India should be grateful to Mr. Joseph Nye, the Carter administration’s spokesman on nuclear issues, and Mr. Robert Goheen, the US ambassador in New Delhi, for having spelled out Washington’s strategy for extracting concessions from this country. Since in his letter to Representative Richard Ottinger, leader of American Congressmen who are determined to stop the supply of enriched uranium for Tarapur with immediate effect, Mr. Goheen has been more precise and frank than Mr. Nye in his testimony to the House international relations committee and his talk with Indian correspondents in Washington, it is better to quote him. Mr. Goheen wants the supply of enriched uranium to India to continue during the grace period of 18 months allowed under the recent US legislation in order to achieve two objectives. First, he believes that in that period it should be possible “to strengthen other parts of the Indo-US relationship so that it will be better able to survive the trauma of a break on the nuclear questions, if that must come. Secondly, even if the United States fails to ‘persuade’ New Delhi to accept full-scope safeguards for all its nuclear facilities, present and future, it can utilize the next 18 months to try and commit India to continue to accept the Vienna-based international agency safeguards on Tarapur, to forgo the right, which will accrue to it once the United States stops the supply of enriched uranium, to process the spent fuel and extract from it the plutonium it needs for its breeder-reactor programme, to adhere to its present policy of not developing nuclear devices even for peaceful purposes, and not to export ‘dangerous’ nuclear technology to any country.
The first objective is an honourable one, even if it is a superfluous one, honourable because it is only legitimate that the American ambassador is concerned that Indo-US cooperation in other fields is not jeopardized because of the divergence of interests in the nuclear field and superfluous because, if Indo-US relations could stand the strain of America’s supply of weapons to Pakistan in the fifties and the sixties and Islamabad’s use of them to make war on this country in 1965, there is no good reason to fear that these ties cannot survive the breach by Washington of its contractual obligation to supply enriched uranium for Tarapur. The second objective, too, is unexceptionable from Mr. Goheen’s point of view. But not so from India’s. On the contrary, the opposite is true. For Mr. Goheen is saying almost in so many words not only that India should be taken for a ride but also that it is possible to do so if Representative Ottinger and his colleagues in Congress are prepared to leave the administration free to deal with the problem so that it can manage not to hurt India’s pride which is “too great and too aroused” at the moment and convince those in authority in New Delhi that they should surrender in substance if not in form. By contrast the Congressmen at war with India’s nuclear programme are simple folk. They at least do not expect those in power in New Delhi to throw away all their assets in return for nothing more tangible than American goodwill and the spurious satisfaction that they, too, have made their “contribution” to the preservation of the status quo which permits only the nuclear weapon states to pile up more and more of deadly weapons.