Nuclear India?
Posted : March 7, 2006 at 11:05 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft spot for countries of one billion people, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more productive and peaceful place…So I applaud President Bush’s desire to form a deeper partnership with India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse — in its current form — the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with New Delhi…India says it needs to keep producing nuclear material to have a more credible deterrent. I can’t judge that…”The problem the Bush administration faces in selling the nuclear deal is not, as the president has said, that ’some people just don’t want to change’ or that they are focused on outdated concerns,” Mr. Einhorn argued. “People are willing to change. They want to support the president’s India initiative, even modify longstanding policies. But they want to do it in a way that also serves an objective that is hardly outdated: preventing nuclear proliferation”
— Thomas L. Friedman, “Letting India in the Club?”
Sounds like a fair argument to me. Am I missing something?
- Anand
Category: Chindia
1 Comment
Well the “unfairness” in the argument is if Fiedman thinks supply fuel to India will lead to Nuke Prolferation what about the ongoing profiliration by world’s most rogue nuke state - China? US already has a civilian nuke sharing prgram with China, a signatory to NPT only on paper but a rogue in the spirit of NPT when u look at this prolifiratio from Pakistan to North Korea, now Libya, and possibly Bangladesh. Where is Friedman’s view on that? India, with its spotless non-Proliferation, is more meritous candidate for Nuke fuel than China! and frankly, we only need this for the next 4-5 years. With huge success in Thorium use as Nuke fuel (read abt KAMINI reactor and IAEA’s CRP committee’s recent report on India’s Thorium research) , we will be able to produce more nuke energy than any others (esp when we have a proven reserves of 250000 tonnes of thorium in our country)!
Posted by: Ramesh at March 13, 2006 @ 8:13 am