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India Joins Nuclear Market
figona brings news that India will be allowed to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). A waiver was approved yesterday that provided an exception to the requirements that India sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. This means India will be able to buy nuclear fuel from the world market and purchase reactors from the US, France, and Russia; something it has been unable to do since it began nuclear testing in 1974 (which inspired the creation of the NSG). The waiver does not include terms to cut off access if India resumes nuclear testing, but the US Congress drafted a letter stating their willingness to do so. Opponents of the waiver have called it a "non-proliferation disaster."
And Pakistan might just get the same treatment India just got, actually. After all, without their help militarily, fighting wars in Afghanistan would be much more difficult.
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Any danger the arsenal represents probably wouldn't even double if it increased 100 fold. Nuclear fuel is something the world needs right now, if all the hype about global warming is as bad as they say it is. Not only that, but cheaper nuclear fuel -> cheaper power -> better economy -> less poverty.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
People in the US especially seem to think of India in terms of snake charmers and cheap IT, forgetting that we are the second largest nation on earth, with genuine security concerns.
With China sitting to our east and making noises (usually, very loud noises) and a particularly unstable Pakistan to the west who got most of their nuclear tech from China, we really don't have a choice.
Besides which, far too many other pieces of tech cannot be sold to India because they may kinda sorta have some possible application in one corner of the fine art of nuclear weapons manufacture. This can finally stop now.
Finally, the whole deal means that we can now start having safety equipment for our nuclear program, which we haven't been able to obtain for years now.
Anyway, you probably don't know the amount of flak the government has taken over this deal... There's talk from lots of sides about "selling our sovereignty", because there will now be periodic inspections of all nuclear facilities by the IAEA.
Anyway, Arbitrarily restricting possession of nuclear weapons to those nations that tested before 1967 is not exactly a solid foundation for the NPT. It should have been quite blindingly obvious right back then that several nations, even reasonably stable ones, would have severe reservations about such an imbalanced treaty.
Because the NPT is a biased treaty of HAVES and HAVE NOTS. It basically says that the countries that HAVE nuclear weapons can continue to have them forever and those that don't can never have them forever, thereby creating a hierarchy of powers. India rejects this as highly discriminatory and wants a world where all nuclear weapons are eliminated. Since that sounds impossible, India went ahead with its nuclear program to defend against its neighbours like China and Pakistan.
The problem with Thorium is that it's a decade or two away from commercial use. India needs power NOW. And oh, they aren't mothballing their Thorium programme -- if anything progress has been good.
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