Editorial
India, Oil and Nuclear Weapons
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Published: February 19, 2006
Exploding at the seams with building, investment and trade, India can
hardly keep up with itself. Airplanes coming into Delhi and Mumbai
routinely end up circling the airports for hours, wasting precious
jet fuel, because there are not enough runways or airport gates. City
streets originally built for two lanes of traffic are teeming with
four and sometimes five lanes of cars, auto-rickshaws, mopeds, buses
and trucks. This energy-guzzling congestion will only become worse as
India continues producing fairly high-quality goods and services at
lower and lower prices - from automobiles that cost only $2,500 to
low-budget airline flights for $50.
India's president, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, sounded exactly like
President Bush when he told the Asiatic Society in Manila earlier
this month that energy independence must be India's highest priority.
"We must be determined to achieve this within the next 25 years, that
is, by the year 2030," he said. Unfortunately, Mr. Kalam, like Mr.
Bush, is far better at talking than at any real action to reduce
energy consumption. In the new enclaves for India's emerging middle
class and its rapidly rising nouveau riche, environmentally
unsustainable, high-ceilinged houses feature air-conditioning systems
that stay on year round.
When President Bush makes his long-planned trip to India next month,
he will be visiting a country that, like China, has begun to gear its
international strategy to its energy needs. That is one of the
biggest diplomatic challenges facing the United States, and right now
the American strategy is askew.
India desperately wants Mr. Bush to wring approval from Congress for
a misbegotten pact in which America would help meet India's energy
requirements through civilian nuclear cooperation. With its eye on
the nuclear deal, India recently bowed to American pressure and cast
its vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's
suspected nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council.
That was a victory for Mr. Bush, and India did the right thing in
helping to hold Iran accountable, but the deal it wants to make with
the United States is a bad one. It would allow India to make an end
run around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's basic bargain, which
rewards countries willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the
opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their
energy needs. America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on
India because India refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty and
it has tested a nuclear device that uses materials and technology
diverted from its civilian nuclear program.
In trying to give India a special exemption, Mr. Bush is threatening
the nonproliferation treaty's carrot-and-stick approach, which for
more than 35 years has dissuaded countries that are capable of
building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to
Turkey to Saudi Arabia. And if his hope is that the promise of
nuclear technology from America will be enough to prod India to turn
its back on Iran, that's a bad bet. Even as India was casting its
vote on Iran's nuclear program, India's petroleum minister, Murli
Deora, said his government would continue to pursue a
multibillion-dollar gas pipeline deal with Tehran.
There is no diplomatic quick fix in this energy-hungry world. Even
if India shunned Iran, it would still have to turn to other petroleum
suppliers that Washington wants to isolate, including Sudan and
Venezuela. And the Iranian supplies would wind up going to other
energy-hungry nations, tying them more closely to Tehran. If Mr. Bush
wants to tackle this quandary seriously, he needs to begin by pushing
for significant energy conservation steps in the United States, by
far the world's largest energy consumer. That would do far more to
weaken the stranglehold Iran and other energy-producing nations now
exercise over world oil markets.
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