New York Times
Friday, July 22, 2005

Editorial: Green Light for Bomb Builders

The Bush administration is full of tough talk about opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. But it keeps undermining the world's most effective instrument for doing so: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In May, top administration officials stood aside as a crucial review conference meant to strengthen the treaty ended in a stalemate. Now Washington wants to allow India an end run around the treaty's basic bargain - the one that rewards the countries that are willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import highly sensitive nuclear technology for power reactors.

The strength of that bargain has dissuaded many countries that are capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, including Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The bargain's credibility has depended on the willingness of the major nuclear exporters to uphold it. One of the most powerful examples of the price a nation would pay for ignoring the rules has been the nuclear export restrictions the United States has imposed on India for decades, ever since India declined to sign the treaty and tested a nuclear device, using materials and technology diverted from a civilian nuclear power program.

Lifting these restrictions would encourage other countries to follow New Delhi's dangerous example. It is now up to Congress and the other nuclear supplier nations to take back what President Bush has so carelessly given away.

India is a great nation with a great future and many common interests with the United States. But India is also one of only four countries in the world that does not abide by the nonproliferation treaty. Pakistan and Israel have also refused to sign it, and North Korea dropped out. None of these other holdouts are now eligible to buy the kind of sensitive nuclear technology being proposed for India.

Besides the four holdouts and the five established nuclear powers recognized under the treaty - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - no other nations are known to have nuclear weapons. Without the treaty, there might now be as many as 20 or 25 nuclear weapons states.

The Bush administration is, of course, eager to stop governments it does not like from acquiring nuclear weapons. It regularly rattles military and diplomatic sabers at North Korea and Iran. But it seems to have almost as much contempt for international treaties as it has for rogue states. Given the increasing accessibility of nuclear weapons technology and the growing number of potential governmental and nongovernmental suppliers of the needed materials and equipment, only a strengthened nonproliferation treaty, enforced without exceptions, stands any chance of slowing the spread of nuclear arsenals. A nonproliferation policy that is selective and unilateral is no policy at all.