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| Authors: | Michael A. Levi, David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change Charles D. Ferguson, Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow for Science and Technology |
|---|
June 2006
48 pages
ISBN 0876093632
$10.00
Council Special Report No. 16
If Congress does not approve the U.S.-India nuclear deal, “it would have a real and negative effect on the bilateral relationship,” concludes a new Council Special Report. Congress should adopt a two-stage approach, formally endorsing the deal’s basic framework, while delaying final approval until it is assured that critical nonproliferation needs are met. “Patience and a few simple fixes would address major proliferation concerns while ultimately strengthening the strategic partnership,” says the report.
“The Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation or rejecting the deal and thus setting back an important strategic relationship,” say the authors, Michael A. Levi and Charles D. Ferguson, both Council fellows for science and technology. But this is a false choice, they argue.
Levi and Ferguson advise Congress to “reserve the bulk of its political capital for a handful of top-tier objectives. It should focus on preventing Indian nuclear testing, and fundamental changes in Indian nuclear strategy, rather than on blocking simple growth in the Indian nuclear stockpile. It should prioritize obtaining cooperation—not only from India—in controlling the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies, over measures that would shape the development on nuclear technology in Indiaitself.”
“Congress should issue a set of bottom-line requirements for the formal U.S.-India nuclear cooperation agreement, for India’s inspection agreement with the IAEA, and for new [Nuclear Suppliers Group] rules that would allow nuclear commerce with India, and enforce those by refusing to pass final legislation enabling nuclear cooperation until those other agreements are in place and are satisfactory,” says the report, U.S.-India Cooperation: A Strategy for Moving Forward.
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Michael A. Levi is a fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the Council, Dr. Levi was a nonresident science fellow and a science and technology fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He is coauthor of The Future of Arms Control (Brookings, 2005), which proposed new principles for controlling dangerous technologies in a world fraught by terrorism, and of Untapped Potential: U.S. Science and Technology Cooperation with the Islamic World (Brookings, 2005), which explored new opportunities for engaging Muslim publics. Dr. Levi holds a PhD from the University of London (King’s College), where he was affiliated with the department of war studies and was the SSHRC William E. Taylor Fellow, and an MA in Physics from Princeton University.
Charles D. Ferguson is a fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an adjunct lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University . Before coming to the Council, Dr. Ferguson was scientist-in-residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. At the Center, he codirected a project that systematically assessed how to prevent and respond to nuclear and radiological terrorism. This project’s major findings were published in The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (Routledge, 2005). He is also the lead author of the award-winning report Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks, which examined the threat of radiological dispersal devices, such as “dirty bombs.” Dr. Ferguson has also worked on nuclear safety issues in the Nonproliferation Bureau at the U.S. Department of State. After graduating with distinction from the U.S. Naval Academy, he served as a nuclear engineering officer on a ballistic-missile submarine. He holds a PhD in physics from Boston University.
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