The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal

Recognizes India's history of imposing voluntary safeguards on its nuclear program. Proponents of the deal say India has an excellent record of setting credible safeguards on its nuclear program for the last thirty years. After the safeguards on the U.S.-supplied Tarapur nuclear facility expired in 1993, for example, India voluntarily established a new agreement with the IAEA to continue the restrictions.

Recognizes that India has a good record on proliferation. Although it is not a signatory to the NPT, India has maintained strict controls on its nuclear technology and has not shared it with any other country. Proponents of the deal say this restraint shows that India, unlike its nuclear neighbor Pakistan, is committed to responsible nuclear stewardship and fighting proliferation. In May 2005 India passed a law, the WMD Act, which criminalizes the trade and brokering of sensitive technology.

Rewards India's decision to adopt similar nuclear export standards as those imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). India has thus far chosen to abide by the strict export controls on nuclear technology set by the NSG, a group of forty-five nuclear-supplier states that voluntarily coordinates controls of nuclear exports to non-nuclear-weapon states. Experts say if India chose to lift these voluntary restrictions, it could easily sell its technology to far less trustworthy countries around the world. The U.S. deal would reward the Indian government for its voluntary controls and give New Delhi incentive to continue them, against the demands of Indian hardliners who question what India gets out of placing such limits on itself.

What are the objections to the agreement?

Critics call the terms of the agreement overly beneficial for India and lacking sufficient safeguards to prevent New Delhi from continuing to produce nuclear weapons. "We are going to be sending, or allowing others to send, fresh fuel to India -- including yellowcake and lightly enriched uranium -- that will free up Indian domestic sources of fuel to be solely dedicated to making many more bombs than they would otherwise have been able to make," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving awareness of proliferation issues. While India has pledged that any U.S. assistance to its civilian nuclear energy program will not benefit its nuclear weapons program, experts say India could use the imported nuclear fuel to feed its civilian energy program while diverting its own nuclear fuel to weapons production. New Delhi has done similar things in the past; India claimed it was using nuclear technology for civilian purposes right up until its first nuclear weapons test in 1974. A Congressional Research Service report (PDF) on the agreement states, "There are no measures in this global partnership to restrain India's nuclear weapons program."

Other objections raised by experts include:

• The safeguards apply only to facilities and material manufactured by India beginning when the agreement was reached. It doesn't cover the fissile material produced by India over the last several decades of nuclear activity. The CRS report says, "A significant question is how India, in the absence of full-scope safeguards, can provide adequate confidence that U.S. peaceful nuclear technology will not be diverted to nuclear weapons purposes."
• The deal does not require India to cap or limit its fissile material production. This comes at a time when nearly all the major nuclear powers -- including the United States, France, Britain, and Russia -- are moving to limit their production.
• The deal does not require India to restrict the number of nuclear weapons it plans to produce.
• There are far more cost-efficient ways to improve India's energy and technology sectors. These could include making India's existing electricity grid more efficient, restructuring the country's coal industry, and expanding the use of renewable energy sources, Sokolski said in congressional testimony. All these steps would involve much less dangerous transfers of technology that would not be dual-use, and therefore not convertible to nuclear weapons production.
• The agreement was rushed and takes unnecessary risks without adequate preparation or expert review. The agreement "appears to have been formulated without a comprehensive high-level review of its potential impact on nonproliferation, the significant engagement of many of the government's most senior nonproliferation experts, or a clear plan for achieving its implementation," writes William C. Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, in Nonproliferation Review. "Indeed, it bears all the signs of a top-down administrative directive specifically designed to circumvent the interagency review process and to minimize input from any remnants of the traditional 'nonproliferation lobby.'"

Who needs to approve the agreement?

The final terms of the nuclear deal need approval from several sources before they can be implemented. The bodies required to approve the deal include:

• IAEA. India has to sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA under which all nuclear material and equipment transferred to it by the United States as a part of this deal shall be subject to safeguards. In August 2008, the IAEA's Board of Governors approved an India-specific safeguards agreement (PDF). The IAEA said it will begin to implement the new agreement in 2009, with the aim of bringing fourteen Indian reactors under agency safeguards by 2014. The IAEA currently applies safeguards to six of these fourteen nuclear reactors under previous agreements. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei says the IAEA and India are in dialogue concerning an additional protocol to the draft safeguards agreement.