Was it that the Americans hadn’t understood what our Government was telling them? Was it that our Government wasn’t seeing what the Americans were doing in open daylight? Or was it that we, the ordinary folk, were being fed sleeping-pills?

Section 3(b)(7) has an even more far-reaching implication. It specifies that the US is to aim, “pending implementation of a multilateral moratorium,” to “encourage India not to increase its production of fissile material at unsafeguarded nuclear facilities.”

In a word, even before the general Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is finalised, the US will exert to get India to desist from increasing the production of fissile material.

Section 3(a)(1) specifies that the US objective in the agreement is to “Oppose the development of a capability to produce nuclear weapons by any non-nuclear weapon state, within or outside of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

India is outside the NPT, and, as we shall see, US officials were declaring at every opportunity that it most emphatically is not a Nuclear Weapons State, and is not going to be accepted as one.

Foreclosing options

Indeed, the House Bill goes further. It binds the US not just to work for these objectives on its own. It binds it to close the options of India, should the latter, in the reckoning of the US, violate the provisions in this regard. Section 3(a)(3) specifies that the US Executive will work to “Strengthen the Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines concerning consultation by members regarding violations of supplier and recipient understandings by instituting the practice of a timely and coordinated response by NSG members to all such violations, including termination of nuclear transfers to an involved recipient, that discourages individual NSG members from continuing cooperation with such recipient until such time as a consensus regarding a coordinated response has been achieved.”

... contd.