Why Australia should sell uranium to India

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.