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Stagecraft and StatecraftPouring hot oil on nuclear powerToo much hot air in nuke deal
The Indo-U.S. nuclear deal is largely about selling dreams, but a major myth propagated is that greater nuclear-generated electricity will help reduce India’s oil-import dependency, writes Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times July 4, 2008
The partisan rancour over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal has helped obscure facts, allowing shibboleths and fantasies to substitute for an informed debate on a critical issue. Several myths continue to be repeated untiringly. The biggest of them draws a meretricious link between nuclear energy and soaring oil prices to justify the proposed import of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent power reactors from overseas.
What does nuclear power have to do with the price or import requirements of any transportation fuel? Thanks to the oil price shocks in the 1970s and 1980s and the advent of new energy technologies, the share of global electricity produced from oil has shrunk from 25 per cent in 1973 to barely 4 per cent. The remaining oil-fired power plants — of which India has only a handful — will be phased out, or refitted to run on gas. Oil now is primarily used for transportation, while the reactor-import option is about electricity generation.
The link between nuclear power and oil is specious. In the years ahead, the world could move toward electric vehicles and even use grid power to make hydrogen for the fuel-cell vehicles of the future. In another futuristic scenario, nuclear energy may indirectly serve as a substitute to some oil use in the commercial and industrial sectors. But today, greater nuclear-generated electricity is not going to really reduce any country’s oil needs, certainly not India’s. In fact, with little overlap in the oil and nuclear global-market structures, nuclear power now competes principally against coal, natural gas and maybe renewables.
If global oil demand is threatening to outstrip supply, so is the case with uranium. Current concerns associated with oil’s price volatility, supply security and geopolitical risks are no different than uranium’s. And if global oil reserves are finite, so are uranium resources, with proven uranium reserves likely to last barely 85 years, according to the Red Book published jointly by the OECD and IAEA. In fact, in the past five years, the international spot price of uranium has risen faster than that of crude oil, with uranium today trading six times above its $10 a pound historical average. Oil and uranium prices are likely to stay volatile, but the long-term trend for both is surely up.
Just as cheap oil now appears fanciful, cheap nuclear power for long has been a mirage. More than half a century after then U.S. Atomic Energy Agency Chairman Lewis Strauss claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter”, the nuclear power industry everywhere subsists on generous state subsidies, which do not reflect in the published costs of generation. The current electricity-market liberalization trends spell trouble for the global nuclear-power industry because they threaten the state support on which it survives. As a 2005 IAEA study by Ferenc Toth and Hans-Holger Rogner warns, “nuclear power’s market share might indeed follow a downward trajectory” if state subsidies abate and more cost-effective reactors are not designed.
Other international studies have shown that nuclear power, although a long-matured technology, has demonstrated the slowest rate of learning in comparison to other energy technologies, including newer sources like wind and combined-cycle gas turbines. Instead of the price declining with nuclear power’s maturation, the opposite has happened. Power reactors also remain very capital-intensive, with high up-front capital costs, long lead times for construction and commissioning, and drawn-out amortization periods that discourage private investors. In the US, two separate studies by the University of Chicago (2004) and MIT (2003) showed new nuclear power remaining comparatively more expensive. That explains why the U.S. industry has yet to receive its first domestic power reactor order in more than three decades, despite the Bush administration offering among the world’s most-attractive tax sops and other state incentives. But in India there has been little debate on the nuclear deal’s premise — that the way to meet burgeoning energy demands is to import power reactors. While nuclear power certainly deserves a place in a diversified energy portfolio, reactors imports will be a path to external-fuel dependency and exorbitant plant costs. India ought not to confuse its electrical generation problem with transportation fuel problem. Also, India cannot correct its oil-import dependency on the Gulf region by fashioning a new dependency on a tiny nuclear-supply cartel made up of a few state-guided firms. While oil is freely purchasable on world markets, the global nuclear reactor and fuel business is the most monopolized and politically regulated commerce in the world, with no sanctity of contract. Without having loosened its bondage to oil exporters, should India get yoked to the nuclear cartel? With few reactors being built in the West or Russia, this cartel has aggressively sought export markets. In a bizarre spectacle, after having castigated Iran’s pursuit of civil nuclear technology as unsuited to its energy wealth, France and the US have competed to sign up reactor deals with oil-rich Arab countries. Yet, even at the current slack rate of construction of reactors, bottlenecks are becoming a serious problem for key components. There are just a few manufacturers for many components. For example, at least nine reactor components, including giant pressure vessels and steam generators, are made only in one facility owned by Japan Steel Works. A recent study by the U.S.-based Keystone Center reported a six-year lead time for some parts.
