IEEE Spectrum July, 2007 - 27

from the Indian side. It was only when President George W.
Bush came to power in 2001 that a different perspective on
India took shape.
The previous year, Bush's national security advisor-to-be,
Condoleezza Rice, had argued in a Foreign Affairs article that
the United States should recognize India as a counterweight
to China. This idea was echoed by other strategists, including
Ashley Tellis, who helped design the civil nuclear agreement
with India. "If the United States is serious about advancing its
geopolitical objectives in Asia, it would almost by definition
help New Delhi develop strategic capabilities such that India's
nuclear weaponry and nuclear forces could deter against the
growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely
to possess by 2025," Tellis wrote in a report for the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, D.C., where
he is a senior associate.
For the Bush administration, India's emergence as a de facto
nuclear weapons state was to be embraced, not punished. That
shift in attitude was formalized in December 2006, when Bush
signed a bill amending the U.S. Atomic Energy Act-the first step
toward reversing a three-decade ban on nuclear trade with India.
Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and deputy national security advisor, summed up the administration's
thinking in a March 2005 Wall Street Journal opinion piece: "Why
should the United States want to check India's missile capability
in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance
over democratic India?" And why, he might have added, should
U.S. companies forgo lucrative opportunities with Indian customers, when suppliers in other countries-indifferent to New Delhi's
nuclear weapons status-would be rushing in to do business?
Should the pact be sealed, India will allow inspectors from
the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency to regularly survey its civilian nuclear facilities. India, in turn, will be
eligible to import uranium to fuel those civilian reactors that
undergo inspection. It will also be able to purchase light-water
reactors, the most popular reactor type worldwide. However,
the country is under no obligation to allow safeguards on all of
its civilian reactors. U.S. companies, for their part, will gain a
foothold in a newly opened economy.
Some hurdles, however, remain. India and the United States
are still negotiating the terms for importing uranium. The IAEA
must nail down the details of the India-specific safeguards, and
the Nuclear Suppliers Group will need to agree to amend its rules
to permit trade between the United States and India.
Even before the deal has gone through, the U.S.-India pact has
revived the DAE's hopes for a large-scale expansion of nuclear
power. But the actual economics of the deal may prove sobering
for the DAE. Light-water reactors are expensive: a 1-GW lightwater reactor costs roughly $1.5 billion to $2 billion, compared
with about $1.2 billion for a heavy-water reactor of the same
size-which increases the unit cost of electricity generation by
up to 25 percent. Unless foreign companies offer cheap loans,
Indian electricity consumers are unlikely to be able to afford
many imported light-water reactors.
What's more, the agreement is likely to increase-not
decrease-India's capacity to produce nuclear weapons and
material. By importing uranium, India will be able to channel its native supply toward military purposes. In fact, K.
Subrahmanyam, a former head of India's National Security
Advisory Board and, since the 1960s, India's most prominent
nuclear weapons advocate, has openly called for giving as many
power reactors as possible civilian designation in order to conserve domestic uranium for the production of weapons-grade

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plutonium. My colleagues and I estimate that India already has
approximately 500 kg of weapons-grade plutonium, sufficient
for roughly 100 nuclear warheads-and Indian nuclear weapons
advocates are clearly interested in stockpiling more.
There is also the possibility that those nuclear reactors not
subject to IAEA inspection will be converted to military ends.
Any power reactor not under safeguards can be used to make
weapons-grade plutonium by limiting the time the fuel is irradiated. This prevents the build-up of higher isotopes of plutonium,
which are undesirable in a weapon. When a typical heavy-water
reactor is operated normally, fuel remains inside the reactor seven
times as long as when it is producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Heavy-water reactors are particularly suited to making bombgrade material, because new fuel is continuously added (and old
fuel continuously removed); this type of reactor could produce the
same amount of electricity every year but would use seven times
as much fuel to do so. In theory, a 220-MW heavy-water reactor, run at 60 to 80 percent capacity, could produce 150 to 200 kg
per year of weapons-grade plutonium.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has demanded a similar deal from the
United States. The U.S. government has refused, ostensibly
because of Pakistan's poor nonproliferation record-in particular, the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's long-running
illicit trade network, which provided nuclear technology to Libya,
Iran, and North Korea. Undaunted, Pakistan's agency in charge
of nuclear weapons, the National Command Authority, issued a
statement saying it will expand its own arsenal, which currently
is estimated to have between 65 and 75 nuclear warheads, in
response to India's increased capacity for generating weapons.
In other words, what happens in India, and the choices it
makes, will resonate both regionally and globally. India's myopic
focus on expanding its civilian and military nuclear program
threatens to exacerbate the arms race with Pakistan while ignoring the urgent local need for clean, affordable electricity.
Instead of digging deeper into the nuclear rut, India should
invest even more heavily in renewable electricity generation and
improve its energy efficiency in many sectors. For instance, India
could expand its use of wind power-it already has the world's
fourth-largest installed wind capacity-as well as solar, biomass
and small-scale hydropower. There's huge room for improvement in its coal plants, which are significantly less efficient than
those in other countries; losses during electricity transmission
and distribution are typically about 25 percent, compared with
10 percent in many countries. And the environmental impact of
coal, both in terms of carbon emissions and the health effects
of pollution, must be addressed.
Between its burgeoning economy and a population that is
projected to eclipse China's by 2050, India has difficult choices
to make regarding its energy future. Nuclear power, however, is
not an affordable-or desirable-answer for India.

About thE Author
m.v. rAmANA is a senior fellow at the centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies in Environment and development, in bangalore, India, where
he researches India's nuclear energy and weapons programs. he is on
the National coordinating committee of India's coalition for Nuclear
disarmament and Peace and the global council of Abolition-2000, a
network aiming to abolish nuclear weapons. his papers are available
at http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuclear.html.

to ProbE furthEr
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