Three developments are imminent, and the House should be alert to them.

First, the steps which were not just implicit, but explicit in the Nuclear Deal will now commence. In the coming months the country will be under pressure to sign on a slew of follow-up agreements which will freeze the power imbalances of today:
• The NPT review is scheduled for 2010, and there will be extreme pressure on India to sign up – without being recognized as a Nuclear Weapon State;
• There will be similar pressure to sign the CTBT – without there being in place an international mechanism of verification;
• And then to sign the Fissile Material Control Treaty or, if the Treaty is long delayed, to in effect declare adherence to the walls that are going to be prescribed in it – remember that during the Nuclear Deal negotiations, and under the Hyde Act India was told that it must declare a cut-off date for producing fissile material even before the FMCT comes into force. Here also, we will be under pressure to abandon the stand we have hitherto taken: namely, that there must be an internationally controlled, and not a nationally controlled verification mechanism.

The slightest reflection will show that the stance that the verification mechanism must be an international one and not one in the control of one or two countries that have the technology for verification as of now is a substantive and not a semantic one. Today the US does have the ability to verify. But can one rely on it to be even-handed? It has been well-documented, after all, how the US agencies knew for years about the bazaar that A.Q. Khan had set up: they chose to do nothing; indeed, they squashed researchers who had nailed the evidence. Hence, when verification is left to mechanisms that are under the control of – the very few – countries that today have the requisite technical capacity, they will proceed by their convenience.
• We will also be told to sign the PSI – recall that the PM had himself said that India has reservations about this in its present form.
• And a much tighter Additional Protocol of the IAEA is also in the works.

... contd.