Giving India a Pass

As for the charge of encouraging other potential rogue proliferators, this has little merit because India is not really a rogue -- it never signed on to the NPT in the first place and so has a legitimate claim not to feel bound by its provisions. The real rogues are countries such as Iran and North Korea, who signed on and then made a mockery of the regime and its enforcement. Pakistan, it is true, has also never signed on, but its stance is far more rogue-like than India's because it has a demonstrated record as a major and egregious proliferator of nuclear technology. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who ran a global nuclear bazaar, today lives comfortably in Islamabad after an anodyne public reprimand followed by a prompt pardon. India, in contrast, has spurned overtures from Libya and Iran despite receiving tempting offers of cash and oil in return for assistance with their nuclear weapons programs.

Regarding the final charge, that the agreement will encourage other nuclear suppliers to peddle civilian nuclear technology recklessly, such a concern is baseless because it rests on the false assumption that the deal with India is itself reckless -- which it is not. Should the Russians, for example, try to use the deal as a precedent for selling nuclear technology to either Israel or Pakistan (the only other states currently outside the NPT), the recipient will have to separate its nuclear weapons program from its civilian energy program and accept full-scope IAEA safeguards, just as India has done -- which would make the sale essentially unproblematic.

In sum, providing India with civilian nuclear technology will enable the country to address its dire energy needs and limit the dangers of nuclear accidents at antiquated plants while cementing its growing strategic relationship with the United States. Those advocating a strategy of technology denial see India through the narrow and parochial prism of nonproliferation. When the country was viewed by policymakers as poor, weak, and strategically irrelevant, the arguments of such "functionalists" inside the American foreign policy and national security apparatus could trump the arguments of the "regionalists" arguing for a more mature, multifaceted, and flexible bilateral relationship. Now that India has risen in importance, the regionalists have gained the upper hand (as they always have had, for example, with regard to Israel). It's about time.