you find it discriminatory? you stupid slumdog. stop dreaming about pakistan being made a part of India, blah blah...
Infact the solution to all the problems would be division of India. India has problems with all its neighbours, incl. pakistan china bangladesh and srilanka... So it would be better to divide this slumdog land among these countries...
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Bush’s Very Dangerous Deal
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Why did Washington do it? The answer is money and politics. Mira Kamdar, a 2008 Bernard Schwartz Fellow of the Asia Society, has written that the deal "will generate billions of dollars in lucrative contracts for the corporate members of the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC) and the Confederation of Indian Industry … This is what the nonproliferation regime, that has kept the world safe from nuclear Armageddon for decades, is being risked for: cash." Kamdar is right. The USIBC estimates that India will spend $175 billion over the next 25 years on nuclear trade, and other deals have already started flowing: India recently paid $1 billion to Boeing for six military airplanes, and U.S. companies will now bid on an estimated $40 billion in other arms sales.
If money greased the skids, politics pushed the deal over the finish line. Some just want to solidify the U.S.-India strategic partnership. Neoconservatives in Washington want India as an anti-China ally. In their view, the problem is not that India has nuclear weapons; it is that India doesn't have enough. When Republicans pushed, Democrats acquiesced. Barack Obama and Joe Biden joined John McCain in praising the deal. Other Democrats seemed most concerned about not alienating Indian-American constituents, now a major voting and campaign-funding bloc.
A few members of Congress took a stand. Rep. Ellen Tauscher (Democrat of California) said, "It flew in the face of decades of American leadership" and set "a precedent that will be hard to erase," and Rep. Ed Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts) said, "There are many ways to deepen U.S.-India ties without damaging the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."
But the damage was done, and the next president will now have to dig us out of a deep nuclear hole. The only way to repair damage this severe is to build a whole new security structure.
As candidates, both Obama and McCain pledged they would lead the world on a new campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. Let's hope the president-elect meant it. To succeed, he must make it a top priority, setting an example for the rest of the world by dramatically reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, getting Russia to do the same and then quickly ratifying the nuclear-test-ban treaty and getting China, India and the other holdouts to follow suit. He must then bring all the nuclear-armed nations together in a summit to pledge together to stop producing new weapons, to slash their current arsenals and to act decisively against any new nuclear programs.
If it sounds like a tall order, it is. But should the president fail, future generations may well look back at the U.S.-India deal the way others looked back on the Missouri Com-promise or the Treaty of Versailles: as political power plays that paved the way to war.
Cirincione is the president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation focused on nuclear-weapons policy.
© 2008
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