With the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) attention almost entirely focused on submitting evidence to the UN accusing Iran of having conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment programme that could lead to this country making a nuclear bomb, the Times of India news report that 4 kg of uranium being trafficked out of India had been seized near the India-Nepal border could cause more alarm bells to ring.
India, of course, has signed neither the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) nor the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and only four of its nuclear reactors are subject to IAEA safeguards. Consequently serious reservations have all along been expressed on the highly touted new US-India nuclear deal on consideration of questions about India\'s willingness to comply with the very minimal non-proliferation restrictions required by the U.S. Congress last year, along with India\'s ties to Iran and that country\'s uneven non-proliferation record. John Isaacs, Executive Director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation was still more explicit saying “Nuclear non-proliferation efforts may have dodged a bullet. If implemented, this deal would have driven a hole through the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which for decades has stood as our first line of defense against nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of countries”.
But perhaps what even better presents the Indian non-proliferation record is an article published in Rediff’s India Abroad titled ‘India not a model nuclear state’, as far back as September 2005. This reads:
“Top United States nuclear experts have taken strong exception to New Delhi\'s claim of an impeccable track record with regard to non-proliferation, and declared that India is hardly a model citizen.
The report comes on the eve of the Bush administration sending a formal presentation to the Congress for a change of laws to envisage the transfer of civilian nuclear reactors and other nuclear technology to India.
David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, while acknowledging that India has not “spread nuclear weapons anywhere…my experience with India has not been that it\'s a model…”
Albright, a former United Nations nuclear weapons inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency, who testifies regularly before the Congress, said, “I mean, if you think of Iraq, and the (Indian) company NEC, we know they were providing missile technology to Iraq in violation of the sanctions, and NEC is associated with the Indian military. It\'s not just a renegade company”.
During a meeting, attended by several senior Bush administration officials and policy wonks from leading think-tanks and arms control organizations, to release the new ISIS report \'Global Stocks of Nuclear Explosive Materials,\' Albright also argued that it shouldn\'t be forgotten that “India wanted to sell a research reactor to Iran,” and that “there have been links to the precursors to the Iranian chemical weapons program.”
“So, there are serious enforcement issues in the Indian export controls and I know they are trying to improve their export control system, but I haven\'t seen any way that they are able to enforce export control laws in the same way that you would see in a country like Germany, which can actually prevent WMD (weapons of mass destruction)-related technologies or items, going out of India,” he said.
Albright said India was nowhere “near that point,” of having an “effective export control system” and that there was evidence of exchange of fissile material from its civilian and military programs…
Albright said, “We\'ve been struggling to try to understand India\'s gas centrifuge program and one of the surprises there was that it\'s a program that really does depend on foreign procurement…they have a system where they ask for things from companies - sell the order in essence and we\'ve seen these companies going out and getting these materials…”
He claimed the government of India “sells tenders and if a company buys the tender, they get the details of what is being sought and then they go and get it for the Indian centrifuge program. And this is happening in some cases illegally.”
Albright said India was not patrolling this process in so far as to say “when you go to a company in Germany you are going to tell them it is for the centrifuge program, which India knows as soon as they say that, unless the company is asleep, it\'s going to say no. But it does mean that companies do have to be aware of the fact that India continues to look for items for its centrifuge program…
“In the 1980s, the Indians were getting a lot of equipment for the gas centrifuge program from the same companies that were providing the same equipment to the Pakistanis...”
The former UN nuclear weapons inspector said some of the material that India had procured illegally, could very well have been used for thermonuclear weapons. He said since the export control system in India, “while on paper is improving, the enforcement of it isn\'t very good and so there are concerns that spin-off technologies or items from the centrifuge programs and other parts of the nuclear industry could end up being sold in places that it shouldn\'t end up at. So there is an ongoing worry that they (the government of India) is not on top of this problem and they want to make money off of these things.”
