Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of high-tech goods to India. Other restrictions dated back to the 1970s, and
barred the export of dual-use technology and items that could contribute to
India's nuclear or missile programs. This precluded the transfer of civilian
nuclear technology as well as cooperation and technical assistance on nuclear
safety issues.
By this time, US sanctions had importance for India more for symbolic than
for practical reasons. American sanctions, New Delhi insisted, were an
anachronistic remnant of an attitude where one country believed it had the moral
authority to levy sanctions against another. Sanctions reflected an American
assumption that nuclear weapons were permissible for the United States but not
for India. What place, Indians asked, did such thinking have in this new
friendship between sovereign equals? Worse yet, India, which prided itself on its
unblemished record of not assisting other countries to acquire nuclear
capabilities, found itself under US nonproliferation sanctions, whereas China, for
which there was ample evidence about its nuclear weapons assistance to other
nations, was not sanctioned. As one Indian scholar bitingly remarked, 'China
gets only words, we get the boot'.
Washington's deliberate pace in moving to lift the Glenn amendment
sanctions reflected the policy dilemma confronting the new Bush administration.
A statement issued by the State Department in mid-February inadvertently
underscored the problem. In calling on Russia to cancel an agreement to ship
nuclear fuel to the Tarapur power reactors in India, the department appeared to
equate this action with Moscow's far more provocative policy of providing Iran
with sensitive nuclear assistance. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld raised tempers
in New Delhi further when he casually lumped India, as a recipient of Russian
missile technology, with such pariah states as Iran and North Korea.
In fact, the Bush administration was not nearly as ready as many in India
assumed to walk away from the edifice of nonproliferation treaties, international
agreements, and US legislation that had grown up over the past generation. Say
what they would about 'obsolete' arms control treaties, Bush officials
nonetheless were as keen to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of
the North Koreas, Irans, and Iraqs of the world as had been the Clinton
administration. As they surveyed their options, Bush's new officials discovered a
certain utility in at least portions of the existing international nonproliferation
regime, even if they did not trumpet this judgment.
Moreover, the 1998 Indian and Pakistani tests, and the failure of US efforts to
prevent them, had not lessened the concerns that had led successive American
presidents from both political parties to emphasize nonproliferation and restraint
in their policies toward the subcontinent. To the contrary, these concerns, amidst
heightened Pakistani-Indian tensions, were as pressing as ever. This too stayed
those who might otherwise have been prepared to de-emphasize or even abandon
US nonproliferation efforts in the region.
