Source: Daedalus

Global Implications of the U.S.-India DealOn July 18, 2005, President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced their desire to change a series of national laws and international rules that the United States had helped create over a 30-year period to strengthen the nonproliferation regime. These rules were meant to deny nuclear cooperation with India and other states that refused either to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or to put all of their nuclear facilities under international safeguards. Between 2005 and September 2008, Bush and Singh personally invested large amounts of political capital to win all the national and international approvals required to accommodate India’s request for nuclear cooperation. What began as an obscure, albeit revolutionary, quest by a handful of driven individuals in Washington and New Delhi, ended up as an agreement by the 45 members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to exempt India from nonproliferation rules that are supposed to remain applicable to all other states.

The making and enforcing of international rules is frequently quixotic. Making rules is often tedious and compromising, while their enforcement is often absent or feckless. The nuclear nonproliferation regime has suffered these afflictions. However, considering that the ambition is to regulate the most powerful technology and material known to humankind, the rules that have grown around the NPT since 1968 have been remarkably successful. The nonproliferation regime is a key structure of the nuclear order that most people in the world would rather not live without. Some wish that this nuclear order would more strongly incline toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, or would more actively promote distribution of nuclear energy. Others wish that it would concentrate more effectively on stopping proliferation. Few want the disorder that would follow a collapse of the bargains on which the current system of rules depends. Thus many observers and governments fear that the NSG-India nuclear deal is a bad portent: it may signal corrosion of the rules-based nuclear order.