[Mb-civic] Good Nukes, Bad Nukes - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Good Nukes, Bad Nukes

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A17

Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and 
Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One 
symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global 
disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the 
nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them 
stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both -- 
rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that intelligence "is the ability 
to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." That has always 
seemed to me like an argument for enlightened hypocrisy. And maybe it's 
the best explanation for why we should say yes to India's nukes and no 
to Iran's. The two cases are different because -- they're different. The 
same rules don't apply to both; one has shown that it is benign and the 
other behaves like a global outlaw.

President Bush's trip to India this week sets the nuclear issue in all 
its hypocritical glory. The centerpiece of the visit, it is hoped, will 
be an agreement that, in effect, validates India's accession as a 
nuclear weapons state in exchange for its acceptance of new safeguards 
on its civilian nuclear program. An Iranian observing Bush's visit might 
conclude that the lesson is that if you can somehow manage to build a 
nuclear bomb despite the West's antiproliferation efforts, you will 
eventually get away with it.

Iran would be dangerously mistaken if it made that assumption. The real 
lesson may be that rules are sometimes less important than behavior. The 
world is ready to accept India as a nuclear power because its actions 
have given other nations confidence that it seeks to play a stabilizing 
role. A world where behavior matters gets the incentives right: It 
forces Iran to demonstrate its reliability so that, over time, it can be 
seen in the same league as India and Pakistan.

One common thread in U.S. policy toward India and Iran is the insistence 
that enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel be under some form of 
international supervision. The agreement Bush is seeking during his trip 
-- to separate India's civilian and military nuclear programs -- 
embodies that idea. So does Russia's proposal to provide enrichment for 
Iran's nuclear program. Iran suggested last weekend that it might accept 
this plan. Most observers remain dubious, but if Iran is really willing 
to outsource its civilian nuclear fuel, that might be a breakthrough.

The Bush administration is weighing a more ambitious idea that all 
nuclear enrichment and reprocessing should be capped -- so that no new 
country can join the club. Sen. Richard Lugar has submitted such a 
proposal, based on suggestions from Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard 
University expert in nuclear policy. Under the Lugar plan, countries 
that forgo their enrichment and reprocessing programs would have 
guaranteed access to nuclear fuel at reasonable prices. Mohamed 
ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, proposes 
to take internationalization of fuel supplies a step further -- so that 
all enrichment and reprocessing would be under the IAEA's control.

How can the world foster civilian nuclear power without further 
proliferation of weapons? That conundrum was the starting point for the 
drafters of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the 1960s, and it has become 
more urgent today. There's an emerging consensus that nuclear power is 
the best way for China and India to modernize without adding 
disastrously to global warming. John Ritch, head of the World Nuclear 
Association in London, argues that the world will need 10,000 civilian 
nuclear reactors by the end of the century, compared with 440 today. How 
can we manage this explosion of nuclear power while avoiding a mushroom 
cloud? That's the backdrop to our debate about India and Iran.

Harvard's Graham Allison tells his students that the Iranian nuclear 
issue is a "slow-motion Cuban missile crisis." By that, he means that 
miscalculation on either side could have catastrophic consequences for 
the world. Allison's famous study of the missile crisis, "Essence of 
Decision," explained how both firmness and flexibility allowed President 
Kennedy to avoid war. One of Kennedy's secrets, it could be argued, was 
a policy of strategic hypocrisy -- responding to a constructive Soviet 
message that could resolve the crisis and ignoring a subsequent 
belligerent one.

The West is still waiting for the constructive message from Tehran. In 
the meantime, we should all learn to live with a policy that says yes to 
India and no to Iran.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801010.html?nav=hcmodule
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