The think tank that didn't

Medcalf's response to such arguments is that opening up nuclear trade with India won't necessarily lead to proliferation elsewhere: "Neither the US-India deal nor Australian uranium sales will determine whether third countries opt for nuclear arms." And this: "But the most mistaken claim is that Prime Minister Julia Gillard's proposal to end the blanket ban on civilian uranium exports to India will somehow lead to the catastrophic spread of nuclear weapons ..."

Of course no country will build nuclear weapons as a direct result of the US-India deal or the Labor government's uranium policy reversal at its national conference last December. But those events certainly encourage proliferation and fundamentally alter the political equation for some countries.

If, for example, either Japan or South Korea pulled out of the NPT and built nuclear weapons prior to the 2008 US-India deal, they would have been excluded from international nuclear trade and that would have killed their domestic nuclear power industries and their nuclear export industries. Now, the equation is fundamentally altered − based on the Indian precedent, both countries could realistically expect to be able to build weapons with minimal impact (or manageable impact) on their nuclear power programs and their nuclear export industries.

The flip-side of Medcalf's disingenuous, straw-man argument about proliferation is a disingenuous, straw-man argument about disarmament: "Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel have long pursued nuclear weapons regardless of how the world treated India. It is absurd to suggest that their leaders are on the verge of nuclear disarmament if only Australia would steer clear of India's nuclear energy program."

Problems are already evident in the wake of the 2008 US-India agreement, not least China's use of the precedent to justify its plan to sell more reactors to Pakistan.

Medcalf says that safeguards applying to uranium sales to India would be at least as strong as those applying to uranium sales to China and Russia. But IAEA safeguards inspections in China are tokenistic and inspections in Russia are very nearly non-existent − one inspection of one plant in 2001, and another in 2010. Medcalf surely knows that.

And he surely knows about the controversy surrounding uranium sales to Russia. The Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) misled parliament's treaties committee in 2008 by claiming that "strict" safeguards would "ensure" peaceful use of Australian uranium and by conspicuously failing to tell the committee that there had not been a single IAEA safeguards inspection in Russia since 2001. The treaties committee made the modest recommendation that some sort of a safeguards system ought to be in place before uranium exports to Russia were approved, only to have its recommendation rejected. Interestingly, the head of ASNO at the time was John Carlson, who has since left ASNO and is now a 'Visiting Fellow' at the Lowy Institute.

The Lowy Institute takes money from Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, the two companies that stand to profit most from the Labor government's policy change. I've never once seen that funding disclosed in relevant Lowy Institute publications. However I suspect Medcalf's role in the India uranium debate has more to do with his extensive links with India than it has to do with funding from uranium mining companies. And there seems to be a disproportionate number of former government officials (Medcalf and Carlson among them) working for the Lowy Institute.

Whatever the explanation, it remains the case that Medcalf has seriously debased public debate on an important policy issue. The Lowy Institute should be held in contempt for so long as it continues to provide a platform for him to peddle his propaganda.