The harsh truth is that reactor imports, far from cutting India’s oil imports, will increase the already-wide price differential between nuclear energy and thermal power. While all the Indian power reactors built since the 1990s have priced their electricity at between 270 and 285 paise per kilowatt hour or higher, despite inbuilt state subsidy, the coal-fired Sason plant project in central India has contracted to sell power at 119 paise per kWh. Of the three countries lobbying to sell power reactors to India, the United States has little record to show while France’s record stands blemished by a two-year time overrun and $2.1 billion cost escalation in building Finland’s Olkiluoto-3 plant. The third, Russia, is struggling to complete its already-delayed twin reactors in Kundakulam. Wishful thinking ought not to cloud India’s options.
(The author is professor, Centre for Policy Research)
© Economic Times, 2008. The way forward for India on an increasingly divisive nuclear deal with the U.S.Emulate America’s bipartisan handling
Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu newspaper
June 28, 2008
The political drama and uncertainty in India triggered by partisan wrangling over the civil nuclear deal cannot shroud a key fact: Three years after the deal was unveiled as a “historic” breakthrough in U.S.-India relations, its final shape remains unclear and its future uncertain. Several developments have only increased the odds that finalising and implementing the deal will be a long, arduous challenge for both sides. The most prominent of these developments is that time has run out for the deal to be approved during U.S. President George W. Bush’s term in office. Given the extended requirements for congressional ratification set by the U.S. Atomic Energy Act and Hyde Act, it will be a Barack Obama or John McCain administration — and a new U.S. Congress — that will have the final say on the deal. While acknowledging this reality, the Bush administration, however, continues publicly and privately to prod New Delhi to play its last card by taking the safeguards accord to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board for approval. With no role to play in the subsequent stages, India may see more conditions being tagged to the deal by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the U.S. Congress. Considering how the deal picked up tougher terms with each stage it crossed, there is a distinct possibility that it would attract more conditions in the remaining phases. Take the NSG process, which promises to be drawn-out in view of the impending change of administration in Washington. Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh voiced hope in Parliament on August 13, 2007 that the NSG rule-change for India would occur “without conditions,” an unconditional waiver now looks fanciful. The Bush team is loath to share with New Delhi its revised draft proposal to the NSG. In fact, one of the Hyde Act’s prerequisites for the deal’s congressional approval is that any NSG rule-change must mirror the conditions that legislation has set for nuclear commerce with India — from a permanent test ban and tightly regulated uranium access, to a continued prohibition on all civil nuclear fuel-cycle technologies and the right to demand the return of transferred items and materials. The Act requires that an NSG exemption should neither be less stringent nor take effect before congressional ratification of the deal. Its clause-by-clause explanatory notes state that no NSG decision should “disadvantage U.S. industry by setting less strict conditions … than those embodied in the conditions and requirements of this Act.” The concern is that if the NSG fails to replicate U.S.-style conditions, New Delhi would do an end-run around America to buy power reactors from Russia and France. Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Congress barely four months ago that the NSG exemption will be “completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.” The Act asserts the U.S. has the “necessary leverage” in a group it founded to “ensure a favourable outcome.” Given these realities, there ought to be neither hurry nor heat in evolving India’s strategy and options on the deal. This is an issue that needs to be discussed dispassionately, in a bipartisan spirit, without succumbing to contrived deadlines. After all, the deal centres on the very future of the country’s nuclear programme. Once India has invested billions of dollars in importing power reactors, the congressionally enforced conditions, with cyclic presidential certifications of Indian “compliance,” will effectively bear it down. Even when Washington walked out midway from a binding 30-year bilateral pact over just one plant, the U.S.-built Tarapur nuclear power station, New Delhi continued to honour the accord’s terms till the end — and even beyond to this day. Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA had correctly assessed that India would not end its obligations even after America had broken its word, but instead would seek U.S. help to find a substitute fuel supplier to keep electricity flowing from Tarapur. That is exactly what happened. But in return, to this day, India has exacerbated its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the U.S. a right it didn’t have even if it had not walked out of that accord — a veto on Indian reprocessing of the accumulating discharged fuel. Yet, even in the latest deal, India has inexplicably agreed to forego reprocessing until it has, in the indeterminate future, won a separate, congressionally vetted agreement. The political passions the deal is generating make it all the more important that spin should not be allowed to obfuscate facts. Both America and China stand to gain from the qualitative and quantitative fetters the deal imposes on India’s deterrent, including the test prohibition and the forced shutdown of Cirus — one of the two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. Yet vicious attacks have been orchestrated on the Left for allegedly acting at China’s behest. Disinformation has been planted to sow confusion in the BJP ranks and break the party’s steadfast opposition to the deal. Can slogans and taunts serve as a substitute to an informed debate on an increasingly complex and technical deal? One would have expected greater transparency in a deal between the world’s most-populous and most-powerful democracies. In one telling example, the Bush administration, through a gag order on its written responses to congressional questions, has sought to keep the Indian public in the dark on the larger implications, lest the deal should run into rougher weather. In another example, New Delhi continues to shy away from explaining why it agreed to certain glaring provisions in the 123 agreement, such as its grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, or the conspicuous absence of any dispute-resolution mechanism. Citing the newfound support to the deal by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam or Brajesh Mishra can hardly lay to rest nagging questions. Cryptic personal opinions of individuals, however distinguished, will not obscure hard facts. After having been a party to all the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led pronouncements against the deal since 2005, Mr. Mishra has suddenly gone solo to find virtue in the accord. All he says is that he was officially briefed and now “hopes” and “believes” the deal is no longer injurious to Indian interests. But why not share with the public any new material facts he may know? Mr. Kalam, as scientific adviser in 1999, publicly supported the then government’s U.S.-instigated but abortive move to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now, in lending support to a deal that drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT, Mr. Kalam says: “If at any time there was a fear that national security would be compromised … we can withdraw.” This shows he hasn’t studied the deal, because the one common thread running through the Hyde Act, the 123 agreement, and the safeguards accord is that India is to be barred from ever halting international inspection of its entire civil nuclear programme, even if the U.S. unilaterally terminated cooperation.
Let’s be clear: the deal has divided India like no other strategic issue. The rancorous divisiveness ought to give pause to those who may think the deal can be rammed through. Indeed, through political over-investment, the deal has been meretriciously presented as the centrepiece, if not the touchstone, of a new Indo-U.S. partnership. To depict the deal as critical to U.S.-India ties is to suggest the base of that relationship is still narrow. Any bilateral relationship cannot rise or fall on the basis of a single issue. New Delhi’s best option today is to let the deal enter a period of suspended animation and await the new political line-up in Washington. A critical matter like this, which is going to tie India to legally irrevocable international inspections, demands a broad consensus at home. To ignore the widespread misgivings and to precipitously proceed ahead will set a treacherous and damaging precedent. Dr. Singh had assured the nation on several occasions that he would build a broad political consensus in the deal’s favour. Just two days after signing the original deal on July 18, 2005, he said: “It goes without saying that we can move forward only on the basis of a broad national consensus.” On August 17, 2006, he told the Rajya Sabha: “Broad-based domestic consensus cutting across all sections in Parliament and outside will be necessary.” Subsequently, he reassured Parliament that he will “seek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken.” That is exactly the wise course he needs to follow today. The partisan acrimony needs to be defused. New Delhi should learn from the way the much-maligned Bush administration has handled the deal domestically — by forging an impressive political consensus. The Hyde Act was the product of such consensus-building and political co-option, with the administration holding closed-door briefings for lawmakers and allowing its three-and-a-half-page bill to be turned into a 41-page, conditions-stacked legislation. Bipartisan support also holds the key to the deal eventually winning congressional ratification. In India, the deal ought not to be turned into a partisan issue, for it will have to be implemented well after the present government’s term.
