Official India will once again celebrate the end of nuclear apartheid with the US Senate passage of the US-India deal, echoing the celebration a few weeks ago with the NSG waiver. Some folks here will be protesting this agreement, and the visit of Secretary of State Rice, complaining that this agreement limits Indian sovereignty and ties India too closely to the US. Plenty of folks in the US and elsewhere lament the spread of this technology, fearing that India will spread it, as well as being worried about the precedent this deal sets.
The French and the Russians have already been all over the place here, and I think that while this will certainly open the market for US exports, my bet is that the French will be the big winners. I depart from the assumption that there has been a lot of unofficial French exports of nuclear materials and probably Russian too. I imagine that the military types here are interested in doing more tests, but I think that overall the country is desperate for more energy, and with the deal it is likely that there will be more investment in nuclear energy. But India needs trained folks to build and run these places. Here's something the US could do: offer lots of scholarships to train these folks in the US. It is, by the way, what the French will do. And maybe even the Russians.
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2 comments:
Certainly one would think it's in the US interest to do so, as spending a few years getting educated in a country does tend to make one rather more inclined to be sympathetic to that country's interests!
We can hope!
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