Spin-doctors have been taking advantage of public innocence in these matters. Nuclear Weapon States enter into “Voluntary Safeguards”. These have two features, as Under Secretary Joseph observed during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings: they “do not obligate the IAEA to actually apply safeguards and do allow for the removal of facilities or material from safeguards.” The second category is of “full-scope safeguards” by which a country places all its reactors under safeguards. This is what Non-Nuclear Weapon States undertake to do. India would fall in a third category: as in the case of Non-Nuclear Weapon States, the safeguards would apply in perpetuity — that is, once reactors are placed under safeguards, they would remain under safeguards for their entire life; and they would remain there without condition. But these safeguards would apply only to those reactors which India voluntarily declares to be civilian. This latter is the only sense in which the safeguards would be “India specific”.

The distinction is clear from what Under Secretary Joseph told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We heard from other states at the recent NSG meeting that they would not support a ‘voluntary offer’ arrangement as, in their view, it would be tantamount to granting de facto Nuclear Weapon State status to India. We have similarly indicated to India that we would not view such an arrangement as defensible from a non-proliferation standpoint. We therefore believe that the logical approach to . . . a safeguards agreement for India is to use INFCIRC/66, which is currently used at India’s four safeguarded reactors.”

... contd.