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India Deal Will Take Time, Patience, Bush Says By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday that talks on a nuclear cooperation agreement with India would take time and patience, and he offered no specific schedule for completing the deal (see GSN, Feb. 22). The basic principles šof the agreement were announced last year: U.S. provision of nuclear materials and technology to India, in exchange for New Delhi’s separation of military from civilian nuclear facilities and the submission of the latter to U.N. inspections. Differences persist over how the nuclear-armed country, which is not a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty member, should determine which facilities it calls civilian and which it designates as military. Bush is slated to discuss the deal with Indian officials during his visit next week and reportedly plans to submit the agreement to U.S. congressional approval in the near future. “This is not an easy decision for India, nor is it an easy decision for the United States, and implementing this agreement will take time, and it will take patience from both our countries,” Bush said yesterday in a speech organized here by the Asia Society. “I’ll continue to encourage India to produce a credible, transparent and defensible plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear programs,” the president said. “By following through on our commitments, we’ll bring India’s civil nuclear program into the international mainstream and strengthen the bonds of trust between our two great nations.” Bush said India’s energy needs are growing and called nuclear power a “clean and reliable way to help meet this need.” “Nuclear power now accounts for nearly 3 percent of India’s electricity needs, and India plans to increase the figure to 25 percent by 2050, and America wants to help. … India first needs to bring its civilian energy programs under the same international safeguards that govern nuclear power programs in other countries,” Bush said. At a Brookings Institution discussion today on Bush’s coming trip to India and Pakistan, George Washington University international affairs professor Karl Inderfurth said the press has concentrated too much on the nuclear deal in its coverage of Bush’s trip, which is also expected to focus on economic matters. “There is no urgency to finalize this [nuclear agreement], in my view, before the president lands in New Delhi next week,” said Inderfurth, formerly a top State Department official for South Asia (see related GSN story, today). Speaking at the same event, Brookings foreign-policy expert Stephen Cohen said both countries are just beginning internally to work out a consensus on the nuclear deal and that a final agreement is not likely for months. “The core issue” in the Indian debate over separation of military and civilian nuclear sites, said the former State Department policy planner, is “the question [of] how much is enough.” “How many nuclear weapons does India really need for its own security?” Cohen asked. “What is overkill? Do you destroy the horde three times, four times or five times?” “These are questions that the Indians have not yet faced,” Cohen said. He added, though, that India seems to have decided not to follow the path of the United States and Soviet Union, which “just built nuclear weapons to excess.”
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