How Tellis report helped N-deal mark-up

An Ashley Tellis report, submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House International Relations Committee on the eve of the mark-up of enabling legislation on the US-India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, likely contributed to the overwhelming approval of the legislation by both committees.

Several Congressional sources told rediff India Abroad the Tellis report, which undercut the non-proliferation lobby's argument that the deal would help India expand its nuclear arsenal, "was a significant turning point because he provided well-founded research and several facts and figures."

In his report titled 'Atoms for War? US-India Civilian Nuclear Cooperation and India's Nuclear Arsenal,' Tellis argued that the non-proliferation lobby's criticism was based upon two crucial assumptions: that New Delhi seeks the largest nuclear weapons inventory its capacity and resources permit; and that the Indian desire for a larger nuclear arsenal has been stymied thus far by a shortage of natural uranium.

Tellis, who, during the final phase of the negotiations had assisted chief US negotiator Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, said both assumptions were 'deeply flawed.'

'India is currently separating about 24-40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium annually, far less than it has the capability to produce,' he pointed out.

 This, he argued, was evidence that India is 'in no hurry to build the biggest nuclear stockpile it could construct based on material factors alone, and undermines the assumption that India wishes to build the biggest nuclear arsenal it possibly can.

'Further,' he said, 'India's capacity to produce a huge nuclear arsenal is not affected by prospective US-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation.'

To back up this conclusion, Tellis pointed out the base fact that 'India is widely acknowledged to possess reserves of 78,000 metric tons of uranium.'

Building on this, the senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that 'the total inventory of natural uranium required to sustain all the reactors associated with the current power program — both operational and under construction — and the weapons program over the entire notional lifetime of these plants runs into some 14,640–14,790 MTU. Or, in other words, requirements that are well within even the most conservative valuations of India's reasonably assured uranium reserves.'

He pointed out that if the eight reactors India has retained in the military list were to allocate one-fourth of their cores for the production of weapons-grade material, the total amount of natural uranium required to run these facilities for the remaining duration of their notional lives would be somewhere between 19,965-29,124 MTU.

'Operating India's eight un-safeguarded PHWRs in this way would bequeath New Delhi with some 12,135-13,370 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, which is sufficient to produce between 2,023-2,228 nuclear weapons over and above those already existing in the Indian arsenal.'

He pointed out that the total amount of natural uranium required to fuel all Indian reactors, both civilian and military, on the assumption that eight of them would be used for producing weapons-grade materials in one-fourth of their cores, would be roughly between 26,381 and 35,690 MTU over their remaining lives.

And that, he pointed out, 'lies well within India's assured uranium reserves, howsoever these are disaggregated.'

The sum of his argument, Tellis said, was that India had the indigenous reserves of natural uranium necessary to underwrite as large an arsenal as it desired.

'Consequently, the US-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation initiative will not materially contribute towards New Delhi's strategic capacities in any consequential way, either directly or by freeing up its internal resources.'

The report points out that India faces a current shortage of natural uranium caused by constrictions in its mining and milling capacity, but said it was a transient problem that was currently being redressed.

He argued that the current shortage of uranium fuel is a near-term aberration, not an enduring limitation resulting from the dearth of physical resources. 'As such, they do not offer a viable basis either for Congress to extort any concessions from India in regards to its weapons program, or for supporting the petty canard that imported natural uranium will lead to a substantial increase in the size of India's nuclear weapons program.'

Tellis told rediff India Abroad the reason he brought out this report to supplement the testimony he had provided to the House and Senate committees was because "I was deeply concerned about the tenor of Congressional discussions, which seemed to suggest either that the administration was violating its NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) obligations, or that the civil nuclear agreement was somehow going to assist the Indian nuclear program through the fungibility of fuel."

Both claims, he said, had been repeatedly made during Congressional discussion "and both claims, as you know, were vociferously advanced by the non-proliferation lobby, even though both claims were false. The only problem was that no one had proved it.

"So I decided that a serious study of the issue had to be done, and that it had to be completed before the mark-up. I finished it two weeks before the House International Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met to mark-up the legislation, and distributed it to both the committees before the business meetings formally took place."

He said the report also provided an opportunity "to remind our legislators of what Secretary (of State Condoleezza) Rice had been saying all along, that the Indian nuclear weapons program, despite what all the critics have claimed, has been very restrained."

Tellis pointed out that Rice and Burns had repeatedly told the two committees that India's weapons program was small and the power program relatively big, and that civil cooperation would not impact the former.

"I thought it was important for the committees to appreciate that these claims were not simply an effort to defend the deal but were, in fact, substantially accurate, and the only way to do this was to calculate the uranium needs of both the weapons program and the power program and to show that both could be met by India indigenously over the long-term," Tellis said.

Another key reason, Tellis said, was that he wanted to inform Congress it would be futile to try and extort concessions from India, "because none would be forthcoming."

"What I did not appreciate sufficiently when I started my research, and which I do now, is that the true values of the civil nuclear agreement is not in helping India tide over its transient fuel shortages, but in providing it with a cost- and technology-efficient alternative, or at least a supplement, to Bhabha's three-stage plan," Tellis said.

The analyst said this would be the lasting energy-related benefit of the deal; "one that we should be proud of because the President would have succeeded in simultaneously soldering both political and energy benefits through this new agreement."

The overwhelming votes in the two committees, Tellis said, were heartening because they represented a bipartisan endorsement "of what I strongly believe is a bold strategic initiative by the President."