Asia's New Nuclear Map

By MARTIN WALKER,
UPI Editor Emeritus
Published: Sept. 8, 2008 at 9:00 AM
Courtesy Of The: United Press International ( UPI )

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- It is not quite over yet, but the most important strategic development in Asia in this century so far is on the verge of completion.

The weekend decision of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to approve the unprecedented nuclear cooperation deal between the United States and India changes the strategic map of Asia. It also provides President George Bush with a last, critical success that may be seen by historians as the most far-reaching achievement of his presidency.

The Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who must give a final endorsement, may seek to deprive Bush of his triumph. But, given the impressive lobbying and fundraising skills of America's wealthy and well-educated Indian community, they would be ill advised to try. Moreover, the platform of the Democratic Party, as agreed at last month's convention, stresses: "With India, we will build on the close partnership developed over the past decade. As two of the world's great, multiethnic democracies, the U.S. and India are natural strategic allies."

The deal would bring India out of its pariah status as a rogue nuclear power that had not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would allow the country to obtain the nuclear fuels and technology seen as essential to India's soaring energy needs. And in formally joining the nuclear club, without joining the NPT regime, India would maintain the right to keep some of its nuclear reactors for military use out of the international inspection regime and thus gets something close to a free hand for future nuclear development.

By far, the most important feature of the deal is its sealing of the new strategic relationship, which might almost be called an alliance, between the world's largest democracy and its most powerful. The U.S.-Indian relationship, which was cool and sometimes even hostile throughout the Cold War, now joins the existing U.S.-Japanese alliance as the most important strategic relationship in Asia.

For China, which now can see the prospect of encirclement by the United States, India and Japan, this presages a new security environment in Asia, a system of insurance and potential control against China's ambition to become the dominant Asian power. China has only itself to blame for this, with its construction of ports and possible naval bases in Burma and Pakistan that India understandably saw as threatening.

This is the context that explains the angry reaction in Beijing, where the Communist Party's official paper, People's Daily, wrote, "The U.S.-India nuclear agreement has constituted a major blow to the international non-proliferation regime."

This is breathtaking in its hypocrisy. China has done more to destroy the non-proliferation regime than any other country. As former U.S. Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed, who used to be a nuclear weapons lab scientist, has revealed, China gave Pakistan blueprints for a simple uranium atomic bomb in 1982 and later tested a Pakistani version of the weapon in China on May 26, 1990. A declassified State Department memo obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington and since published in The New York Times concluded that China, some time after its first bomb test in 1964, had provided Pakistan with the technology for "fissile material production and possibly also nuclear device design."

"The Chinese nuclear weapons program is incredibly sophisticated," Reed claims. "The scary part is how much Pakistan has learned from them."

The really scary part is what Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, then did with the Chinese technology, building a kind of nuclear technology supermarket whose wares since have been traced to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

By contrast, India has an impeccable record of non-proliferation, although critics of the U.S. deal warn that it establishes a precedent that allows India to develop both civil and military nuclear capabilities without signing the NPT. The implications of this precedent for Iran are significant.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked his political career on the deal and on the personal relationship he had forged with Bush. Singh broke the political coalition in India's Parliament on which his power depended to force the deal through, despite the bitter opposition and walkout of his Communist Party allies.

The Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued a bitter statement Saturday, saying:

"The Manmohan Singh government stands thoroughly exposed before the country for compromising India's vital security interests. Proceeding with this deal will mortgage India's sovereignty and make India's civilian nuclear program vulnerable to U.S. blackmail for the next 40 years."

India overcame the opposition within the Nuclear Suppliers Group by promising to maintain its longstanding rules against nuclear proliferation commitments and also to maintain its voluntary moratorium on future nuclear tests. (Modern computer modeling systems make this far less onerous than it sounds.)

The Bush administration, which lobbied hard for the deal during the three-day meeting of the NSG, has also assured Congress that it has the right to block India's supplies of nuclear fuel and energy if it resumes testing. A letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released Friday by committee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., noted, "The fuel supply assurances are not, however, meant to insulate India against the consequences of a nuclear explosive test or a violation of non-proliferation commitments."

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