Bush taking a huge nuclear gamble with India policy

WASHINGTON — Has President Bush just made the world a safer or a more dangerous place?

That question lingered after he reached a deal with India last week recognizing that India is never giving up its nuclear weapons, and declaring that a country America once treated as a nuclear pariah could now be trusted.

In doing so, Bush took a step in his efforts to rewrite the world's longstanding rules that for more than 30 years have forbidden providing nuclear technology to countries that do not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

"I'm trying to think differently," Bush said in New Delhi, referring to the administration's argument that a new system is needed. But in treating India as a special case — a "strategic relationship" — he has so far declined to define general rules for everyone.

In essence, Bush is making a huge gamble — critics say a dangerous one — that the United States can control proliferation by single-handedly rewarding nuclear states it considers "responsible," and punishing those it declares irresponsible. For those keeping a scorecard, India is in the first camp, Iran is in the second, and no one in the administration wants to talk, at least on the record, about Israel or Pakistan — two allies that have embraced the bomb, but not the treaty.

So will other countries with nuclear ambitions react by becoming more responsible, as the administration hopes, or more envious and more determined than ever to expand their own arsenals? And will India use its new access to U.S.-branded nuclear fuel to free up its domestic supplies of uranium to make bomb fuel for new weapons? And how will the deal affect the tense relationship between India and Pakistan, or for that matter China?

Perhaps the strongest and most discussed critique of the deal goes like this: Bush's timing could not be worse. In the eyes of his critics, he is creating a double standard by legitimizing an Indian weapons program that only eight years ago led Washington to impose huge sanctions, while demanding, in the same week, that Iran and North Korea give up any capacity to make their own nuclear fuel.

Bush, notes Ashton B. Carter, a nuclear expert at Harvard, declared nearly two years ago that there should be no new nuclear states, a concept that "was violated irrevocably" when Bush and the Indians reached agreement on the broad outline of this deal last summer. Now, he says, the deal at least puts the United States in the position of dealing directly with India's plans to maintain or expand its arsenal.