Find way to bring India into world's nuclear family

India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft spot for countries of 1 billion people, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more productive and peaceful place. Sure, as Tuesday's bombings in India illustrate, it has its problems — but it is not Iraq. It is a beacon of tolerance and stability.

So I applaud President Bush's desire to form a deeper partnership with India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse — in its current form — the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with New Delhi. I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran. But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

What's the problem? India has never signed the NPT, which is the international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been very consistent: We do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country that has not signed the NPT. And since that included India, India could never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.

But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the United States eager to build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the Bush team wanted — rightly — to find a way to get India out of the corner it put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other eight free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.