The Real Prize in India-U.S. Relations

Abstract

The lone success story in the Bush administration s epic narrative of foreign policy failure is the approval of its nuclear deal with India. Supporters of the deal had feared that non-proliferation-minded Democrats would sabotage approval if their party took majorities in Congress following the 2006 midterm election. But, in the month following an election that achieved just that result, the deal was nevertheless approved by huge margins in both houses of Congress. President Bush signed the U.S.-India Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation bill into law on December 18. Yet it was a Pyrrhic victory. Passage was hardly a foregone conclusion. Hatched in secrecy, the agreement broke with decades of established policy on nuclear non-proliferation and was announced to stunned lawmakers in July 2004. A chorus of protests followed. In the United States, concerns centered on the impact such a deal would have on preventing further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Bush administration was rewarding India for doing exactly what the United States had strongly condemned Iran and North Korea trying to do. In India, nationalist hawks warned that India was sacrificing the independence of its defense establishment which had, after all, fabricated the bomb on its own, thank you very much. The country's top nuclear scientists lamented that decades of research on using thorium, plentiful in India (rather than uranium, pitifully scarce and of low quality), to fuel nuclear reactors was in danger. New reactors would be fueled by uranium, a supply of which was part of the deal. In both countries, many lawmakers were not happy about an agreement that was presented virtually as kfait accompli. None of these criticisms sufficed to prevent approval of a deal both governments deemed essential to their geopolitical and economic ambitions. Dissent was over-