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Why Australia should sell uranium to India

By Kaushik Kapisthalam - posted Thursday, 23 August 2007


In a stunning turn of events, John Howard’s Australian federal government has decided in principle to sell uranium to India. As expected, there is already a chorus of opposition to this decision, from nuclear non-proliferation hard liners to dogmatists who seek to keep India confined to an India-Pakistan box. Unfortunately, most of the arguments against selling uranium to India are clichéd and inconsistent with today’s reality.

The primary line of reasoning in opposition to uranium sales to India is that the country has not acceded to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). The NPT is considered by many to be the indispensable framework for global nuclear non-proliferation efforts: however, this argument is simplistic because it glosses over the fact that the NPT essentially allows five countries (US, UK, France, Russia and China) to keep their nuclear weapons in perpetuity while condemning the rest of the world to second-tier status.

While it is true that NPT’s Article 6 requires the five recognised nuclear powers to work towards eventual disarmament, the fact these nations still maintain thousands of nuclear weapons suggests that the treaty’s fundamental bargain was essentially a lie. From the Indian point of view, the hard-line NPT-centric non-proliferation opinions long advocated by powerful Western nations were always hypocritical.

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A former Indian official once told this author, “These countries pontificate to us on nuclear weapons while sitting safely under the American and NATO nuclear umbrella. If they are so opposed to nuclear weapons, why did they feel the need to accept a nuclear shield?”

It is interesting to note that many of the NPT-centric critics of an India-Australia nuclear agreement are not consistent in their approach. Australia currently supplies uranium to the US, France and the UK. In the strictest sense, these nations are violating their NPT Article 6 commitments on disarmament.

Britain recently announced a policy to build nuclear missile carrying submarine fleet that would preserve and modernise the country’s nuclear arsenal for another few decades. The US has recently spoken of new uses for nuclear weapons including in “bunker buster” bombs. China is the only NPT nuclear weapon state to currently build nuclear warheads, some of which are aimed at India.

Australia recently signed an agreement to sell uranium to China without requiring Beijing to commit to an end to nuclear weapons testing or to stop making more nuclear warheads. It would be fair to ask India uranium opponents if they are not displaying hypocrisy by opposing sales to India, citing the NPT, while being quiet on Australia’s uranium sales to the US, UK, France and China in the light of their defiance of the NPT Article 6.

Simply put, if Canberra is committed to the NPT over everything else, it should immediately cease co-operation with all nuclear weapon states pending their immediate disarmament.

Another school of thought argues that by supplying uranium to India’s civilian reactors, Australia would help free up India’s “scarce” indigenous uranium sources to be used to make atomic bombs. This is a misrepresentation of India’s nuclear behaviour to date.

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Currently, other than the two dedicated weapons-grade plutonium producing reactors, India has 11 Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) that are un-safeguarded and could potentially be used for bomb-making. A simple calculation reveals that India could have produced over 18,000 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for about 4,000 warheads, had it used all these 11 PHWRs for that purpose over the years.

In comparison, India’s current fissile stockpile is estimated at a few hundred kilograms or about 80-100 warheads. This is why this line of “India should be forced to make a choice” reasoning is absurd. Any country that has chosen to make less than 5 per cent of the number of bombs it could have produced could not have done so because of resource constraints.

The above reasoning also shows why welcoming India into the global non-proliferation mainstream is a net positive for the efforts to curtail nuclear weapons. Most India critics take India’s historical restraint for granted. One American expert observed that India’s commitment to not proliferate nuclear technology and maintain a testing moratorium as part of the Indo-US nuclear deal is not valuable because India will likely do so with or without a nuclear deal.

Such cavalier statements, combined with a continued isolation of a nuclear India could provoke hardliners within India’s nuclear establishment to conclude that they need to act like China and start loosening India’s self-restraint in order for the value of the restraint to be recognised.

It must be recalled that China successfully parlayed its nuclear profligacy with regard to Iran and Pakistan in order to extract concessions for behaviour that it was legally obligated to as a signatory of the NPT. Even the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) mentions China’s “improved” nuclear proliferation record as a reason for Australia’s recent uranium deal with Beijing.

If India’s nuclear isolation were to continue, New Delhi could use the fact that it is not a non-member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel and sell nuclear reactors and other technology to any country and thereby undermine the NSG.

As to the impact of a potential Australia-India uranium deal on Pakistan, we should carefully separate myths from facts. Pakistan has not had a uranium crunch and has always been working to improve its fissile material stockpile.

Recently, the US-based think-tank Institute for Science and International Security released an analysis of a large Pakistani plutonium producing reactor in Khusab. Given the size of investment and infrastructure it takes to build large nuclear reactors, it is clear that Pakistan must have made the decision to escalate its fissile material production well before the Indo-US deal was announced.

Pakistan’s strategists have chosen to make aggressive statements following the Indo-US nuclear deal and Pakistan’s failure to procure its own deal plays to the sentiments of those who believe India and Pakistan should be permanently joined at the hip.

This India-Pakistan view of South Asia is rapidly becoming antiquated. Pakistan was recently ranked as one of the top-states facing risk of failure on the 2007 Failed States Index developed by the US-based nongovernmental group Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. While it is in everyone’s interest to stabilise relations between two nuclear powers, many observers believe that it is grossly unfair and untenable to tie down a rising democracy and global dynamo simply to accommodate the insecurities of an unreliable and failing military regime.

Most critics of an Australia-India uranium deal are missing the point. The NPT, like any international treaty, is based on the geopolitical underpinnings of the time it was negotiated and thereby has a shelf life only as long as the power structure stays the same. Clearly, the world of 2007 is not the same as what it was in 1967. By selling uranium to India with strict conditions and verification mechanisms, Australia could take a huge step towards building closer ties with all major power centres of the 21st century.

On the other hand, should Australian leadership after the next elections take a more dogmatic approach in defence of a failed treaty, they would be making a huge and futile mistake. India is likely to get uranium from other sources should its deal with the US go through and New Delhi would unlikely forget the slight it received from Canberra.

To put it bluntly, an Australian refusal to supply uranium to India using the NPT alibi after Canberra's generous offer to China would be seen not as a principled stand in favour of non-proliferation but as a short-sighted move to preserve a failed nuclear order of the 1960s and as an affront to a rising India.

Australia should therefore consider extending a uranium sales offer to India, similar to one that is on the table with China and other NPT weapons states.

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About the Author

Kaushik Kapisthalam is a US-based commentator on South Asia issues with a focus on defence and strategic affairs. He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and writes regularly for United Press International, Defense News and Asia Times. He can be reached at contact@kapisthalam.com

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