by CKR
Not yet. There are several more steps to this dance.
The legislation that President Bush signed last week is not an agreement to trade nuclear technology. It waived existing US trade requirements for the very special case of India. In other words, the laws prohibiting trade with nations that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty will not apply in the case of India. It also lays out a number of requirements that must be met before trade can take place.
Waivers are a weak way to make foreign policy, but it’s what the President asked for, and, in any case, he doesn’t see it as foreign policy, since that is something only the unitary executive can make. (Here’s the Google for HR 5682. The Thomas version is easier to use for a short time, but the links die quickly. Here’s a pdf copy.)
What the president didn’t say during the signing ceremony was that he appended a signing statement. That signing statement pretty much guts the bill. Michael Roston in Raw Story details what the signing statement undermines in the law.
Section 103 of HR5682 says
The following shall be the policies of the United States.The signing statement says
Section 103 of the Act purports to establish U.S. policy with respect to various international affairs matters. My approval of the Act does not constitute my adoption of the statements of policy as U.S. foreign policy. Given the Constitution's commitment to the presidency of the authority to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs, the executive branch shall construe such policy statements as advisory.If that’s the case, I don’t see why President Bush wanted the legislation. If the signing statement represents the situation accurately, he could simply have gone ahead with his plan. The signing statement also says that the president will choose whether or not to submit any reports that Congress requires in this legislation.
Those nasty submission requirements are for the President to certify that India is meeting its requirements before the waivers go into effect. Seems reasonable: if India has agreed to do certain things and Congress is to open up trade in nuclear technology, then Congress just might want a certification that India actually is doing those things.
Before trade in nuclear technology can take place, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group must approve trade with India. The NSG oversees trade in nuclear technology in order to prevent proliferation. A bit of history that I’ve mentioned before: as the NSG website says,
The NSG was created following the explosion in 1974 of a nuclear device by a non-nuclear-weapon State, which demonstrated that nuclear technology transferred for peaceful purposes could be misused.That state was India.
If the NSG approves, and if India meets its commitments, then Congress will draw up the actual trade agreement.
There is a faction in India, however, that feels that the legislation that President Bush signed is too restrictive.
Siddarth Varadarajan, deputy editor of The Hindu, one of India’s major newspapers, has written a number of relevant articles recently, which can be found on his blog. His opinion seems to be representative of many in India’s nuclear establishment.
The issues that this group raises include:
An unstated purpose of the United States in the agreement is to cap India’s nuclear weapons program.India must have full access to enrichment and reprocessing techologies.
Those certifications required by Congress make the waiver authority effectively annual rather than permanent.
India must be able to build up “strategic reserves” of nuclear fuel. An alternative version is that there must be a guarantee of uninterrupted fuel supplies.
India will never accept a moratorium on the production of fissile material.
India will not accept a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons as a condition of trade in nuclear technology.
Inspections of nuclear equipment traded to India by the countries that provided it are unacceptable.
Most of these concerns could be dealt with by a president fully utilizing President Bush’s signing statement. Varadarajan interprets Bush’s signing statement as an assurance to India that he will not be bound by Congress’s legislation. So do some members of Congress.
Varadarajan and others seem to have expected the agreement to be an unconditional acceptance of India into the nuclear weapon state club. This can’t be done under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which limits nuclear weapons to those nations that tested them before 1964. So the recognition would have to be by alternative means, namely the Joint Statement between President Bush and Prime Minister Singh in July 2005. But the pro-weapons faction in India finds any restrictions whatsoever on India’s ability to produce fissile material and numbers of nuclear weapons unacceptable, not to mention limits on missile development. In short, any steps at all toward nuclear disarmament.
Article VI of the NPT calls on the nuclear weapon states to move toward nuclear and general disarmament. Apparently this is not part of what the nuclear weapons enthusiasts in India want. It can be argued that the NPT nuclear weapon states are moving too slowly toward disarmament, but the total numbers of nuclear weapons are down significantly from the height of the Cold War, when the NPT was signed, and the Moscow Treaty calls for the US and Russia to get the numbers down to 2200 each by 2012. India wants more.
A moratorium on nuclear testing has been in place by the NPT nuclear weapon states since 1992. This faction in India feels that it should be outside such requirements as well.
Their position seems to be that India should have unrestricted access to others’ nuclear technology while expanding its nuclear arsenal at an unrestricted pace, with international inspection only of those facilities that are already under inspection agreements.
An agreement makes that leaves India with all the privileges and none of the responsibilities of an NPT nuclear weapons state, however, is a mockery of nonproliferation. The India lobby was active in getting the legislation passed, having learned from the Israel lobby. US hypocrisy on Israel’s nuclear arsenal has contributed to India’s perception that it may have its cake and eat it, too. That would leave only Pakistan out in the nuclear cold, the only state that never ratified the NPT whose nuclear arsenal hasn’t been blessed by the United States.
Prime Minister Singh’s position last summer was that the House-passed version was unacceptable. The final bill is not very different from that version. The Prime Minister’s press release of 21 December was not specific about “concerns.”
The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh received a telephone call from President George Bush this evening. The two leaders expressed happiness at the strengthening of the bilateral relations highlighted in President Bush’s initiative to amend US laws to enable bilateral civil nuclear cooperation, which received strong bipartisan support in the United States Congress.It appears the Prime Minister is willing to kick the can down the road. Will he be able to sustain that position politically?The Prime Minister said India still has some concerns, though many have already been addressed in the President’s signing statement. Both leaders expressed the hope that remaining concerns will be addressed in the next stage of negotiation.
The two leaders also discussed other subjects including regional matters.
The Prime Minister conveyed season’s greetings to President Bush and Mrs. Bush.