Uranium sales – unpopular but right

Julia Gillard will not receive a great deal of thanks from within her own left faction of the Labor Party for her proposal to drop the ban on selling uranium to India, but as Albert Einstein once said 'what is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right'.

Whatever the Greens and the left of the Labor Party might think, it is right to sell uranium to India even though it hasn't signed (couldn't sign) the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - right for any number of reasons.

Take the pragmatic reasons: We can make money; the mining lobby (which doesn't have the Prime Minister as its pin-up girl at the moment) will be pleased; jobs will be created; we have plenty of uranium and if we didn't sell it to India someone else would.

Let's take it from the humanitarian side. Around 40 per cent of India's population (that's close to 500 million people) have access to electricity for 12 hours or less a day. The need for nearly half a billion consumers to be brought into the 20^th century, let alone the 21^st, is not going to be met by sticking up a few windmills or laying down some photovoltaic cells.

It's either going to be from nuclear energy or a string of heavily polluting coal-fired power stations. What would be your choice Mr Brown?

India is also a rapidly industrialising country. It is doing so because it wants to lift more of its population out of the $2-a-day poverty trap. It is right and proper that it should be doing this, but industry needs electricity, plenty of it - another box to be ticked for nuclear power.

And finally there is the simple fact that Australia is a democracy, India is the world's largest democracy and we should be doing more to develop relations which have been sadly neglected over the past two decades while we have been paying court to authoritarian China.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty has continually been put forward as the stumbling block by the anti-sales lobby. Leave alone the fact that there will be strict and verifiable rules in place to ensure that Australia's uranium will go nowhere near a bomb factory, the mantra is that India has defied the treaty and must be punished for it.

But as I hinted above, it hasn't been a case of India not signing, it can't sign without giving up its nuclear weapons arsenal – even though the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia (then the Soviet Union), France and China are proud signatories while their arsenals bristle with nukes.

The reason is a date – 1970 – the year that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into being. The five countries mentioned already had nuclear weapons and certainly weren't going to give them up, so the framers of the treaty accepted the inevitable and wrote them in as 'Nuclear Weapons States'.

However, India did not explode its first nuclear device until four years afterwards and so was excluded from signing along with (later) Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, the latter having signed originally, before leaving to develop its own bomb.

It is certainly unfortunate that Pakistan felt it had to develop its own nuclear punch to copy India, especially as it is a considerably less stable nation with terrorist groups existing almost side-by-side with its storage silos. That is a separate issue. But the threat that India keenly feels today comes not from Pakistan, but from the east and nuclear-equipped China.

A few weeks ago I was at a meeting of the Australian Institute of International Affairs to hear an address by the Former Indian Foreign Secretary, Lalit Mansingh. He reminded us that China and India had fought a short war in 1962 and since then their borders had been in dispute.

While they had agreed to normalise relations in all other areas, leaving the border issue to a working group of technocrats, Mr Mansingh said that 15 meetings had not resulted in "an inch of progress".

"I am afraid we are at the stage where we feel that China is not interested in resolving the border issue. In fact, the Chinese are making more and more outrageous claims on Indian territory," he said.

This included producing a map that showed the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh renamed as 'Southern Tibet', a clear indication of China's designs on the area, the diplomat said.

A further issue was what India believed was China's long range plan to dam the Brahmaputra River which flows into India from Tibet.

"If this becomes a reality it would be catastrophic for India's north-eastern region; beyond that the entire nation of Bangladesh would be threatened," he said.

Add the growing Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean, and it is not hard to realise why the Government in New Delhi is concerned.

There is little doubt that China sees its future if not as a global power than certainly a regional one, extending its influence over all of Asia. If the US ever decided to withdraw from the region (thankfully that is unlikely, at least in the medium term, after President Obama's visit to Australia) then India would be the only serious rival to those ambitions.

It would also be a clash of cultures and ideologies – China would want to see its own brand of authoritarian centralism triumph over India's democratic federalism. The sabres would be rattling in earnest.

As was the case during many years of US-Soviet rivalry, the threat of nuclear war kept both sides in check. The same can apply to a future power contest between the Asian giants.

India needs nuclear weapons equality with China. In the long run that will preserve peace in the region – perhaps an uneasy peace – but still better than the alternative.

And Australia needs to do its bit to support its democratic friend as it works to bring a greater degree of prosperity and economic freedom across the sub-continent – not always easy in a tumultuous, pluralistic society.

Uranium sales are one small step along that path. Ms Gillard was right to suggest it and her Government should waste no time in implementing it.