WASHINGTON, July 14: The Bush administration views India as part of the solution to nuclear proliferation rather than as part of the problem, says a new study by Carnegie Endowment. The Washington think-tank describes an agreement the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership agreement that the US and India signed last year as heralding “a breakthrough in US-Indian strategic collaboration because it committed both countries to working together in four difficult arenas — civilian nuclear energy, civilian space programmes, high-technology trade, and missile defence.”

“What made NSSP an event of such significance in this context was that the Bush administration chose to turn Washington’s long-standing approach to New Delhi on its head,” says Ashley J. Tellis, author of the study titled “India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States.”

“Viewing India as part of the solution to nuclear proliferation rather than as part of the problem, President Bush embarked on a course of action that would permit India more —- not less —- access to controlled technologies even though New Delhi would not surrender its nuclear weapons programme and subsisted in its position formally outside the global non-proliferation regime.”

The author points out that in return for this policy, the Bush administration has asked India only to “institutionalize comprehensive export controls that conformed to the best international standards and that New Delhi not use the technologies made available to it under NSSP to advance its own strategic weapons programmes.”

According to this study, this change in approach derived from three evolving perceptions within the Bush administration. First, the administration had come to realize that India would not give up its nuclear weapons so long as various regional adversaries continued to possess comparable capabilities.

The Bush administration initially viewed both of India’s antagonists — China and Pakistan — with considerable suspicion, which made senior US officials more sympathetic to New Delhi’s predicament.

Second, the administration concluded that India’s nuclear weapons did not pose a threat to US security and the United States’ larger geopolitical interests, and could in certain circumstances actually advance American strategic objectives in Asia and beyond.

The administration’s own antipathy to nuclear arms control agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty coupled with its strong expectation of an eventual renewal of great-power competition, allowed (it) to take a more relaxed view of New Delhi’s emerging nuclear capabilities.

Third, the administration appreciated that the range of technological resources associated with weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems that were present in India in both the public and private sectors posed a far more serious threat to American safety —- were these resources to be leaked, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to hostile regimes or non-state actors -— than New Delhi’s ownership of various nuclear assets.

“These perceptions, which became dominant in administration’s thinking in regard to India post-9/11, made tightening the Indian export control regime far more important from the viewpoint of increasing US security than leaning on the Indian state to cap or roll back its strategic programmes,” says the author.

From these three perceptions, according to the author, grew the conviction that the United States ought to focus primarily on safeguarding India’s tangible and intangible WMD capabilities, even as Washington struggled to find ways of accepting New Delhi’s nuclear weaponry within the constraining framework of the existing international non-proliferation order.

Accordingly, the bargain encoded within NSSP affirmed that the United States would not let India’s anomalous status within the global Non-proliferation regime become an impediment to the close relationship desired by both sides.

Toward that end, Washington would seek to build a partnership with New Delhi that included satisfying the latter’s long-standing desire for greater access to restricted commodities in the areas of civilian nuclear energy, civilian space programmes, dual-use high technology, and missile defence, so long as India did not seek to use these commodities to advance its own strategic programmes or permit their unlawful export, nor countenanced the diffusion of its own advanced capabilities to any foreign entity.