© Copyright - 2008 The Hindu Growing partisan rancor over the Indo-U.S. nuclear dealNuclear Deal: Questions That Baffle
Why is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a hurry to approach the IAEA Board when he knows the deal cannot be sealed during the Bush presidency? The best way to proceed is to do what he had promised — build a broad political consensus in favour.
Brahma Chellaney Asian Age, June 27, 2008
The civil nuclear deal with America, although steeped in growing partisan rancour, is hardly the weighty issue that should determine any government’s future. Indeed, it is an issue of little long-term import to India’s great-power ambitions or energy needs. For the U.S., the deal offers substantive benefits. But for India the benefits are largely symbolic.
Yet the costs the still-uncertain deal is exacting on India can be gauged from the self-induced federal paralysis, with a sulking prime minister withdrawing into a shell and senior ministers deferring important work. The defence minister, for instance, called off a trip to Japan intended to add strategic content to a bilateral relationship pivotal to power equilibrium in Asia. Such government disruption from the top has no parallel in the annals of independent India.
The ungainly political stagecraft on display raises several unanswered questions. The first relates to Dr. Manmohan Singh’s obsession with a deal that has begun to warp his priorities. Many are asking the same question: Why is he willing to stake his government’s future on a single issue of questionable long-term strategic weight? Can he fashion a legacy by choosing deal-making over deterrent-building?
What is mystifying is that Dr. Singh has landed the country in a political logjam over a deal he knows cannot be completed during the remainder term of U.S. President George W. Bush. Time has simply run out. Even in an overly optimistic scenario, the deal cannot be ratified by the present U.S. Congress.
In addition to New Delhi’s insistence on taking its safeguards accord with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the latter’s governing board at this stage — an action that will gratuitously tie the country’s hands even before the final deal is clear — an extraordinary plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group will need to be held to consider a rule-change by consensus. An NSG waiver will neither be easy nor swift, with the U.S. itself seeking to attach conditions that mesh with its Hyde Act. In the last stage, the deal will come up for congressional ratification, but only after three documents — the so-called 123 agreement, a presidential determination that India has met all the stipulated preconditions, and a “Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement” — have been placed before the U.S. Congress “for a period of 60 days of continuous session”.
Given the limited number of days left in the present U.S. legislative calendar to let a ratification process run its full course, why this tearing hurry on the part of India to take the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? Washington — whose almost-daily statements have sought to egg on New Delhi to play that very card, even if it led to the collapse of Dr. Singh’s government — acknowledged this week that, “obviously, the next U.S. government will have to look at this [deal] and make their own decisions on it”. In fact, as early as last month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden had said the deal is unlikely to be approved in Bush’s term.
Before knowing how the NSG will condition cooperation with India or the attitude of the next U.S. administration, why is New Delhi willing to part with its last remaining card by taking the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? That accord, at any rate, ought to be taken to the Board only after the contours of the Additional Protocol with the IAEA have been firmed up. Otherwise, a leverage-stripped India could face more-stringent and wider inspections when it returns for Additional Protocol negotiations.
Like the 123 agreement, India has already finalized and “frozen” the safeguards accord. But unlike the former, which was made public days after it was initialled, the latter text has not been shown even to coalition allies, underscoring the creeping official opacity.
