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Anonymous diplomats tell Reuter’s Boris Groendahl that they may delay India’s NSG exemption:

But diplomats from several NSG member states said the draft fell behind earlier U.S. proposals, had unacceptable clauses and omissions, and went against existing U.S. laws on the deal.

“I would be very surprised if that would happen,” said a diplomat, who like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“There are no conditions. Obviously what is missing is that (the waiver) is void if there is another atomic test.”

A second diplomat said: “I think a majority of countries feel that the current draft is very weak and there is no conditionality at all… I don’t really think that the U.S. expect that they are able to pass this draft.”

If you are lucky enough to have a subscription to Nuclear Fuel, check out Mark Hibbs’ article “Some in NSG predict prolonged debate over conditions for Indian exemption” (33:16, August 11, 2008). Diplomatic sources tell Hibbs the NSG debate will last “several weeks, perhaps longer” because of opposition to a “clean” exemption.

Groendahl goes on to speculate that the US is hoping the NSG will “fix” the deal by conditioning the exemption on India not testing — something that would be more palatable to the anti-American left in India if it came from the international community.

I don’t know about that hypothesis, but it doesn’t matter. The NSG should oppose a “clean” exemption.

I don’t know how many officials in foreign countries read this blog, but believe me: A clean NSG exemption for India is a license for Delhi to resume testing nuclear weapons.

I’ve already written about the political and technical pressures that I believe are pressing India to conduct another round of tests. Some smart people disagree with my judgment. I think this is a hell of a science experiment to attempt with the nonproliferation regime.

The only scenario under which India would suffer a disruption in supply of nuclear fuel is a resumption of nuclear testing. India is attempting to prevent being isolated as it was after the 1998 nuclear test. A “clean” NSG exemption with no conditions would permit India to use the global marketplace to soften international repercussions from another round of nuclear tests.

I am not saying that India has a secret plan to test. Maybe the Congress-led government won’t. But the Indian side has written every agreement — the US-India 123 Agreement, the Safeguards Agreement and the NSG exemption — to allow Delhi to keep open the option to resume testing. The 123 and IAEA safeguards agreements include provisions committing the US to assist India in creating “a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply.” The 123 Agreement further requires the US to “take into account” whether whatever it was that India did to deserve termination of cooperation (e.g. conduct a nuclear test) was “a response to similar actions by other States which could impact national security.” “Other States” means China.

I don’t believe that such careful, lawyerly language is some kind of accident. India wants to keep the door open to testing; the NSG should slam it shut.

Comment [55]

Following up on James’s post about the proposed NSG exemption for India, the Arms Control Association has the full text of the document.

If you haven’t been reading Siddharth Varadarajan’s commentary at Reality, One Bite At A Time and in The Hindu, you are really missing out.

Comment [8]

The US has apparently finished drafting the NSG exemption for nuclear trade with India (apologies, this is a few days old—I’ve been behind on my blogging). At a meeting in London last month US Ambassador to the IAEA Greg Schulte said that both India and the US wanted a “clean” exemption (i.e. one with no strings attached). And that appears to be what the US has proposed (although it’s not 100% clear).

According to the Hindu:

The draft was finalised in consultation with India and first handed over on Thursday to Germany, which heads the NSG.

The draft drops “gratuitous” references made on committing the NSG members to ensuring that India adopted full-scope safeguards at the earliest, said the officials.

India has resisted full-scope safeguards and wants only those plans identified by it to be under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

The officials said the draft, after being fine-tuned several times in consultation with the U.S., was more or less to India’s satisfaction.

Obviously, requiring India to accept full-scope safeguards “at the earliest” would be effectively meaningless but it would irritate India while placating some of the more sceptical NSG states. More significant, I think, is the fact that the draft was “more or less to India’s satisfaction,” which suggests that any restrictions are minimal.

The irony is, of course, that having done all the leg work to enable nuclear trade with India (including a clean NSG exemption), the US could well lose out on Indian contracts because its own national law, the Hyde Act, is more restrictive than that of other countries.

