Booster Shots

The Bangalore conference will provide a visible backdrop to that arcane process called the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), which aims at deepening engagement between India and the US in four strategic areas: civilian nuclear, civilian space, high technology trade as well as missile defence. Essentially a politically driven process, it is being coordinated by Indian national security advisor Brajesh Mishra and his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice. The NSSP, which was announced on January 12 by both Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and President George Bush, requires each country to take a series of steps that have been clearly spelt out—in terms of sequencing—in a classified roadmap.

Sources say the roadmap was drawn after over a year of discussions. The substantive discussions occurred in September 2003 when US deputy national security advisor Steve Hadley made an unannounced day-long visit to New Delhi. After a one-to-one meeting with Brajesh Mishra, Hadley outlined to the assembled Indian delegation a phased process through which the US thought New Delhi and Washington could engage in issues hitherto considered taboo. Hadley’s visit was the culmination of a non-paper (or informal proposals) on a cluster of three issues (then called the Trinity Issues and including civil nuclear, civil space and high-technology trade) that then foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal took to Washington in July last. When the non-paper was being discussed, the US offered to include another item: missile defence.

Government sources say the NSSP aims at finding ways in which India and the US can work together effectively around the restrictions that are in place because of US laws and multilateral conventions, like the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that Washington is part of. The NSG denies India nuclear equipment and material (reactor vessels, fuels, reprocessing equipment etc) as also dual use technologies. It is not clear how far the US can go on civilian nuclear cooperation given its international commitments but its proposals are far more substantive on the space side.

The Bangalore conference, for example, is billed as "the first serious bilateral engagement about space between India and the US" although the history of cooperation goes back to 1963 when NASA supplied Nike-Apache sounding rockets (which make observations on the earth) for the Thumba launch site off Kerala. The US had also helped design the launch facility and even trained the first groups of Indian rocket scientists (A.P.J. Abdul Kalam included) in assembling, launching and tracking sounding rockets at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Wallops Island. The Thumba facility gradually developed into India’s Integrated Guided Missile Programme (IGDMP).

Post-Pokhran II, the US placed restrictions on ISRO-related entities such as the ISRO headquarters and other divisions. The Indian side has been arguing that a visible demonstration of US interest and intent would be to ease restrictions on ISRO. ISRO sources say they expect restrictions to be eased before the June conference, paving the way for Boeing and ISRO to jointly develop small and medium satellites for commercial launches.

The sources, though not privy to the precise content of the entire package, feel ISRO’s commercial objectives would be better served if it could launch US satellites or those of other countries containing US-origin components. This, it seems, is the minimum expectation from the NSSP.

A critical aspect of the NSSP is the so-called "expanded dialogue on Missile Defence". There have already been three rounds of bilateral discussions including computer simulations on this subject, and one multilateral discussion in Tokyo. There was a missile defence workshop in Hyderabad in February, one in January last year in Delhi as well as in Colorado Springs in May 2002. The issue also figured when Steve Rademaker, the assistant secretary for arms control, came to Delhi this February.

Underlying these exercises is the hope that the United States would understand better India’s need for some of the more advanced weaponry that New Delhi might want to seek, including the Raytheon-manufactured Patriot Advance Capability Missile (PAC2&3). Sources say that although it was a Washington initiative to include PAC2&3 in the discussions, these haven’t progressed even to the stage where the US side feels comfortable talking about the specifications of the missiles.

Former government officials say the two sides have been engaged in the issue of dual use technology since the early ’80s. They say the 1984 MoU on technology transfers helped for a while but post-Pokhran II the US has been keeping a very tight control over supply of dual use items to some government entities in the drdo, the department of atomic energy and the department of space, even though these are for civilian applications. Sources say the NSSP cannot be complete without easing restrictions and licensing requirements on dual technology, especially for such end-users. But Washington’s focus has been essentially on export controls, and wants India to tighten regulations relating to outward proliferation of sensitive technologies.

There is also a growing feeling in the Indian bureaucracy that the process, which began with great expectations, has not developed the kind of momentum that it should have. Hadley came in July, the NSSP announcement came in January and as yet there has not been any concrete steps. This suggests that the path has not been very easy for the two sides. Additionally, the state department’s non-proliferation zealots, sources feel, have seized upon the proliferation issue emanating from Pakistan to turn the NSSP process into focussing almost exclusively on export controls. Said a senior source: "Let us be clear. We are in the beginning of the process of tightening our controls. The US has taken decades and decades to arrive at a system which is very complicated and thorough. We are not going to get there tomorrow. Or the day after. If the actions from the US side is conditional on satisfying them then there is a greater danger of further delay in progress."

Analysts watching the NSSP process from the outside cannot but help compare the slow progress of NSSP with the alacrity with which the US has forgiven Pakistan’s proliferation excesses, and has tried to cover Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s tracks.