There are other mysteries, too. One centres on Dr. Singh’s metamorphosis from being anti-nuclear to becoming a fervent votary of commercial nuclear power. As finance minister in the first half of the 1990s, Dr. Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.
The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Dr. Singh set in motion then were not reversed until several years after he left office. That Dr. Singh’s newfound interest in nuclear power relates merely to reactor imports has been underscored by his recent action in cutting the Department of Atomic Energy’s 2008-09 budget by more than half a billion dollars.
Another unexplained action — one that demolishes the official contention that the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme — is the U.S.-dictated decision to permanently shut down Cirus, one of India’s two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. As Paul Nelson, T. V. K. Woddi and William S. Charlton of the Texas A&M University point out in a U.S. government-funded study, much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960.
As a completely refurbished reactor, Cirus is as Indian a facility as any. The prime minister's baffling decision to shut down Cirus two years from now, without approving a replacement reactor, will leave a major production shortfall in military-grade plutonium.
No less troubling is the fact that solemn promises made in Parliament were not kept. After the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved separate versions of an India-specific bill, the prime minister declared on August 17, 2006: “I had taken up with President Bush our concerns regarding provisions in the two bills. It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bills. The U.S. has been left in no doubt as to our position”. When Congress disregarded Dr. Singh’s red lines and passed the Hyde Act by amalgamating the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills, the prime minister admitted on December 18, 2006, that “there are areas which continue to be a cause for concern”.
Yet India negotiated a 123 agreement that complies with the Hyde Act, with the U.S. stating publicly, “We have the Hyde Act, and we kept reminding the Indian side, and they were good enough to negotiate on this basis…” Of all the 123 agreements the U.S. currently has with partner-states, the one with India stands out for conferring enforceable rights only on the supplier-state.
The prime minister's assurances on ““removal of restrictions on all aspects of cooperation”, lifetime fuel stockpiles, linking perpetual international inspections with perpetual fuel supply through “India’s right to take corrective measures”, securing an operational consent to reprocess spent fuel, etc. today lie in tatters.
The government’s secrecy on the safeguards accord springs from the fact that its text release will expose the manner it has yielded further ground. For example, the 123 agreement, instead of granting the right to take corrective measures, just records that India will seek such a right in the IAEA accord. But the IAEA accord, in its preamble, merely cites the 123 agreement’s reference to corrective measures!
It is manifest from this record that if the deal attracts more onerous conditions during the NSG and congressional approvals, the prime minister will go along, as he has in the past, after making some perfunctory noises. Indeed, it is this record that is likely to embolden NSG members and U.S. lawmakers to tag on more conditions in the next stages to constrain India’s nuclear leeway.
As it nears its third anniversary, the deal has become an emblem of how not to conduct Indian diplomacy. The deal also symbolizes the manner it has been sought to be thrust on the nation through media management, instead of by political co-option.
Public relations alone cannot sell an initiative. Can it be forgotten that the deal’s current cheerleaders were the drumbeaters to get India to send an army division into Iraq in 2003? How more vulnerable would India have been today had that campaign succeeded?
Just as in 2003, today’s campaign is centred on overstatement — that the concerned issue holds the key to a strategic partnership with America. There is also gross exaggeration about the utility of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors from overseas.
The deal’s collapse will neither alter the direction of the U.S.-Indian relationship, which is set toward closer strategic cooperation, nor affect the modest role nuclear power will play in India’s energy mix, with or without reactor imports. The deal, contrary to the propaganda, does not offer India unfettered access to uranium imports. India’s uranium crunch, in any event, is set to ease in two years’ time as new mines and mills open, according to nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar.
In that light, how justifiable is Dr. Singh’s action in turning the conditions-laden deal into a make-or-break issue of personal prestige and upping the ante to the extent that the nation has been plunged into a political crisis? Instead of wanting to precipitously approach the IAEA Board and step into a firestorm of national furore, shouldn’t the prime minister seek to achieve what he pledged in Parliament — “the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken”?
