[Mb-civic] Bush's Bold Bet On India - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Bush's Bold Bet On India

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 24, 2005; Page B07

The United States and India have put aside their troubled past to reach 
far into the future with a visionary bilateral agreement that challenges 
both nations and the rest of the world to treat nuclear weapons and 
nuclear energy with greater realism than they do under the nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty.

If Congress agrees to the changes in law sought by the Bush 
administration to put the agreement signed last week into force, nuclear 
energy will take center stage from nuclear weapons in the new order of 
U.S.-Indian relations, which now become crucial to constructing a 
post-Kyoto consensus on climate change.

Energy vs. arms has been an atomic trade-off dictated by the nuclear 
treaty for nearly a half-century -- before global warming became a major 
international concern, and before rogue states showed they were not 
interested in such a trade.

New Delhi and Washington give impetus both to the growing acceptance by 
environmentalists of nuclear energy as a lesser evil and to the Bush 
Doctrine of post-Sept. 11 security.

<>The odd status of nuclear energy as a combination risk (at least since 
the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979) and reward (for developing 
countries) mutates as fossil fuel pollution becomes a greater threat. 
For differing reasons, the United States, India and China are outside 
the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol. Until that changes, a global 
climate change system will not work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/22/AR2005072201627.html?nav=hcmodule 

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