Round-up: US-India Civilian Nuclear Deal
By Kamla Bhatt • Oct 14th, 2008Category: Americas, Global Voices, Ideas, India, YouTube Videos
While most of us were obsessively tracking the twists and turns of the financial global downturn there was an important milestone that USA and India crossed that went almost unnoticed. Earlier this month President Bush signed a bill that allows for sharing civilian nuclear technology with India that will help generate nuclear energy. Energy has been in short supply in India for decades now and the situation has worsened quite a bit in the last few years. Both India and China, two of the world’s fastest growing economies are fighting over supply of energy (oil fields) around the world. China relies on coal, while India hopes to increase its energy quota from nuclear energy to about 30-35 percent.
My latest Global Voices post looks at the US-India civilian nuclear deal and what bloggers had to say on this subject. It was kind of surprising to discover that the level of discussion on this subject was rather low-key among Indian bloggers. I wonder why.
The US-India civil nuclear deal has not gone unnoticed by many countries, especially Pakistan. Earlier today Pakistan’s President Zardari arrived in the People’s Republic of China and there is a talk about signing a civilian nuclear deal between Pakistan and China. Pakistan is considered as a traditional ally of China. Pakistan is also considered a close ally of the United States. Pakistan acted as a conduit or a back channel for President Nixon in the early 1970s and helped normalize USA’s relationship with China. The US-China rapprochement was an important foreign policy achievement of Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. But that was over 30 years ago and a lot of water has flown under the bridge.
I wonder what the long-term repercussion will be of the US-India nuclear deal. Will it seriously undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as some critics have pointed out? Or, is it as some other observers have argued that NPT is an inherently flawed treaty and frozen in time, and discounts the de facto situation on the ground? What do you think?