Once the IAEA Board seals the safeguards accord, India will have little role to play in the next stages, other than as a bystander anxiously monitoring from afar what additional conditions the deal attracts in the NSG and congressional-ratification processes. So why throw nuclear caution to the winds and buoy up non-proliferation literalists in the NSG and Congress in their resolve to sculpt the final deal?
© Asian Age, 2008. The Hype on the Rise of China and IndiaIs the India and China hype true? By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times
 Today it has become commonplace to speak of India and China in the same breadth as two emerging great powers challenging the two-century-old Western domination of the world. How justifiable is the hype on their rise? The future will not belong to China and India merely because they have a huge landmass and together make up more than a third of humanity. Being large in size and population is not necessarily an asset. In history, small, strategically geared states have wielded global power. The colonial powers that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries were led by small Britain and included tiny Portugal and the Netherlands. For analysts, it is tempting to make long-term linear forecasts on the basis of current trends. But such projections in the past have rarely come right. Remember the popular concerns in the United States in the 1980s that a fast-rising Japan threatened America's industrial might? The reason why such predictions have come wrong is that statistical probability — the sole tool in forecasting — has little application in strategic analyses. The straight-line projections on the economic growth of China and India may be too one-dimensional. Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that China's economy will surpass the U.S. economy around 2035 and that India will do so a decade later. This could happen but it is hardly certain. To be sure, economic growth is essential to underpin political and social stability. It is doubtful the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power will survive without it continuing to deliver high economic growth. But such growth in any country hinges on several factors, endogenous and exogenous. One factor beyond the control of policymakers in India and China that could slow economic growth and create major policy challenges for them in the years ahead, for example, is climate change. China and India, of course, have history on their side. These two were the world's largest economies for centuries up to 1820, after which they went into sharp decline due to their failure to catch up with the industrial revolution and by making themselves easy prey for European colonial interventions. But world history is replete with instances of small states made powerful by farsighted policies and big states unraveled by weak, unimaginative leaders. China certainly has a more forward-looking leadership than India, even though Chinese leaders, lacking popular legitimacy, tend to be more insecure. India has to pay a "democracy tax" that weighs down its decision-making and slows its economic development. When one examines natural endowments — such as arable land, water resources, mineral deposits, hydrocarbons and wetlands — the picture that emerges is not exactly gratifying for India and China in order for them to achieve enduring great-power capacity. Bounteous natural capital is critical for a country to sustain national strength over the long run. India and China together have more than 35 percent of the global population — or eight times the number of inhabitants in the U.S. — but just 60 percent more usable arable land than America. The two giants would have had a better balance between land size, population and natural resources had their populations been much smaller. But even as India still adds nearly a million people a month despite a slowing fertility rate, some Indians cheer the "demographic dividend" that awaits their youthful country while the developed world ages. Failure has come to be identified as a success. At a time when the world is confronting an energy crisis — symbolized both by the spiraling price of crude oil and gas, and the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — India and China stick out for their fast-rising dependency on energy imports and growing contribution to carbon-dioxide emissions. Their energy dilemma causes a growing burden and threatens to slow down their economic rise. Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts in everyday life — from gasoline-fueled transport to water-guzzling gadgets like washing machines and dishwashers. The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. But unlike the choices that the old economic giants had in their path of development — such as the one exemplified by the shift from scarce timber to abundant coal in 18th-century Britain — the emerging economic giants can avail themselves of no substitutes for some of the resources whose present demand is beginning to lag availability. Of all the resources, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the future prospects of India and China is fresh water. Climate change will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia's great rivers is likely to be accelerated by global warming. China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle over water resources. Having entered an era of perennial water shortages that are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita water availability, the scarcity in the Middle East, India and China face the prospect that their rapid economic modernization could stall due to inadequate water resources. This prospect will become a reality if their industrial, agricultural and household demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Even though India's usable arable land is larger than China's — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet. China's ambitious interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects in the vast Tibetan plateau, and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, threaten India's well-being. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China's long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northward to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. Water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions, reopening old wounds and bringing Tibet to center stage. Asia's economic rise and the ensuing shifts in international power equations foreshadow a world characterized by a greater distribution of power. But the hype on China and India needs to be tempered by geopolitical realism centered on a careful assessment of their long-term potential to build and sustain comprehensive power. Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan." The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 18, 2008
(C) All rights reserved India's U.S.-Influenced Decision to Shut Down Cirus Research ReactorCirus: A Testament to the Prime Minister’s Double Talk
Brahma Chellaney Covert magazine, July 1-15, 2008
(Cirus, on the right, and Dhruva, India's two research reactors that produce weapons-grade plutonium for the military programme.)
