In a measure of how the official line in Washington on India’s nuclear status has changed from the Bush to the Obama Administrations, the US is circulating a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling, inter alia, for all Indian nuclear facilities to be placed under international safeguards and not just those that have been declared “civilian” under the July 2005 Indo-US civil nuclear agreement.
The ostensible rationale for the resolution President Barack Obama would like to be adopted at the special UNSC session he will chair on September 24 is to demonstrate the seriousness of his stated commitment to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
But there is a sting in the tail for India: For the first time since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force, the UNSC is going to demand that all States outside the treaty sign it immediately or begin adhering to its provisions. The only other time the UNSC has adopted such a prescriptive demand for a country or group of countries that never accepted the treaty was in 1998, when it passed resolution 1172 urging India and Pakistan to sign the NPT as well as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the wake of the nuclear tests both countries conducted in May that year. Since then, the 1172 resolution has been treated by the international community, and the US in particular, as a dead letter as far as India is concerned.
Indeed, the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear agreement, followed by the Indian safeguards agreement at the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers group exemption was meant to underline Washington’s desire to treat as irrelevant India’s non-adherence to the NPT. Over the past few months, US administration officials have revived the push for NPT universality at various international forums and sought to get the G8 to back a ban on enrichment and reprocessing technology sales to countries like India that have not signed the treaty.
“Over the past few months, US administration officials have revived the push for NPT universality at various international forums…”
Though these moves have been accompanied by statements of support for the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal and the beginning of talks on reprocessing, the repeated foregrounding of the NPT suggests growing American impatience with the Bush administration premise that India’s nuclear credentials warrant it being placed in a category different from Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
Other provisions
The draft resolution also contains a range of other provisions on the CTBT, the permanence of safeguards and so on, as well explicitly requiring that all situations of “non-compliance with non-proliferation obligations” be brought to the UNSC which would then determine whether this non-compliance was a threat to international peace and security.
The only reference the resolution makes to the actual abolition of nuclear weapons is its call for all NPT and non-NPT members to undertake to pursue good faith negotiations on “a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” By clubbing together non-NPT states with all NPT states (i.e. both the nuclear and non-nuclear), this formulation avoids extending de facto recognition to the nuclear weapon status of India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
Proposed ENR ban
Meanwhile, despite the US seeking to dilute the waiver India secured from the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s export rules last year, the Manmohan Singh Government is yet to protest or even formally raise the matter with Washington. India’s baffling silence has led President Barack Obama’s advisers to conclude that US attempts to reimpose an international ban on the sale of enrichment and reprocessing equipment will not adversely affect bilateral relations or hurt the prospects of American companies winning lucrative nuclear and defence contracts.
