Editorial: “A price too high: The rise of China is no reason to trample on the non-proliferation regime,”

Economist, August 2, 2007

http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9587588

Slowly but seemingly relentlessly, America's deal with India on nuclear co-operation is wending its way to fruition. Two years after it was first announced in Washington by George Bush and Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, the two countries have concluded negotiations on the terms of a technical agreement governing that co-operation. Both sides have claimed a great breakthrough. Nicholas Burns, the State Department official who has shepherded the deal through a maze of complications, called it “perhaps the single most important initiative in the 60 years of our relationship”. M.K. Narayanan, Mr Singh's national-security adviser, called it “a touchstone of a transformed bilateral relationship”. That once distant ties between America and India are warming up is indeed cause for celebration. But the heat also burns a huge hole in the global non-proliferation regime. As this newspaper has argued ever since the deal was first mooted, this is wrong, dangerous and unnecessary.