May 2, 2004 ☼ Foreign Affairs

Kaushik Kapisthalam takes the ‘international non-proliferation ayatollahs’ to task for targeting India while the real proliferators - Pakistan and China - went about their business unfettered. Moreover, while India’s cooperation could prove valuable in the quest for the ‘holy grail’ of nuclear technology - the closed fuel cycle, it is being shut out of the global R&D network in spite of its matchless record on nuclear proliferation.

Unfortunately, there is one major impediment to this co-operation — the cabal of international non-proliferation ayatollahs.

The ayatollahs’ scapegoating of India was further illustrated when a nuclear trade journal quoted US bureaucrats talking about the US discovery of plutonium in air samples taken deep inside Pakistan. Ignoring the obvious possibility of China or North Korea being the source of the plutonium, American ayatollahs concluded that the plutonium was vented during India’s 1998 nuclear tests and was carried over the air to Pakistan. The Ayatollahs even argued that this could be deemed a technical violation of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which India signed in 1963. In effect, they wanted to punish India for a proliferation case discovered in Pakistan. It now turns out that the ayatollahs were forced to eat crow after the Pakistan-North Korea links were revealed recently and there is increasing evidence that Pakistan could have tested a North Korean device. [ORF]

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