links of the NNSA which has been chosen by the Senate as the interacting partner from the US side. Second, we need to look at the nature of advice which the Senate and the House have been receiving over the last year from US non-proliferation lobbies and think-tanks who are bitterly opposed to this nuclear deal. And, lastly, we need to examine whether there were possible ongoing interactions between the officials of the Indian government (except DAE representatives) and the US administration, where the intent and spirit of Section 115 were indeed discussed, and perhaps mutually concurred.

The NNSA was formed in March 2000 by consolidating the defence, non-proliferation and national security, fissile materials disposition, and naval reactor-related activities of the US Department of Energy (DoE). The FY-2001 budget for NNSA was US $6.2 billion. In presenting the budget, the then Secretary (DoE) said, "A crucial component of our national security budget is our extensive non-proliferation work, which helps to ensure that Americans can enjoy a future that is safe and secure." The first head of NNSA was General John Gordon, who was earlier the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Even today the NNSA shares its budget and programmes with other US entities like the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which are all primarily entrusted with national and international covert operations. NNSA, given these links, is certainly not a suitable organisation to be programmatically linked to the Indian nuclear activities or even to our non-nuclear security matters, such as counter-terrorism or border-security, though NNSA participation may well serve the US objectives.

The Senate action in imposing Section 115 on India can be best understood from a revealing article titled, Seizing the Moment: Using the US-Indian Nuclear Deal to Improve Fissile Material Security by Kenneth Luongo and Isabelle Williams (Arms Control Today, May 2006). Mr Luongo is an executive director of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council (RANSAC), and was earlier the director of the Office of Arms Control and Non-Proliferation at the US DoE. Previous to that he had served as a staff member in the US Congress in different positions. Over the last year, Mr Luongo and his colleagues have been partly responsible for shaping the views of the US Congress on the Indo-US nuclear deal. I shall, therefore, quote extensively from this article to sharply bring forth the logic used by the US Senate in framing and including Section 115 in the Senate bill.

At the outset, Luongo advises the Congress that "…the ideal trade-off for Congressional approval (of the Indo-US deal) would be a complete cut-off of fissile material production in South Asia. However, there is robust opposition in India and Pakistan to a cut-off at this time. Therefore, a necessary and achievable alternative is to mandate that India engage in a serious dialogue about improving fissile material and facility security... (However,) requiring a discussion of security improvements and successfully implementing them would likely prove to be a touchy issue in New Delhi… Procedurally, such a nuclear security dialogue could be mandated by the attachment of a condition to any legislation approving the agreement… (If this is not done) it would amount to an enormous missed opportunity to improve global security."

On the subject of proliferation, he adds, "Concerns have also been raised about illicit nuclear equipment purchases, sensitive knowledge leakages, and lax export control implementation by India… Officials from each country (India and Pakistan) have stressed in public that necessary steps have been taken to strengthen security standards and that their nuclear programs are adequately secure … (however) they have provided no concrete evidence to the international community to support claims that their programs are invulnerable… Because of the high international stakes involved if materials and expertise are not secured properly, more substantive cooperation is essential to ensure standards are as stringent as possible."

Regarding a framework for cooperation to be imposed on India, their advice is, "At the top governmental level in India and Pakistan, however, there are likely to be a number of obstacles to engaging in this very delicate dialogue, including political sensitivities, different threat perceptions, and bureaucracy. Future efforts will therefore need to be carefully packaged and executed and will require a higher priority on the political agenda… Both countries are reluctant to allow external access to their nuclear programs and are suspicious about intrusive cooperation… National sovereignty over nuclear programs is a high priority in both countries … it is very unlikely that either India or Pakistan would allow US officials or laboratory specialists into its nuclear facilities to implement security upgrades (and) the media in each country has already accused their governments of ‘selling out’ the country’s nuclear assets to the United States… (Therefore,) cooperation should focus on opening dialogue on a possible ‘menu’ of low-intrusive tools that could be adopted and implemented unilaterally by either country at facilities across the board, both civilian and military."

The Luongo and Williams statements eloquently summarise the US perspective of the Indian situation and they reflect the collective views of various middle-of-the-road non-proliferationists in the US. No wonder the US Senate seems to have bought their viewpoint and structured Section 115 of the bill and approved it quietly, with no floor discussion, recognising the "need to carefully package and execute" it.

Finally, it should be noted that both the NDA and UPA governments have been conducting periodic bilateral discussions through an Indo-US Joint Working Group on Counter-terrorism, which has been functioning since January 2000. It is not known whether the Indian side headed by the MEA has a DAE representative or not. Other than the contents of the short press releases, nothing much is known about the group’s activities. The January 22, 2002 press statement from New Delhi, issued after the fourth meeting of the group, states, "Counter-terrorism officials on the two sides reviewed the anti-terrorism training and capacity building programmes conducted by the United States. The Indian side welcomed the US offer to further expand the programme, covering preventive, protective and consequence management capabilities in both conventional and WMD terrorism. The Indian delegation also welcomed the US pilot project involving equipment and technology to strengthen border management and surveillance." A press release dated April 21, 2006 issued after the seventh meeting says, "The discussions advanced US-India cooperation in areas of common concern such as bio-terrorism … WMD-terrorism… Both sides agreed to share information on a real time basis, respond to counterterrorism assistance requests expeditiously and collaborate to upgrade preparedness and capability to deal with acts of terrorism."

Given these ongoing interactions, there is concern whether the intent, details and spirit of the new Section 115 of the Senate bill were indeed discussed over some of these group meetings and mutually agreed on between the two governments, totally unknown to Parliament and the public. Even so, the Secretary, DAE should have been party to that decision. If he was not, and our government has taken a decision on matters like WMD terrorism without his knowledge, then there is something seriously wrong with the way this government is arriving at critical decisions. To say the least, all this calls for an urgent clarification to Parliament from the highest level of government to clear up the confusion.

Finally, we must keep in mind that India is also entitled to get assistance from the IAEA on nuclear facility and material security, under the International Physical Protection Advisory Service (IPPAS), even without signing the Indo-US deal or the NPT. Though the DAE has not so far sought any such help, if ever the country needs it, opting for such international assistance is any day safer than involving the US in a bilateral mode.

<i>Dr A. Gopalakrishnan is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, government of India. He can be reached at : </i>
agk37@hotmail.com<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->