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Untangling India’s N-industry poses major challenge

By Ed Lane

After more than three decades of ‘indigenous’ construction, India has created a massive complex of nationwide nuclear facilities that have civilian and military uses

THE civilian and military branches of India’s home-grown nuclear industry are tightly woven together and separating them under a US-brokered deal would be sensitive and complicated, experts say.

India integrated its civilian and military nuclear programme outside the global Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1972 and was further excluded by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group after it tested atomic weapons in 1974.

The result has been that after more than three decades of “indigenous” construction, India has created a massive complex of nationwide facilities that have civilian and military uses, said national security professor Bharat Karnad of the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

“India refused to be part of the NPT because of national security concerns and built a unique, indigenous programme by linking civilian and military. To change that drastically would be unwise; small changes may be desirable in part for geopolitical reasons,” Karnad told AFP.

The secretive nuclear complex includes 22 power reactors, according to India’s Department of Atomic Energy, 15 of which are operational and produce 3,310 megawatts of power. The rest are under construction.

Under the deal reached in July with the United States, India would place a “credible” number of the plants under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to make sure their fuel is not used in weapons production in addition to six already under such safeguards.

In return, the United States would change domestic laws and amend international agreements to allow India to buy civilian nuclear power plants under IAEA safeguards to bring New Delhi “into the international mainstream” on proliferation policy, President George W Bush said last week.

Manmohan Singh faces an uphill struggle to convince experts in India the deal is sound strategic policy, said KP Vijayalakshmi, a professor of Canadian, US and Latin American studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“This is a group of scientists that have been working on all sides of the nuclear fuel cycle for civilian and military use. To get them to change the way they operate would be a problem initially,” Vijayalakshmi said.

Singh told parliament this week that about 65 percent of the country’s nuclear power capacity - which could mean either the megawatt output or 22 plants - would be placed under safeguards.

But he ruled out other facilities such as an experimental fast breeder reactor programme designed to produce plutonium, which can be used for weapons, for fuel.

India also has several complexes where power plants provide material to produce plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, both weapons-grade, that would also be outside of inspections.

Still, defence and strategic analysts in India remains wary.

Karnad said that “the US needs India more than India needs the US” and that the country should be “hard-nosed” in agreeing to even slight changes in its nuclear programme that could threaten its doctrine of minimum credible deterrent.

“We need at least parity with China,” said Karnad of the number of nuclear weapons India should possess.

Private think tanks estimate India’s weapons stockpile at 80 to 250 nuclear weapons, compared with around 2,000 for neighboring China, that can be deployed on either planes or missiles and possibly launched from ships, but not submarines yet.

C Raja Mohan, security analyst with the Indian Express newspaper, said some analysts were overstating the effect the deal would have on India’s nuclear programme.

“We have a military programme and will keep it. The prime minister has said to parliament it is not negotiable. The basis is simple, what you sell to India for civilian use can’t be used for weapons as well as what is under safeguards.” afp

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