Comment [5]

Having had a chance to digest the India safeguards agreement, I’ve become interested in what is left out. Specifically, how will the IAEA analyse and draw conclusions about Indian compliance?

How the Agency analyses information is, in many ways, just as important as the safeguards agreement itself. Moreover, it has changed considerably since full-scope safeguards were introduced in the early 1970s.

Prior to efforts to strengthen safeguards in the 1990s the Agency adopted what was termed a “facility-level approach”. It had a set of inspection goals for each facility in a state. If those objectives were met at each and every facility then, at the end of the year, the IAEA concluded that there had been no diversion of nuclear material in the state concerned.

Following the shock of discovering Iraq’s clandestine nuclear programme in 1991, the Agency pioneered a new “state-level approach”. The IAEA safeguards glossary defines it thus:

a safeguards approach… developed for a specific State, encompassing all nuclear material, nuclear installations and nuclear fuel cycle related activities in that State. A State level safeguards approach defines the application of safeguards measures at each facility and location outside facilities in the State and, where an additional protocol is in force, the safeguards measures … that would enable the IAEA to draw and maintain a conclusion of the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in that State….

(For a less terse discussion, but one still written in Agency-speak read this).

The Agency never gives examples so let me give one of my own which (I hope) illustrates the idea.

Say a state has a declared enrichment plant capable of producing 100 tonnes of LEU per year. However, the state declares it only uses the plant to produce 60 tonnes of LEU per year to feed two reactors. This might well be because the state built too much enrichment capacity and doesn’t need to use it all. However, it also raises the possibility that the enrichment plant is being used for some undeclared (“excess”) production.

Under the state-level approach the Agency will flag up this potential mismatch and will look into it before drawing any conclusion about the state’s compliance. Under the facility-level approach, it would have “blindly” applied safeguards at the enrichment plant and reactors without looking into the difference in capacities.

The state-level approach is, incidentally, applied in all states with a safeguards agreements in force, whether or not they also have an additional protocol in operation (although the Agency’s conclusions is modified accordingly).

Anyway, this all raises the question of whether the Agency will be applying the state-level approach in India.

Obviously it can’t apply a state-level approach per se since India’s military facilities will remain unsafeguarded. However, if India cleanly splits it civilian and military facilities, I can see no reason why the Agency can’t apply a state-level approach to the whole of India’s civilian fuel cycle: a state within a state, if you will. Using this kind of analysis in India will significantly enhance the credibility of conclusions drawn by the Agency.

I don’t think this question has ever come up before with the IAEA as it has never attempted to safeguard an entire fuel cycle in a state outside the NPT (safeguards are applied in such states but only to particular facilities).

However, Euratom must face a similar problem in applying safeguards in the UK and France. Like India, the UK and France have a military fuel-cycle but their civilian fuel cycles are comprehensively safeguarded (by Euratom). Does Euratom adopt a state-level approach in the UK and France? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.

In any event, I think that the India safeguards agreement does give the IAEA the necessary authority to use the state-level approach. Specifically, article 11 specifies which facilities, material and equipment require safeguards. Its authority appears to be sufficiently broad to enable the Agency to ‘track’ all nuclear material around the fuel cycle, wherever that leads.

I don’t want to give the impression that the omission of the Agency’s safeguards “concept” for India from the safeguards agreement is a deficiency—safeguards agreements never specify it. But, I do think we need to know what this concept is before we can properly assess the value of safeguards in India.

Comment [6]

I have a copy of the India-specific safeguards agreement, IAEA/2008/30. Here is the full-text.

The word “perpetuity” appears not once.

The section on termination of safeguards states that termination “shall be implemented taking into account the provisions of GOV/1621 (20 August 1973).”

That is a worrisome clause — it appears to offer a loophole that I wrote about in October 2006 after Mark Hibbs published a pair of articles on the agreement:

GOV/1621 is restricted, so I don’t actually know what it says. Sources, however, told Hibbs that GOV/1621 has to do specifically with safeguarding items which are transferred to a state from third parties—a loophole those experts told Hibbs would allow India to interpret the agreement as excluding the 8 indigenous Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors New Delhi offered to place under safeguards pursuant to the US-India agreement …

That would mean that India’s safeguards obligations on the reactors are voluntary, allowing India to terminate or suspend safeguards on these 8 reactors after removing any imported fuel.

