Indo-US nuclear deal: should Pakistan be concerned?

ISLAMABAD: Just hours after President Obama landed in New Delhi, India and the US announced “progress” in a landmark nuclear deal that had remained stalled for over six years.
The movement on the much-talked-about deal was significant because it would now, finally, allow India international access to civilian nuclear reactors as well as nuclear material to fuel those reactors.
American companies have long remained interested in nuclear commerce with India but the domestic laws of the two countries had been holding them back, at least till Barack Obama’s intervention.
Of the hurdles, the first and foremost was the legal issue of tracking the nuclear material provided by the US to India. While domestic laws in the US required the “tracking” of whereabouts of material to ensure that it is not diverted towards India’s nuclear weapons programme, India thought that the requirement was “intrusive” as it had already agreed to tracking by the international nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, under the nuclear safeguards agreement.
The other hang-up was the tough liability law cleared by the Indian Parliament in 2010. The law grew out the 1984 Bhopal tragedy as the US-owned company, Union Cardbide, in Bhopal left scores of people dead due to an industrial oversight.
The law exposed the US supplier companies to risk by holding them completely responsible in the event of any nuclear accident and hence, was stopping the US companies from engaging in nuclear trade with India.
Pakistan has itself been trying to cash a similar deal with the US, but the latter has remained hesitant. America’s decision not to grant the deal was framed famously by former President George W Bush who, during his visit to Islamabad in 2006, said, “I explained [to General Musharraf] that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories.”
Bush further went on to say, “So as we proceed forward, our strategy will take in effect those well-known differences.” Over the years, despite their Strategic Dialogue, it’s been clear that such a deal for Pakistan remains a distant dream as long as the US continues to take into account the “well known differences”.
Instead, Pakistan has so far been able to win the Chinese cooperation in the nuclear domain, with Chinese companies currently financing and helping Pakistan with the construction of civilian nuclear reactors in Karachi.
As far as concerns vis-à-vis the US’s nuclear trade with India go, anxieties inside Pakistan are quite apparent but a little misplaced. Many in the past have said that India could well use the spent fuel from the reactors supplied by the US to fire up its Fast Breeder Reactor in order to make weapons grade plutonium but that, in effect, has become almost impossible.
In fact, the agreement comes with strings attached which have required India to completely demarcate its civilian and military programmes. It has further placed all its indigenous civilian, as well as nuclear reactors acquired from the US, under the IAEA’s full scope safeguards, which would even account for the spent fuel coming out of these reactors.
So, simply: The IAEA would be monitoring the raw material for nuclear energy – which could be used for nuclear weapons from the moment it enters the reactor till the product – which is also a raw material to make nuclear weapons – is removed or in other words, tracking the movement ‘from cradle to grave’.
More than diversion of nuclear materials, Pakistan would be watching out for India’s freed up local reserves of natural uranium. These reserves were previously being split between both the civilian as well as the nuclear weapons programme but with the US, as well as other countries, now taking care of India’s civilian nuclear requirements, India could now completely channel these local uranium reserves towards its nuclear weapons programme and increase the pace of its armament. Thus, more nukes on the other side of the border, possibly.