Reacting to popular dismay over the light sentences meted out to the corporate perpetrators of the Bhopal tragedy–slaps on the wrist, really–India’s parliament has voted to hold foreign suppliers of nuclear components liable for damages from a reactor accident. Normally, only the operator of a nuclear power plant is held liable, and in virtually all countries legislation limits total liability.
The decision by India to spread liability broadly among foreign suppliers may well, if business press pundits are correct, vitiate the benefits U.S. nuclear manufacturers were hoping to reap from the controversial deal the Bush administration made with India’s government. If so, arguably, those who gave us the deal are getting just what they deserve.
The deal, almost as contested in India as in the United States, opened the Indian nuclear power market to U.S. suppliers, without significantly constraining the Indian nuclear weapons program or in any way penalizing India for its decision to go nuclear.
George Perkovich, author of an excellent book about the Indian nuclear weapons program, has enumerated the mental constructs that permitted U.S. policymakers to rationalize the deal: an inclination to place faith in balance-of-power thinking rather than rule-based systems ; a jaded view of the NPT, seen as limiting benign players like the United States and India but not bad actors (like Iran and North Korea); a desire to limit ascendant China by building rival alliances among its neighbors; and to do that in the case of India by elevating it to “international rank” and drawing it into a “close partnership with the United States.”
Though Perkovich said those factors “drove” the deal (where he probably meant something more like “enabled” it), he left out what was almost certainly the most important driving factor: a sense on the part of the U.S. industry and those sympathetic to its interests in the Bush administration that there was little point in continuing to penalize India, thereby shutting U.S. suppliers out of what may be a large growing market for nuclear reactors and components, when after all the horse was already out of the barn.
Perkovich ably enumerated the costs of that narrow and short-sighted attitude: A “devaluation of virtue,” inasmuch as India is rewarded for thumbing its nose at the NPT, while parties in good standing are not; a missed opportunity to at least wrestle India into a fissile-material cutoff and/or adherence to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and a lost opportunity to develop penalties against NPT violators (though, let it be said, India was not an NPT violator, having never joined the treaty).
Those are all weighty points, but perhaps because of his own aversion to balance-of-power thinking, Perkovich leaves out what was arguably the deal’s single most undesirable attribute. By facilitating India’s overall nuclear activities, it could not but help the country’s nuclear weapons program, fueling the arms race with Pakistan and complicating intractable problems on the Subcontinent that already are too complicated and intractable.
If the deal is now in effect dead, good riddance.
