The Hindu Business Line : Fusion, at last

The latest agreement between India and the United States on civil nuclear cooperation comes after a long, tortuous process of reconciling the differing perceptions in the establishments of the two countries. While Mr George Bush and Dr Manmohan Singh saw the deal purely as an agreement for cooperation in civil nuclear energy, powerful sections in their countries saw it as a sell-out in strategic/military space or on non-proliferation goals. Unfortunately, events in the two years since the two leaders issued the path-breaking joint statement have only stoked these fears.

The crude attempts by sections of the US establishment to tilt India’s foreign policy to be in consonance with the former’s geopolitical ambitions in West Asia and elsewhere didn’t help matters either. Equally, India’s insistence that ‘spent fuel’ from the power plants set up under the agreement should be allowed to be reprocessed to generate fresh uranium for the next cycle of energy generation was seen in the US as a brazen attempt to stockpile fissile material for possible use in nuclear weapons. In the event, the Governments have to be commended for persisting with the negotiations to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement.

From India’s point of view it may not have been the perfect agreement. It may even contain ingredients that can limit its autonomy in international relations. But all strategic initiatives involve some risk taking. Also, the global environment is never static. India has demonstrated a capacity for making progress under severely constraining circumstances. There is no reason to think that opportunities will not crop up that can be exploited to mitigate such risks as may exist in the present agreement. Certainly critics of the nuclear agreement have not come up with any better argument than the one made famous by a former Pakistani Prime Minister, Z. A. Bhutto, who vowed that his country would rather eat grass than forsake the development of an atom bomb. On the other hand there is bound to be a surge in overseas investment interest in the nuclear power sector, not to mention Indian companies and research institutions gaining freer access to technology in other sectors hitherto denied them, now that the US has given a certificate of good conduct.

The US may be entitled to wishing for itself and other promoter members of the nuclear club a status of enduring supremacy. But for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are attempts by some to use proliferation as a tactical tool to score points against the US, such a goal is increasingly becoming elusive. In the event, the agreement marks a grudging recognition by Washington that it is willing to do business with some if not all and India appears to have qualified by that reckoning.

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