The list of the overwhelming challenges President Bush is leaving for the next president was long enough before he added, with the acquiescence of the U.S. Senate, providing India with nuclear material and knowhow. There are so many ways this is a dangerous policy that it is hard to know where to start. The “winner” is the fact that Pakistan’s military responded by deciding that it must keep up with India, and hence will seek to expand its nuclear program, one way or another. This is a truly alarming development, in a world in which alarms abound, because Pakistan is by far the country in which terrorists are the most likely to get their hands on nuclear arms, either by capturing them, having them slipped to them by cooperative elements in the military or intelligence services, or by overthrowing the failing government.
One may say, wait a moment; the US is not giving India nuclear arms. Hence, why would Pakistan seek to countervail them? The fact is that India’s access to highly enriched uranium is limited. As a result of the U.S. providing Indian civilian reactors with such materials, India can and will use its own uranium in its military nuclear facilities to make more bombs.
The U.S. has a vital security interest in curbing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has been pressing Iran and North Korea for years to stop such developments, and it has rallied its allies to help it in implementing such nonproliferation policies. However, if the U.S. helps another nation expand its nuclear program, it will end up undermining the already weak norm against nuclear weapons, making it even more difficult to demand that other nations give up their military nuclear ambitions. In the words of Senator Byron Dorgan, “[The] message is you can misuse American nuclear technology and secretly develop nuclear weapons, you can test those weapons, you can build a nuclear arsenal in defiance of U.N. resolution and you will be welcomed as someone showing good behavior with an agreement with the United States of America.” He added that the agreement is a “green light to say ‘You may produce additional nuclear weapons.’”
The notion that it is ok for “good” governments to have nuclear bombs, that we need only worry about rogue and failed ones, is a risky supposition. Governments come and go. The government of Iran—when the U.S. helped the Shah to start a nuclear program—was a close ally which overnight became a dire enemy. I am not suggesting that India will follow the same course, but the notion that it can be relied upon to be a close U.S. ally has little to support it. For decades, India was much closer to Russia than to the U.S., and there are large and growing segments of the populations who, let’s put it gently, do not love us.
In short, the Bush “legacy” has just been extended by adding one more mess to the pile, and the next administration is being saddled with one more problem that it will need to fix—only this one is more troubling than many of the others.
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. For more discussion, see Security First (Yale 2007). To contact him, write comnet@gwu.edu. www.securityfirstbook.com
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