For nuclear club, it’s decision time on India

The Hindu
Aug 20, 2008

VIENNA: For a club with such strict rules of membership and forbidding guidelines of behaviour, the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s lack of a permanent address has always given the cartel something of a spectral character. Set up under conditions of the greatest secrecy in London in April 1975 in order to deal with the consequences of India’s ’peaceful’ nuclear explosion at Pokhran in 1974, the seven founding members decided not to advertise the birth of their club. Three of them — France, West Germany and Japan — were not even members of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, though Bonn and Tokyo would deposit their instruments of ratification soon thereafter. One of them, the erstwhile Soviet Union, did not want developing countries to think it was ganging up with the West against them. The United States, Britain and Canada also preferred to be circumspect. Conscious of the fact that the rest of the world — including their closest allies — would see the cartel in a negative light, the seven decided that no minutes would be kept of their historic first meeting.