A new bilateral agreement signed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott in early September will allow Australia to sell uranium to India for the first time.
The agreement formalises a 2007 Howard government policy to allow Australian uranium to be exported to India for energy generation, overturning a decades-old ban on uranium sales to countries which had not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Australia sells uranium for energy generation to many countries, including the US, Japan, China, South Korea, UK, France, Germany and Spain.
Mr Abbott says the agreement is a sign of trust between the two countries. "India has an absolutely impeccable record when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation," he said.
Does India have an absolutely impeccable record when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation? ABC Fact Check investigates.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty
The NPT was opened for signature in 1968 and came into force in 1970. It is the only multilateral binding commitment to nuclear disarmament. A total of 190 countries have joined, including five nuclear-weapon states - the US, Russia, China, France and the UK. Australia is also a signatory. India is one of four nuclear-armed states that remain outside the NPT, along with Israel, Pakistan and North Korea.
India claimed its national security would be disadvantaged by the separation of 'nuclear-weapon states' and 'non-nuclear-weapon states' in the treaty.
Article IX says: "For the purposes of this treaty, a nuclear-weapon state is one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967."
India had not tested a nuclear weapon at this stage and was therefore not considered a nuclear-weapon state.
According to the treaty, non-nuclear weapon states are prohibited from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. This meant countries that had conducted tests prior to 1967 would be allowed to keep their weapons (albeit with a commitment in Article VI to disarm over time), but India would have been forced to stay nuclear-weapon free.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly in 1995, India's then-minister of external affairs, Pranab Mukherjee, called the NPT a "pernicious document" because "it has made the possession of nuclear weapons by the nuclear-weapon states immutable and has made the goal of global nuclear disarmament that much more difficult".
India's goal is the total elimination of nuclear weapons, Mr Mukherjee said, but added: "The nuclear-weapon states claim to share this goal, but their present objective is to retain nuclear weapons while making sure others do not get them."
The NPT's stated goals are to:
- Prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology;
- promote co-operation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy;
- and aim for nuclear disarmament.
Signatories to the NPT agree to prevent nuclear weapons from being disseminated more widely and to ensure the security of their nuclear materials by applying International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards on peaceful nuclear activities, which includes not diverting nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons.
Australia's uranium export policy states that uranium will not be exported to countries with nuclear weapons unless they make an assurance that the nuclear material is for peaceful purposes, such as generating energy, and will not be diverted to military purposes.
Spreading nuclear weapon technologies
Dr Ian Hill, a senior fellow in international relations at ANU's College of Asia and the Pacific, says the truth of Mr Abbott's statement - that India has an "absolutely impeccable record" when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation - depends on how 'non-proliferation' is defined.
"If you define proliferation as helping to spread nuclear weapons technologies to other states, it is absolutely true that India has an impeccable record," he said. "While it has developed those technologies, it has never sold them, bartered them or given them away to another state."
Professor Ramech Thakur, director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation & Disarmament at ANU, agrees that if the definition of non-proliferation is preventing leakage of nuclear materials, India does have an impeccable record.
"There hasn't been a single plausible or credible allegation thereof to suggest that either India as a country, or as a government, as a state, or groups located in India, have proliferated any nuclear material, design, technology, skills or weapons to anyone else," he said.
Dr Maria Rost Rublee, a senior lecturer in international relations at ANU's College of Arts and Social Sciences, says that India's determination to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is exemplified by a report that they turned down an offer from Libya in 1978 to pay off their $US15 billion foreign debt in exchange for nuclear weapons technology.
Diverting nuclear material from peaceful purposes
The promise not to divert nuclear material, such as uranium, from peaceful purposes to the development of nuclear weapons is a key plank of both the NPT and Australia's uranium export policy.
Dr Rublee says India certainly does not have an impeccable record when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation.
"I do believe it's a stretch to say it's impeccable and in fact, the fact that India's program began by explicitly breaking a legal commitment to Canada, tells you that there's a problem from the very start," she said.
Dr Rublee is referring to India's first nuclear test, when it exploded the 'Smiling Buddha' nuclear bomb in 1974 using plutonium from a nuclear reactor supplied by Canada. The Canadian government immediately stopped supplying India with nuclear materials, a ban that was only overturned in 2010.
Former Labor foreign minister Professor Gareth Evans, who convenes the Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, also cites India's diversion of Canadian resources to making nuclear weapons as evidence that their record is not impeccable.