I am interested in whether other people share my reading of the agreement.

It appears to me that a reactor becomes subjects to safeguards if (1) it is listed in the Annex (which I don’t have) or (2) uses imported fuel. According to the text of the agreement, India may suspend safeguards on a facility listed in the Annex (case 1) if India and the IAEA “jointly determine that the facility is no longer usable for any nuclear activity relevant from the point of view of safeguards”. As far as I can tell, the agreement is silent on what happens to safeguards on facilities not in the annex (case 2) after India removes all safeguarded fuel.

That leaves the very distressing possibility that Hibbs was correct — that once India removes any imported fuel leaves from any of the 8 indigenous pressurized heavy water reactors, which are unlikely to be listed in the Annex, India can unilaterally terminate the safeguards on the facility.

The remedy would quite straightforward: The IAEA BOG should insist that the reactors themselves are put under safeguards “in perpetuity”—not just the material or other items supplied under the safeguards agreement.

There are other aspects of the agreement that I find worrisome — the co-mingling of military and civilian plutonium (separation is an accounting device, rather than a physical separation) and the suspension of existing safeguards agreements in favor of the new agreement.

Comment [17]

Over the last year or so the Indian communist parties (Marxist and otherwise) have made a valiant attempt to block the US-India nuclear deal. I don’t think the Communists and I agree on why the US-India deal is a Bad Thing but I’ve been cheering their efforts nonetheless.

The communist parties hold 59 seats within a governing coalition led by the Congress Party that has a majority of 44. They have been threatening to withdraw their support from the coalition, thereby forcing early elections, if India signs a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

After months of wooing the communists, the Congress party has now changed tack and secured the support of the socialist Samajwadi Party, which holds 39 seats. It seems confident it can pick up another 5 seats from somewhere.

Before the US-India deal is complete, three things need to happen. First, the IAEA Board of Governors needs to approve the India safeguards agreement. Second, the Nuclear Suppliers Group must approve an exemption to its rules. Finally, the US Congress must give its blessing.

It’ll be very, very tight to get this completed before the US election. The Board of Governors is going to consider the safeguards agreement at its meeting on 28 July. The next NSG meeting is apparently in September.

If the US Congress doesn’t get around to considering the matter before silly season takes over, what happens then?

Conventional wisdom (which is probably correct) is that McCain is in favour of the deal, whereas Obama is “highly ambivalent“.

Indeed, this morning, I came across the following. At an Arms Control Association event on 16 June this year, John Holum, speaking on behalf of the Obama campaign said this:

Senator Obama, as you indicated, did support the authorizing negotiations of the peaceful nuclear cooperation arrangement with India, in significant part because he believes we need a broad strategic relationship with a fellow democracy that has not been a disseminator of nuclear technology and materials elsewhere in the world…

At the same time, he supported that authorization after his amendments were adopted to make sure that fuel supplies were limited to what would reasonably be used in civilian nuclear power reactors and connecting the agreement to a continued testing moratorium. He also supported other amendments that strengthened the nonproliferation aspects of the agreement. He hasn’t yet made a judgment on the deal… [My italics]

Intriguing. However, his life would have been made much easier had it been Indian domestic politics that scuppered the deal.

Comment [8]

Rory Medcalf, writing on the Lowy Interpreter, suggests that Manmohan Singh’s omission on India’s test moratorium “won’t lead to fission”:

For a start, while it might seem odd that Singh did not mention the testing moratorium on that occasion, the M-word still features regularly in Indian Government discourse. Just yesterday, Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee used it while discussing the nuclear aspects of his recent talks with the Australian Government. And at least as telling as the content of Singh’s 9 June speech was the way his Government marked the tenth anniversary of India’s May 1998 nuclear tests — it didn’t.

