Nuclear Racism!

This is a fairly good article on the Indo-US Nuke deal!

Why should India, with a spotless nonproliferation record, be denied access to U.S. civilian nuclear technology for electricity, while China — which helped Pakistan and Iran in their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons — can have it?

The inequitable structure of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has resulted in built-in discrimination in favor of China and against India that has made it necessary and justifiable for the administration to conclude its civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi.

The treaty is based on a legalistic fiction that underpins this discrimination. When it was concluded in 1968, only the five states that had already tested nuclear weapons were permitted to sign as "nuclear weapons states." China, which had tested in 1964, got in just under the wire. India tested in 1974, six years too late.

As Robert Kagan has argued [op-ed, March 12], the NPT "erected a gargantuan double standard," which he went on to call "a particularly mindless kind of double standard, since membership in the nuclear ‘club’ was not based on justice or morality or strategic judgment or politics but simply on circumstance: Whoever had figured out how to build nuclear weapons by 1968 was in."