One of the great mysteries still begging for illumination is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s embrace of nuclear energy. No week or month passes without Singh alluding to the benefits of nuclear power for India. But as finance minister during the 1991-95 period, Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.
The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Singh set in motion were not reversed until several years after he left office. The nation today has a right to know whether Singh’s new-found interest in nuclear power is centred on imports — a concern reinforced by his government’s 2008-09 budget, which slashes the Department of Atomic Energy’s funding by $529 million. Another baffling mystery is Singh’s decision, as part of the controversial nuclear deal with the United States, to permanently shut down by 2010 one of the country’s two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. The prime minister has offered no explanation to the nation for overruling the nuclear establishment and agreeing to shut down the Cirus research reactor, located at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960. In fact, Cirus had been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars and reopened for barely two years when Singh made the surprise announcement to close down the reactor. Speaking in the Lok Sabha on March 10, 2006, the prime minister claimed that, “while the Cirus reactor was refurbished recently, the associated cost will be more than recovered by the isotope [production] and the research we will be conducting before it is closed”. But Singh still hasn’t answered the key question: Why did he succumb to U.S. pressure over a reactor that remains crucial to India’s strategic programme? Not only does the country still lack a credible minimal nuclear deterrent against its main challenge, China, but also current international estimates of India’s weapons-grade fissile material stockpile put its quantity just marginally higher than Pakistan’s. Given that Singh is now committed to “work with the U.S.” for the early conclusion of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), India needs to sharply accelerate its rate of weapons-grade plutonium production as it doesn’t have time on its side. Singh’s action, however, throws a larger spanner in the works.
The shutdown of Cirus two years from now, if the nuclear deal goes through, will deprive the nuclear military programme of almost one-third of its current supply of weapons-grade plutonium. Of course, India could build a replacement reactor. But the long lead time needed to build a research reactor, and the government failure thus far to sanction such a facility, will leave a major production shortfall.
The fuel burn-up in large, electricity-generating reactors produces plutonium of a quality far less desirable for weapons. Therefore, for military-grade plutonium, India has relied on its research reactors, Cirus and Dhruva. But Dhruva — commissioned in 1985 — faced major start-up problems that took several years to rectify. That is why the 40-MWth Cirus has contributed the larger share of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium — a point noted by Paul Nelson et al in a 2006 paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. In having insisted that New Delhi dismantle Cirus, America’s aim, needless to say, was to crimp India’s nuclear-deterrent plans — an objective the deal seeks to serve also by enforcing a permanent test ban.
Cirus — the source of plutonium for the 1974 nuclear test — was built with Canadian technical assistance and received US heavy water under two separate 1956 contracts that predated the 1957 establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the 1968 finalization of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) text. Because the concept of international “safeguards” (inspections) had not yet been devised, India gave no explicit undertaking to abjure nuclear-explosive uses.
Indeed, just after Cirus came on line, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru openly declared: “We are approaching a stage when it is possible for us … to make atomic weapons”. Decades later, the shutdown decision has given the non-proliferation lobby in the U.S. and Canada much to celebrate: India is tacitly conceding its 1974 test was born in sin and, to atone for it, it will shut down Cirus. Singh’s action, besides compromising the strategic programme, mocks various international (and even official American) legal opinions clearing India of any Cirus-related wrongdoing.
Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
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