I have a sense that there is a quiet and growing recognition in New Delhi that India has been needlessly backing itself into a diplomatic corner on the question of whether and when it would sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and that there is a wish, given the new global momentum on disarmament and the controversy over the US-India nuclear deal, to slip quietly out of that corner. So while I am surprised Singh did not mention testing in his recent speech, I wouldn’t read so much into it. The bottom line is that if the US finally ratifies the CTBT — a real possibility in the post-Bush era — then China will follow quickly, and India not long after.

I hope that’s right.

Comment [3]

A colleague of mine notes that Indian PM Manmohan Singh, in his address to the conference Towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, omitted any mention of India’s voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing. Here is the key paragraph:

India is fully aware of its responsibilities as a nuclear weapon state. We have a declared doctrine of no first-use that is based on credible minimum deterrence. We have in place strict controls on export of nuclear and fissile related materials and technology. India has no intention to engage in an arms race with anyone. Above all, India is fully committed to nuclear disarmament that is global, universal and non-discriminatory in nature.

The omission is important — though George Perkovich and I both missed it at the moment. Once one notices the absence of any reference to a test moratorium, though, it is quite striking. Compare Singh’s recent statement with another from 2005:

June 9, 2008

February 25, 2005

India is fully aware of its responsibilities as a nuclear weapon state. We have a declared doctrine of no first-use that is based on credible minimum deterrence. We have in place strict controls on export of nuclear and fissile related materials and technology. India has no intention to engage in an arms race with anyone. Above all, India is fully committed to nuclear disarmament that is global, universal and non-discriminatory in nature.

There is today growing recognition of India as a responsible nuclear power. We remain committed to our unilateral moratorium on testing, and our policy of no-first use. We reaffirm our willingness to work with the international community to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to work towards the ultimate goal of universal nuclear disarmament.

***

The wording is almost identical — so much so that I can’t believe the failure to mention the test moratorium was an accident. It was quite on purpose.

Sing has mentioned the moratorium on at least two other occasions (once in 2005 and again in 2006), as well as in the July 18 2005 statement in which Singh agreed that India would “assume the same responsibilities and practices … as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology” including “continuing India’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.” There is that word — “responsible” — again, defined in part by India’s moratorium.

Which leads me to ask, why is Singh suddenly leaving his options open to drop the moratorium and resume testing?

One possibility is suggested by the fact that the yield of India’s May 1998 event is inconsistent with the claim that India successfully detonated a thermonuclear device among the five bombs said to have gone boom. Certain Indian scientists have argued that India needs to resume testing in order to master that particular technology. (For more on the failed May 1998 test and possible pressures for a resumption of Indian testing, see: The Bomb, Dmitry. The Hydrogen Bomb, April 10, 2005).

Maybe Singh is under some pressure on that front.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the US-India nuclear deal is a license for India to conduct another round of nuclear tests, the Hyde Act be damned.

Comment [11]

Greetings from Delhi.

Yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh opened the conference, Towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, by lighting a lamp (left) and giving a speech (right).

(I tried to convince George Perkovich to have a lamp lighting ceremony at the 2009 Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference, but I don’t think he bought it.)

Singh’s address to the conference, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of a speech by Rajiv Gandhi, emphasizing the need for disarmament and reiterating existing Indian proposals:

These proposals retain the spirit and substance of the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan. We hope that other states will agree to a dialogue on these proposals, and will join us in committing to nuclear disarmament. That is the critical first step – a commitment, preferably a binding legal commitment through an international instrument, to eliminate nuclear weapons within a time bound framework.

I was almost encouraged until I saw the headline in The Hindu over breakfast — “Can’t Limit Energy Options: PM.”

In fact, these are the headlines from Google News:

Limiting energy options a luxury: PM
The Statesman

N-terrorist a realistic threat, says PM
Economic Times

Nuclear energy the best option
The Hindu (online)

N-deal must for energy needs: Prime Minister
The Times of India

Only VOA headlined the story “Prime Minister Pitches Global Nuclear Disarmament.”

Back to weary cynicism.

Comment [10]

Over at Verification, Andreas has put up the first two in a series of posts commemorating the tenth anniversary of India and Pakistan’s test series. Well worth checking out.

Comment [1]