Delaware News Journal
Saturday, July 23, 2005 

Editorial: Rewarding India with nuclear sales could tear apart arms treaty 

Advancing India's nuclear capability is a bold venture for the Bush administration, but it risks ripping apart an international treaty that barely contains weapons proliferation as it is. 

India wants to buy technology now forbidden to it for civilian energy generation. President Bush is inclined to let it, even though India also has nuclear warheads but is not party to arms treaty oversight. 

The new agreement, still subject to approval, acknowledges an important democratic and economic counterweight in a volatile part of the world. India borders China, Afghanistan and Pakistan and is just beyond Iran and North Korea. 

Yet this agreement gambles with the precarious peace among nations known to have arms weapons plus others with civilian technology. Touchy states like India and Pakistan have weapons but have refused to sign the nonproliferaton treaty. Those two even provoked fears of atomic war in 1998. 

The 35-year-old treaty keeps a lid on militarization through access to civilian nuclear energy components in exchange for not developing or voluntarily giving up weapons capacity, and an inspections regime. Iran and North Korea are causing fits as noncompliant weapons threats. Israel is another regional sore point: It has weapons but also hasn't signed the treaty. 

India has been an outsider since its first nuclear weapons test in 1974. It now wants access to civilian fuel and reactor parts in exchange for agreeing to no arms transfers and stopping weapons testing. Yet India also pressed for recognition as a weapons state. In other words, it wants rewards despite long-standing resistance. 

Letting India buy technology without any promise to eventually disarm itself, as 187 treaty signers have done, would be a diplomatic coup -- for it. The White House has to be full of cockeyed optimists to take such an agreement to Congress for approval. It might cement a friendship in southeast Asia, but it could destroy any leverage with nuclear aspirants everywhere else.