Cap, no roll back

Now that the little mushroom clouds, both of indignation and hosannas, have drifted off into the sunset, one thing seems clear: unless India wants to go on building nuclear weapons ad infinitum, it can only gain from the agreement it has arrived at with the US.

The trade-off is straightforward. India needs energy. Nuclear energy is an important source. But India doesn't have the technology, nor the uranium. It needs to import both. In order to do that, it has to forswear all military uses of the fissile material that comes out in the wash when you produce energy. This forswearing is what it has agreed to do.

More importantly, this is what the US has agreed it will live with. That is a big departure. Obviously, it has been given assurances by India that it will not go overboard in building bombs. This has been interpreted to mean that it has lost its flexibility in determining the size of its 'minimum' deterrent.

But no one can really say what that minimum is. India probably has enough already to deter any attack. Indeed, if North Korea is anything to go by, even one bomb is enough -- even with an enemy as formidable as the US. This was what moved Nawaz Sharief when he said after the Chagai blasts "Pakistan ab hamesha ke liye mahfooz gaya" (Pakistan is now safe forever).

In other words, the point about flexibility can be overdone. To be sure, it needs to build a few more powerful missiles. But that is not what the Indo-US agreement is about.

So far, so good but some questions remain. Should the Prime Minister have sprung this thing on the country in the manner he did? Surely there is something to be said for debate and consensus, especially when a major decision is involved. The government can argue that such things are not discussed publicly in advance. But was the Cabinet taken into confidence?

The country did not receive any indication that Dr Singh was about to reverse a 50-year-old policy. He needs to explain why, because process is important in a democracy, and not just outcomes.

There is then the issue of how the nuclear industry is to be organised. At present, it is controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission, which was primarily charged with developing India's nuclear weapons and for whom electricity generation was a fig-leaf. But now another wing, as it were, is to be added to the industry which will only produce electricity.

Will this be under the supervision of the AEC or will the government allow a private-public partnership to grow outside the AEC? There is a strong case for letting the AEC do its own thing and not allow it to run the entire show-especially since the evidence shows that it is pretty inept at what it does.

Finally, there is the safety issue. A nuclear disaster causes unimaginably more harm than anything known to mankind except comets crashing into Earth. If India is to build a large nuclear electricity business, safety will have to be made non-negotiable.

Can we ensure that?