Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xii, 280 pp. (Figure, tables.) US$79.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-07341-8.
There are two tendencies in the study of nuclear diplomacy: one to reduce the moves and turns to a kind of formulaic game-like calculus, the other to follow one side of the game more closely because the author enjoys an advantage there. Dinshaw Mistry successfully unites his access to and subtle understanding of both the Indian and American sides of this complex story, and avoids reducing it to formulas. He enters deep into the political labyrinths of the American and Indian policy-making environments to show how limited the mandates have been for the negotiating teams. Now at the University of Cincinnati, Mistry has made skillful use of very different sources, including the insight of skilled Indian and US journalists/writers who worked this subject almost every day. A good reason that Mistry’s balanced and detached work is important to Pacific Affairs readers, even those whose interest in nuclear history is slight, is because it is so revealing about the political cultures of both countries. As India’s influence in the rest of the Pacific Affairs region increases, such knowledge is inherently valuable.
The India-US nuclear relationship opened in 1949–1950 when American officials and leaders, alarmed by French moves on India’s huge thorium deposits, agreed to purchase a great deal of beryllium at an exaggerated price in a secret multi-year contract. In 1955 India asked for, and soon received, 20 tons of US heavy water for the new CIRUS reactor commissioned in 1961. The first functioning electrical power reactor was an American-designed light water reactor, commissioned in 1970. But when India tested its first atomic bomb in 1974, cooperation narrowed to the completion of an enriched uranium contract for the US reactor, and official sanctions were placed on further US involvement. Even the spent US fuel at this reactor had to be stored (by India) on site for more than thirty years. Just as these sanctions were unwinding, India tested five bombs (one of them thermonuclear) in 1998, thus attracting new sanctions. So the twentieth-century relationship between India and the US is best described as a history of “managing disappointment.”
When the Bush government realized in 2005 that India was more important to the US, and that most sanctions on India were counter-productive, the relationship entered the twenty-first century. Sanction-lifting had already occurred in September 2001, “but only because they were simultaneously lifted on Pakistan, whose assistance Washington required for its military campaign in Afghanistan” (39). The book skillfully treats the international dimensions of the process, such as India’s continued voting at the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency in favour of Iran’s nuclear program. Senior US officials had to work on nuclear lobbies in other countries (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Japan) to reduce those governments’ interference with the draft agreement. India and the US had tough negotiations with critical partners at both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Nuclear Suppliers Group. But rather than standing out alone, with domestic politics subordinated to them, Mistry shows that these multi-national variables had their tangled domestic roots too. That is where his analysis has flourished.
One way to look at Mistry’s excellent book is to see this process as a time of “nuclear learning.” The teams established what Mistry calls “win-sets,” building from lists of issues around which separate negotiation had to occur. The learning occurred, in my view, when the proponents of an agreement realized where they could compromise with each other, and where opponents of the agreement (such as the left parties in India and members of the US Congress) realized the limits of their influence. Mistry says that inclusion of certain items in the win-set of the other country “allows” each of them to accept an arrangement leading to the agreement. He conveniently provides a quantitative scale to each of the options, and their consequences, for each party.
Some of the issues which Mistry examines are:
- Separation of military and civil uses of nuclear facilities in India, with “firewalls” between them.
- Access to new Indian sites for US electrical power reactor-building corporations, with limited liability in case of accidents and damages. India had not forgotten the 1986 experience with Union Carbide after the accident at its Bhopal fertilizer plant, and established stringent nuclear accident liability regulations. India opposed any IAEA checks on nuclear application of its liability laws.
- Restraints on India’s plan to test nuclear weapons, and a schedule for the termination of cooperation after a future Indian nuclear test.
- Restraints on India’s exports with weapons-of-mass-destruction potential (chemicals, organisms, equipment, and technology).
- Inclusion of India’s breeder reactor on the list for IAEA inspection; among India’s twenty-two reactors (some of them were operating at 50 percent of their capacity), only six were in a safeguarded position in 2005.
- Assurances of continuing US enriched fuel supply; India had not forgotten the difficulties and costs caused by US withdrawal of shipments of enriched uranium for Tarapur in 1974–1978.
Mistry contrasts the two country’s decision regimes, saying “the most powerful bureaucratic actors—the president, secretary of state, national security advisor, and under-secretary of state for political affairs—made the final negotiating decisions” for the US. But in India the top nuclear officials often drew the red lines beyond which they did not wish PM Manmohan Singh and/or External Affairs officials to move (14–15).
Mistry assembled evidence on how track-two diplomacy was used, including the roles of think tanks, strategic affairs elites, business associations with lobbying power, and the media. Positions of important individuals (such as Jimmy Carter), and editorials of influential sources like The Hinduare carefully analyzed. Americans were on the ground in India and their president and secretary of state went to meetings and worked the phones on this subject for years. India hired two US public relations firms close to both Republican and Democratic parties. Mistry carefully sifted through testimony before committees, shows how a US Coalition for the Partnership with India actually operated, and shows that the absence of such a coalition in India was not, in the end, a decisive flaw.
No conclusive knock-out punch leading to “yes” is suggested for either side, just a messy cluster of issues which had to be separately negotiated, one interest bumping into another. The business potentials, which had unlocked some American doors in 2005, still remained unfulfilled for the US (and for Russian and French reactor builders too) even seven years after conclusion of the agreement. Mistry curiously confines to a footnote the insight that the US and Indian negotiating styles were different, namely that “while Washington looks for specific answers in talks with India, New Delhi often pursues ‘the art of nondiplomacy’, meaning that it does not say yes or no” (242). This question of negotiating style should be more prominent, because political cultures contain negotiating cultures.
Mistry reminds us that this entire process was not for the nuclear establishments of each country alone. The curious thing about nuclear diplomacy is “the puzzle of why two major powers (that is, the US and India) that had strategic interests in building a partnership found it very difficult to do so” (242). Yes, a most curious thing.
Robert Anderson
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
pp. 700-703