Ok, folks... Yes, I was born at night, but it wasn't last night...
'Civil nuclear cooperation with India will not lead to an arms race in South Asia. Nothing we or any other potential international suppliers provide to India under this initiative will enhance its military capacity or add to its military stockpile.
How can anyone believe this? While this consortium will be providing uranium to India strictly for their civilian power initiatives, Rice has admitted "the country already had enough uranium to build the number (of nuclear weapons) it wanted". But this program will give India the option of leveraging their own uranium reserves for military projects instead of having no choice but to task them for civil power generation. How is that not 'enabling'?
'India is not going to become a member of the NPT as a nuclear weapons state.', says Rice. We are simply seeking to address an untenable situation. India has never been party to the NPT and this agreement...does bring India into the non-proliferation framework and thus strengthen the regime.
I fail to see how enabling India to actually challenge China's military pre-eminance in South Asia improves things? China has already been busily flexing their military muscles, principally over Taiwan. Can there really be any doubt about how China will react when India achieves the stockpile levels they're aiming for? Or Pakistan?
And how does this bring India into the NPT framework? There's no downside to this for India. They hold all the cards. They decide which reactors are civilian and which aren't (which is the factor that determines whether any given reactor is inspected, or not). They get to use their domestic uranium reserves as they see fit, without supervision or oversight. I suspect someday, we might actually recognize that we've uncorked the bottle, and that the 'genie' will someday square off against us with weapons of our own design.
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