elected PM would not have accepted the Indo-US nuclear deal as Manmohan Singh has, argues N.V.Subramanian.
5 July 2008: After Manmohan Singh, most intellectually honest people would say no to a technocratic prime minister. Is the fall back to an elected PM not only inescapable but desirable? Very probably yes.
If you were to take a secret poll of the Congress leadership, Manmohan Singh and the Indo-US nuclear deal would lose hands down. The deal won’t win the Congress party the next general election, even if it beats the tight US congressional calendar. It is not even about winning polls. The deal sells out India’s military nuclear programme by prohibiting testing. Without explosive testing, weapons, especially thermo-nuclear weapons, but most of all, warheads on medium- and long-range missiles, cannot be perfected. The Samajwadi Party has trudged up the former President, Abdul Kalam, to certify the worthiness of the deal. With due respect to Kalam, he is a technologist, not a scientist, far less an atomic scientist, and not at all the cream of that company, a weapon’s designer. And what should and does frighten the Indian military is that the lone thermonuclear weapon in the May 1998 test did not produce the intended bang.
The point is, most Indian strategic writers know this and more. Anyone with any legal comprehension who has read the entire (available) documentation on the deal also knows that an explosive test will kill the unique exemption for
