Nukes, No Nukes

Good NYTimes article on the implications of Bush's visit to India and Pakistan.

And here's another piece that asks whether the nuclear deal with India is smart or reckless.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good deal, because it points toward international dialogue as the way to decide who should be recognized as a valid nuclear weapon country. For me, this whole India process has exposed what an unwieldy tool the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is, and how unstable the treaty's foundations really are.

Said another way, many people object to India being recognized as a nuclear weapons state because it undermines the effectiveness of the NPT. But when you look at it, under the NPT, membership in the club of nuclear weapons countries is determined solely by who got there first, which hardly seems an adequate criterion. It's not about democracy or record of peacefulness.

Now, the NPT has spawned good tools for slowing proliferation (i.e. IAEA inspections), which is a very good thing. But by itself the NPT is a poor substitute for international dialogue on who should or should not be a nuclear weapon country.

And while the NPT may have slowed nonproliferation, it clearly hasn't stopped it. Now we have all these cases of states that have some degree of nuclear weapon capability, and under the binary model of the NPT, we can only say "No. Bad. No nukes for anyone after 1970." Unfortunately, this shackles the international community from effectively dealing with those countries in gray areas (Israel, India, and Pakistan, to name three) or those in almost black areas (North Korea and Iran). Shouldn't the international community be able to say, "you and you are ok, provided you take these steps, but you guys over here are going the wrong way."

Additionally, as long as the NPT is the sole treaty governing nonproliferation and disarmament, it will only underline the power imbalance between nuclear haves and have-nots, much to the chagrin of the have-nots. This situation galvanizes a number of the "have-not" countries to develop nuclear weapons technology (by any means necessary) because they perceive they will then be taken seriously and/or seen as a "great" power.

So perhaps it's right to say inspections are good, nonproliferation is good, but change happens and we're going to talk about it. That would also give the international community flexibility to apply different kinds of sanctions for different countries.

Perhaps the best lesson of the U.S. / India nuclear agreement should be that the world needs to start talking about nuclear disarmament. If the only nukes that existed were for energy supply and all parts sold were registered with the IAEA, period, then the use of centrifuges, etc could be more easily tracked. I believe the Atlantic Monthly said that AQ Khan was able to construct Pakistan's program because there were so many dual-use technologies around and he took advantage of gray areas. We need to get to a place where all nuclear facilities are inspected, because all are solely for civilian purposes, and there are fewer of these gray areas.

(By the way, as ever, all these opinions are strictly my own rambling thoughts, and they are not connected in any way with U.S. State Department policy. I'm speaking only as a citizen trying to understand the world.)

Now, the next question: what is Congress going to say? I think they'll go along, just based on what the newspapers here are saying. Anyone disagree?