eds Feeds American experts have been incessantly
warning their government of the dire
consequences of exempting India from
the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG)
requirements. On December 8, while
testifying in front of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the
Executive Director of the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center, Henry D. Sokolski
said, “The US persuaded the NSG to allow
India to import uranium for its civilian
nuclear program but, as predicted, this has only allowed India to dedicate more
of its meager domestic uranium
production to military purposes. India, in
short, with the deal now can make more
bombs.” A week after the testimony, Adrian Levy, a
world renowned investigative journalist
wrote an alarming piece, warning that
India is secretly constructing an entire city
dedicated to building an arsenal of
nuclear weapons. Levy’s in-depth look at how India has been surreptitiously
uprooting farmers since 2012 in the
South of the country to erect a clandestine
nuclear city is a testament of the very real
global threat a nuclear armed India poses,
and it also proves that the American actions have in fact helped India
proliferate on a very massive scale. Americans must realize that India is no
one’s friend and that history proves that.
India cannot be bound by any bilateral or
multilateral agreements. In the early
1990s Pakistan and India had a bilateral
agreement that prohibited both nations from possessing chemical weapons, a
few years later after ratifying the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1996, India
declared it had a stockpile, a clear
violation of the bilateral commitment to
Pakistan. In 1974 India conducted its first nuclear
test. They were only able to develop their
first bomb by violating the terms of a
multilateral peaceful uses agreement that
they had with Canada and the United
States. Since last December, Putin, Obama, and Xi
Jinping have all visited India, and with
each one Modi has made promises that
contradict the commitments he has made
to the others. Modi thinks he can pull the
wool over everyone’s eyes – yes, he does, but cannot fool them any longer. He used
President Xi Jinping’s visit to leverage
Russia and the visit by Vladimir Putin to
force Barack Obama into his arms. This is
the real face of the so-called incredible
India. The construction of this new top-secret
nuclear city, as detailed in Levy’s report is
clear evidence that America’s attempt to
offer India a civil nuclear incentive has
failed to reign in their nuclear weapons
program, instead it has helped the weapons program grow to unthinkable
new heights. The city when completed in
2017 would be “the subcontinent’s
largest military-run complex of nuclear
centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories,
and weapons- and aircraft-testing facilities”, the report said. Regional stability is essential to avoid war,
the NSG exemption secured by the
America for India has freed up un-
safeguarded Indian uranium for weapons
use, and as revealed by Levy for an entire
city dedicated to building nuclear bombs. After all this, America still choses to
continue with backing India’s bid for full
membership to the NSG, ironically the very
organization created to prevent future
proliferation after India exploded their
first bomb. The Americans must know that if India is
allowed to build such a huge facility for
the sole purpose of enriching uranium, it
will create instability in the region. It will
further aggravate Pakistan’s security
dilemma, and at the same time enrage the Chinese. According to the report, the construction
began three years ago, and it is hard to
imagine that strategic thinkers in the
United States did not raise any red flags.
The hypocrisy of the American standards
is just so astonishing that it leaves me speechless. Pakistan has meager resources and a
declared purpose for their nuclear
weapons program, which is actually a
stabilizing factor in the region, and it is
bombarded with American pressure to
restrain its program. Not to mention, Pakistan did not violate any civil nuclear
agreements to build its nuclear capability.
On the other hand, India, the first country
to proliferate in the region by violating a
civil agreement, has massive resources,
and no credible purpose for their nuclear weapons program, and it is given
exemptions to import more resources to
buildup their nuclear arsenal, further
destabilizing the region. This sort of
hypocrisy makes no sense and can result
in a global nuclear crisis. To make matters even worse, another
report published earlier this week states
that India’s nuclear explosive materials
are vulnerable to theft, but as the report
states, “the Americans choose not to
press for tougher security because of its booming trade relations with India” and
cannot afford to offend the Indian
workforce in America that has crept into
their system. I beg the Americans to pay attention to
their experts in Washington DC, and pay
heed to their warnings of a global nuclear
crisis if India is allowed to continue to
grow its nuclear arsenals unchecked. I
urge them to stop playing geo-politics for the sake of all our futures.