Senate approves India nuclear deal despite warnings of disaster

"Never has something of such moment and such significance and so much importance been debated in such a short period of time and given such short shrift," Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) told the Washington Post following yesterday's vote by the Senate to approve the U.S.-India nuclear deal.  Despite a three-year campaign by leading nuclear weapons experts supported by Ploughshares Fund, the Senate joined the House of Representatives in giving the Bush Administration one of its only nuclear policy victories in removing restrictions on nuclear trade with India, striking a blow to the global nonproliferation system.

With Ploughshares Fund support, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, has been at the forefront of the international efforts to oppose the deal.  In his statement following the Senate vote, Kimball acknowledged commitments by Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) "that there should be and will be consequences if India makes the mistake of resuming nuclear testing."  Yet, he maintained, "contrary to the counterfactual claims of proponents and apologists, it does not bring India into the 'nonproliferation mainstream'," and is still a "nonproliferation disaster."

Kimball and other critics of the deal have predicted that it will hamper nonproliferation efforts by encouraging other countries to demand similar treatment.  Indeed, hours after the Senate vote, Pakistan's Prime Minister Raza Gilani demanded a similar deal with the U.S.  Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Ploughshares-funded Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center told the Christian Science Monitor that "this deal has everything to do with being able to say we changed relations with India and with building good relations with the Brahmin elite of that country, but it has nothing to do with nonproliferation and will only set it back."  Michael Krepon, president of the Ploughshares-funded Henry L. Stimson Center agreed. "Bringing India into the mainstream of nuclear nonproliferation is essential. The crux of the problem is how to do so in ways that reinforce, rather than undermine the conservative principles underlying the global nonproliferation system. The Bush administration hasn't come remotely close to meeting this test," he wrote in the Washington Times.