The US and India sign a deal that gives India access to US nuclear technology even as the inevitable critics speak out:

“It will set a precedent that Iran will use to argue that the United States has a double standard,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a leading opponent of the deal. “You can’t break the rules and expect Iran to play by them, and that’s what President Bush is doing today.”

Of course, Iran signed the NPT and India did not, but India’s case does not rest on technicalities, nor is the notion of ‘discriminating’ in favour of a particular nation anything new in the non-proliferation game:

The deal’s opponents also like to argue that, in order to be fair and equitable, the same agreement must be extended to all other declared nuclear states that have remained outside the NPT — namely Pakistan. That assumes that treating all non-NPT states in the same way would somehow make the regime more legitimate. In practice, though, the nonproliferation regime’s survival has depended on discrimination. Japan is allowed to reprocess spent fuel and stockpile plutonium, but South Korea is not. South Korean scientists secretly enriched uranium to weapons grade, forged uranium metal from imported fertilizer, and secretly reprocessed plutonium — yet Seoul was not reprimanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), even though Iran is facing sanctions for similar activities. Discrimination in favor of India, then, is not an unprecedented act that necessitates immediate redress by extending a similar deal to Pakistan. And if the larger point isn’t clear enough, consider that the United States is being condemned for an agreement on civilian cooperation with India, whereas there is no discussion of the impact of Chinese nuclear weapons designs transferred to Pakistan (from which they have traveled to Iran, Libya, and North Korea).

It is somewhat bemusing to see perfectly intelligent men like Rep. Markey cling on to the very-60s notion that a country can be kept from developing nuclear weapons by force of a treaty (and the implied threat of sanctions) alone. Today, nuclear technology — especially almost-as-devastating ‘dirty bomb’ technology — is dispersed enough that non-state actors can get hold of it. The NPT is about as useful in this world as farriers are on an autobahn. Most leaders recognize this and know it makes sense to co-opt India, with its clean record on proliferation — hence the visits by Chirac and Bush in quick succession to New Delhi. Yet the world will have to suffer a last dance by the non-proliferation dinosaurs before a new order emerges out of the unworkable present.

(Updated 3 March) I think this comment on Daniel Drezner’s blog best captures the discomfiture of the non-proliferation faithful. Essentially, to them this deal is a moral hazard:

… you miss the point. The point is that there are procedures for things in this world and when you bypass all precedants and procedures and render them meaningless, you may get the thing you want, but you are also fundamentally changing how the world works, particularly if you keep ignoring procedure over and over again or only half-heartedly go through its motions (as in the case of the start of the Iraq war).

(Italics mine.) The problem, of course is that the procedures were never much good anyway — all it did was allow a declared weapons power (China) to covertly arm Pakistan and North Korea, and an undeclared power (Pakistan) to atomize nuclear tech to the world’s hotspots (North Korea, Iran). Like it or not, the world has changed and the comfortable world the NPT envisages looks increasingly out of sync with reality. Here’s hoping some of the nuclear idealists take off their blinkers long enough to realize that.

A while back Madhoo wrote about people who refuse to live in the present:

…Does it make any sense whatsoever to react to decades-old stuff just because it has just been declassified? Nixon is no more, Indira Gandhi is not alive and Kissinger is in no way involved with the current administration – what is the point on making a big deal about this now?

I think this is what is the problem is with us – living in the past. We refuse to let go of the demons of the past and refuse to look ahead. Every time there is a remote chance of us getting anywhere better, we go into a self-destructive mode and shoot ourselves in the foot. Idiots!

On the other hand, it seems living in the past isn’t the exclusive preserve of the Rediff webmasters but also senior American policymakers:

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) condemned the agreement as a “dangerous proposition and bad nonproliferation policy” and said he will introduce legislation to block it. “We cannot play favorites, breaking the rules of the nonproliferation treaty, to favor one nation at the risk of undermining critical international treaties on nuclear weapons,” he said in a statement. “What will Russia say when they want to supply more nuclear materials or technology to Iran? You can be sure that Pakistan will demand equal treatment.”

Bolton, Bush’s nominee to become U.N. ambassador, argued that such cooperation would mean rewarding a country that built a nuclear weapon in secret, using technology it obtained under the guise of civilian power. Both North Korea and Iran are believed to have tried the same route to develop nuclear weapons. Some within the administration said the deal would be damaging at a time when the United States is trying to ratchet up international pressure on both those countries to give up their nuclear-weapons ambitions.

Non-proliferation made sense in a world where few nations had access to nuclear weapons. In a changed world where ‘responsible’ superpowers ship fissile material to irresponsible anarchies (which then scatter the lethal technology amongst the world’s worst), proliferation is a fait accompli and non-proliferation is a lame duck. Yet the policymakers for whom non-proliferation is an end, not a means to peace continue their sad, irrelevant dance on the DC stage.

What is interesting about non-proliferation is that it has worked for as long as it has: countries like Brazil and South Africa which signed up for the NPT did not do so primarily for the carrot of civilian nuclear tech, rather their national threat perception did not indicate the need for a nuclear deterrent. In the shadow of nuclear China and belligerent Pakistan, India obviously saw things differently.

The fact that the non-proliferation hawks in DC can still talk about ‘favorites’ and ‘breaking the rules [for India]‘, can still equate India with Pakistan and North Korea indicates that they are far more out of touch than the tactless webmasters at Rediff. For the rules have already been broken and the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the posession of the genie must today be predicated on a nation’s record rather than its level of technological accomplishment in 1968.