Radioactive Politics

When President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the U.S.-India nuclear deal in July 2005, they stunned the world. Washington wonks accused Bush of abandoning America's decades-old bipartisan policy of fighting nuclear proliferation just to curry favor with India. In New Delhi, critics accused Singh of trying to make the once fiercely nonaligned India a "subaltern" of the United States. Beyond the hyperbole, however, the pundits were right about one thing: a new paradigm had just been created.

Bush was inviting India out of the doghouse, which it had inhabited since first testing an atom bomb in May 1974, and into the world's most exclusive clubhouse: the nuclear-weapons states. India, for its part, was promising that it would move away from its outmoded Third Worldism and become a reliable partner of the United States. To make this happen, of course, would involve a difficult series of reciprocal steps by New Delhi and Washington. Singh agreed to separate India's civilian and military nuclear programs and place the former under international safeguards. He also committed India to strongly support the United States' nonproliferation initiatives toward other countries, such as Iran. And Bush promised to persuade Congress and the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to facilitate civilian atomic cooperation with India. After three decades, India would regain international access to high-technology trade.

Bush's decision to spend so much political capital on India was rooted in a few simple propositions: that a rising India could not forever be kept away from the global high table. The president recognized that U.S. attempts to roll back India's nuclear program hadn't worked and had also prevented the world's most powerful democracy and its largest one from forming the kind of genuine partnership that was in both their interests.

By any measure, it was a sweetheart deal for India. The agreement--which was not offered to other outlying nuclear states like Israel and Pakistan--did far more than just ratify India's nuclear status. It also fundamentally altered Asia's geopolitical balance in India's favor. In a stroke, Bush abandoned Washington's traditional policy of evenhandedness toward India and Pakistan and agreed to start treating New Delhi on par with Beijing. No wonder then that China and Pakistan have emerged as the principal opponents of the deal.

Given all this, one would have expected the agreement to be a hard sell in America but to be quickly embraced in India. In fact, the opposite happened. Despite some resistance from Washington arms controllers, Republicans and Democrats soon rallied behind the president. But India was plunged into one of its gravest foreign-policy crises ever.

The initial resistance came from India's atomic scientists, who had suffered American sanctions all their adult lives and refused to believe that the United States had given up on trying to take away their nuclear assets.