The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty And India

The relationship of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with India has been an interesting subject in the field of security studies. The nuclearisation of India and its subsequent rise are further forcing the world to redefine its relationship with the treaty. However, the international response is quite mixed. The old mindset still thinks that India may join the treaty as a Non-Nuclear Weapon State. Scholars appear divided whether India should join the treaty as a nuclear weapon country. The book discusses current crises of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which are going to figure in the 2010 Review Conference of the treaty. This book was published as a special issue of The Strategic Analysis.

This Independent Task Force report recommends that the immediate objectives of U.S. foreign policy should be to encourage India and Pakistan to cap their nuclear capabilities and to reinforce the effort to stem nuclear weapons proliferation.

This paper describes the evolution of the Non-Proliferation Regime through its major phases and the dynamics of the transformation which marked these phases, through a contextualisation of the security or geo-strategic environment of each phase. This paper has also made a conceptual study of the regime and the philosophical framework that shape the creation of the regime and its major shifts and makes an assessment of the concept of the non-proliferation regime through the Regime Theory framework and attempts to explain the paradigm that shaped the regime’s initial principles and goes on to explain the evolution in terms of the paradigmatic shifts. The attempt is to analyse the Indian approach to the regime through its response to the major structures and norms formulated by the regime during its evolution. It explains India’s policy on the regime’s fundamental tools on three key areas: non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The analysis being done through these categories will look at India’s policy on or approaches towards key instruments like the NPT, nuclear test ban, ending fissile materials production, safeguards, export controls, etc. Lastly the paper looks into the dynamics of the post-1998 and post nuclear-deal phase when India is supposed to be attempting to integrate with the regime and its principles. How is India attempting to do this? What are the key challenges and obstacles towards this objective? What are the means for greater Indian integration with the regime? My idea is to actually bring out the new diplomacy that India has, how the global politics is viewing India’s new status after the Indo-US nuclear treaty, and lastly to bring out the changing dynamics in the nuclear diplomacy. India has to play a critical role in tackling these challenges. India has to play the role of a responsible player in minimising proliferation dangers by actively engaging in the non-proliferation regime.

The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is one of the most controversial instruments in international law. This text argues that countries with nuclear weapons misrepresent the Treaty to prevent other states from developing peaceful nuclear energy, holding back nuclear disarmament in the process.

This volume appears at a time when the prospects for banishing the threat of nuclear annihilation are brighter than at any time since the first atomic device exploded over the desert at Alamogordo. The last few years have seen an ex traordinary change in the climate of East-West relations. The programme of political and economic reform which President Gorbachev initiated in the Soviet Union and which is now spreading throughout most of Eastern Europe has been parallelled by serious efforts to reach agreement on measures for conventional and nuclear disarmament. This has led to new hope that international peace and security can at last be built upon the firm foundation of justice, respect for in ternational law and a determination to approach problems in a spirit of genuine co-operation rather than one of distrust and confrontation. This new climate encourages us in the belief that the obvious common sense of preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons will come to be shared by all nations. At the same time, we have to recognize two very disturbing facts, which imply that there can be no slackening of our efforts to strengthen the non-proliferation regime.

The United States–India nuclear cooperation agreement to resume civilian nuclear technology trade with India—a non-signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and a defacto nuclear weapon state—is regarded as an impetuous shift in the US nuclear nonproliferation policy. The 2008 nuclear agreement aroused sharp reactions and unleashed a storm of controversies regarding the reversal of the US nonproliferation policy and its implications for the NPT regime. This book attempts to overcome the significant empirical and theoretical deficits in understanding the rationale for the change in the US nuclear nonproliferation policy toward India. This nuclear deal has been largely related to the US foreign policy objectives, especially establishing India as a regional counter-balance to China. The author examines the US–India nuclear cooperation agreement in a bilateral context, with regard to the nuclear regime. In past discourse India has been mainly viewed as a challenger to the nuclear regime, but this reflects the paucity in understanding India’s approach to the issue of nuclear weapons. The author relates the nuclear estrangement to the disjuncture between the US and India’s respective approach to nuclear weapons, evident during the negotiations that led to the framing of the NPT. The change in the US approach towards India, the nuclear outlier, has been exclusively linked to the Bush administration, which faced considerable criticism for sidelining the nonproliferation policy. This book instead traces the shifting of nuclear goalposts to the Clinton administration following the Pokhran II nuclear tests conducted by India. Contrary to the widespread perception that the decision to offer the nuclear technology to India was an impromptu decision by the Bush administration, the author contends that it was the result of a diligent process of bilateral dialogue and interaction. This book provides a detailed overview of the rationale and the developments that led to the agreement. Employing the regime theory, the author argues that the US–India nuclear agreement was neither an overturn of the US nuclear nonproliferation policy nor an unravelling of the NPT-centric regime. Rather, it was a strategic move to accommodate India, the anomaly within the regime.