"There should be no waiving of our standard safeguards requirements when it comes to accounting for Australian-supplied nuclear material," he said.
Dr Rublee says there are also issues with how India secures its nuclear material.
"The question is - could someone come in and take some material, or could an insider get hold of the material and transfer it out of the country," she said. "Those are very important parts if we look at proliferation record and India scores very poorly."
The NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index assesses the security of nuclear materials around the world.
Dr Rublee says India scores below Pakistan on the index, and is ranked above only North Korea and Iran.
This table shows the overall scores of countries with weapons-usable nuclear materials, according to the index:
*Change in score between 2012 and 2014
According to a 2013 report by the US Arms Control Association, India has placed 19 civilian nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards, but the association notes it has not agreed to report on "nuclear-related imports, uranium mining, and research and development related to the nuclear fuel cycle".
"The IAEA also does not have complementary access to Indian facilities to inspect undeclared sites," it said.
The report gave India an overall grade of C+:
Nuclear weapons stockpiles
A 2013 report by ANU's Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament assessed progress of the NPT. It found that there was a global stockpile of nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons, 94 per cent of which are held by the US and Russia.
India has an estimated 80 to 100 nuclear weapons, a similar amount to Pakistan and Israel.
While cuts in US and Russian stockpiles have been significant, the report notes that nuclear arsenals are growing in India, China and Pakistan. India is also known to have highly enriched uranium and weapon-grade plutonium, both 'fissile' materials that are used for nuclear explosions.
Professor Thakur says India is not bound by the NPT requirement to disarm its nuclear arsenal. Countries in the NPT with nuclear weapons capabilities are, but have increased their nuclear stockpiles since signing the treaty.
"That includes the US, Russia, who between them hold 93 per cent of the world's nuclear weapon stockpile," he said. "So to say we are worried about 100 weapons in India but not worried about 300 in China, 8,000 each in the US and Russia, both of whom we supply... that doesn't add up as well."
India has committed to a 'no first use' policy of not using nuclear weapons either preventatively or pre-emptively, the only nuclear-armed state, apart from China, to do so. This position was reiterated by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi during the country's elections this year.
Testing nuclear weapons
While testing nuclear weapons isn't prohibited by the NPT, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), opened for signature in 1996, but not yet in force, aims to ban "nuclear explosions by everyone, everywhere".
India conducted its second set of nuclear tests in 1998.
Worldwide condemnation followed, including from the UN Security Council, calling on India and Pakistan to de-escalate tensions between them and to join the NPT.
Professor Nick Bisley, executive director of La Trobe Asia at La Trobe University, says India has not signed the CTBT and never will.
"If you are taking a fairly strict interpretation of non-proliferation, you are not doing anything more than what you've got, then you'd probably say (the testing) is not a black mark," he said.
"I think one of the most important parts of the non-proliferation story is openness about information and... I think they have been very open and transparent about what they are doing to the extent that anyone is."
Dr Hill says that because India has not signed the NPT, it could not technically be deemed to have broken international law in developing nuclear weapons.
"But defenders of the NPT argue that India undermines attempts at ensuring nuclear non-proliferation in remaining outside the NPT and in testing nuclear weapons in 1998, and then moving to build a relatively small arsenal of about 100 to 200 weapons," he said.
The verdict
India has an "absolutely impeccable record" when it comes to preventing the horizontal spread of nuclear weapons to other states, which all experts agree is critical for bona fide nuclear non-proliferation credentials.
However, it has increased its nuclear weapons stockpile, conducted nuclear testing and refused to sign the NPT. There are also question marks over its safety procedures. India's record when it comes to nuclear non-proliferation is not "absolutely impeccable".
Mr Abbott's claim is exaggerated.
Sources
- Tony Abbott, doorstop interview, Mumbai, India, September 4, 2014
- Tony Abbott, joint statement with prime minister Modi, New Delhi, India, September 5, 2014
- Parliamentary Library, The origins of Australia's uranium export policy, December 2, 2011
- UN Office of Disarmament Affairs, Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
- Geoscience Australia, Australian Minerals Atlas, Uranium
- Embassy of India, India Review, August 1, 2005
- UN General Assembly, Fiftieth Session, September 29, 1995
- Preparatory commission for the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty organisation, Smiling Buddha
- Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, ANU, Nuclear Weapons: The state of play, 2013
- NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index 2014
- Reuters, India's Modi says committed to no first use of nuclear weapons, April 16, 2014
