Julia Gillard's u-turn on selling uranium to India exposes Labor's decay

That argument ignores two points.

Firstly, India has an ambitious and comprehensive national security doctrine. A key component is the development of an operational capability to engage in a limited war against Pakistan. For example, under the controversial "cold start" doctrine India hopes to engage in large scale joint forces operations, a type of Blitzkrieg or what NATO called Air-Land-Battle during the cold war, against Pakistan's strike corps during a regional crisis.

India is acquiring sophisticated, including from the United States, conventional military assets to enable its general staff to feel something like "cold start" can work. But cold start will require some level of escalation control. Strategic parity with Pakistan based on a policy of mutual deterrence does not sit easily with such ambitious operational concepts.

Pakistan will not give up strategic nuclear parity with India without an almighty effort. Pakistan is developing an array of delivery platforms for its nuclear weapons and is also building additional nuclear reactors to supplement its fissile material stocks with plutonium. India also is augmenting its fissile material production capability.

The second of our two points is that India's nuclear weapons policy is not merely framed with respect to Pakistan. China is an important consideration. For example, India is developing a ballistic missile capability that will enable Delhi to hold significant targets within all of China at risk. Interestingly, China appears to be responding by beefing up its intermediate range ballistic missile capability aimed at India.

By selling uranium to both India and China Australia will be able to boast a grim consistency.

Moreover, India considers its nuclear capability to be a reflection of its status as a great power. Strategic parity with Pakistan hardly befits an aspiring global power. Indeed, India has indicated that it would like to develop strategic nuclear submarines and an intercontinental ballistic missile capability. Should India acquire such a capability it would become the newest member of the globe's nuclear weapons complex, a subset of the world's nuclear weapon states, which is defined as states with nuclear weapons of reach beyond their immediate region.

Selling uranium to India will likely help to fuel a dangerous arms race in South Asia, likely will assist India to enhance its strategic capability with respect to China as it boosts its fissile material stocks for more bombs and might well give Delhi more breathing space to develop a strategic nuclear capability of global import.

Nuclear nonproliferation is at heart an ethical principle. You support it, seek to nurture it and give it the highest priority, to the extent that your actions are consistent with it. Trashing Iran is easy. Australia's commitment to being a "good international citizen" with respect to nonproliferation is not to be judged according to how loudly Canberra condemns Iran. What matters is what Australia itself is doing with respect to its nuclear policies and arrangements.

To be sure the export of uranium will improve Australia's relations with India; however a consistent supporter of nonproliferation would argue that the nonproliferation norm should have higher priority. Additionally what is meant by "India" needs to be analysed. It would not include the poor and those who exist in a state of increasing material inequality within Indian society. India, again, is a technical term meaning the national security establishment and the cashed up elite.

Australia's political analysts are, by and large, complicit with the notion that adherence to "liberal internationalism," the so called norms and laws of the society of states, is what a labour and social democratic oriented foreign policy is all about. Notice that the NPT norm and letter of the NPT treaty is violated in this case. In a world where major power war is still a possibility and where advanced science and technology enables destruction on a vast scale humanity has a thin margin of survival provided, in part, by arms control treaties and regimes. The Labor Party, if it supports the position of the leadership, would be helping to further erode just such a regime in order to accommodate short term considerations of wealth and power.

Furthermore labour movement oriented approaches to foreign policy are, at least in theory, meant to be about internationalism understood as solidarity and support for the poor and oppressed of the world. This goes well beyond the narrow and shallow conception of an internationalist foreign policy promoted by our sophisticated and worldly analysts of international relations. But the likelihood of Labor in December adopting an international policy platform built around solidarity with the poor of India is about as likely as my receiving a reply from Santa Claus come December.

Australia is set to export uranium to India because the United States had first entered into a nuclear trade deal with India and used its diplomatic power, with the support of other nuclear exporters looking to make a buck and improve relations with "India," at the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The U-turn comes hot on the heels of Kim Beazley's declaration that a US military presence in Australia would represent the "southern tip" of the US led system of global power aimed at China.

At the forefront are material concerns about profit and power.

Those "comrades," or "friends" as Real Julia now calls them, that still believe in the "light on the hill" would do well to ponder this, and much else besides, when it comes time, lo and behold in December, to renew their party membership.