The US-India Nuclear Pact: A Good Deal

Stronger US-India strategic ties resulting from the pact would lessen India's need to greatly expand its nuclear arsenal and would bind Indian governments more firmly to norms against nuclear testing

US arms sales to India

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Dinshaw Mistry, Asia Studies Visiting Fellow at the East-West Center in Washington, explains that "New Delhi's defense procurements from the United States are worth a substantial $15 billion.

Aligning unevenly : India and the United States

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/In the early and mid-2000s, US policymakers anticipated India becoming one of America's top global partners. Have New Delhi's policies on key strategic issues actually aligned strongly with US objectives, as would be typical of close partners? An analysis of twelve prominent issues in US-India relations indicates that New Delhi's policies mostly converged moderately, rather than to a high extent, with US objectives. Specifically, the alignment between New Delhi's policies and US objectives was high or moderate-to-high on three issues—UN peacekeeping, nonproliferation export controls, and arms sales. It was moderate or low-to-moderate on six issues—China, Iran, Afghanistan, Indian Ocean security, Pakistan, and bilateral defense cooperation. And it was low or negligible on three issues—nuclear reactor contracts for US firms, nuclear arms control, and the war in Iraq. To be sure, despite the low or negligible convergence, New Delhi did not take an anti-US position on these issues. Four factors explain why New Delhi's policies aligned unevenly with US objectives across the issues: India's strategic interests (that diverged from US interests on some issues); domestic political and economic barriers (that prevented greater convergence between India's policies and US objectives); incentives and disincentives (that induced New Delhi to better align with US objectives); and certain case-specific factors. This analysis suggests that, rather than expecting India to become a close ally, US policymakers should consider it a friendly strategic partner whose policies would align, on the average, moderately with US strategic interests

Negotiating multilateral instruments against missile proliferation

The absence of a major multilateral treaty banning missiles is explained by the limited scope of the two main instruments against missile proliferation – the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and the Hague Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC). In the MTCR's case, limiting the scope to supply-side technology controls facilitated progress during its negotiations. In the Hague Code, limiting the scope to transparency, and keeping out additional items such as incentives to renounce ballistic missiles and the topic of cruise missiles, made negotiations easier. The trade-off from a limited scope in both instruments is that there is still no significant worldwide treaty banning missiles

Reassessing Nuclear South Asia

It has been twelve years since the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. Sufficient time has passed to draw some conclusions about the meaning, motivations, and implications of those events. This issue begins with an article which sets the stage for the tests, providing a retrospective on the political climate at the time and the steps each country took toward nuclear weapons development. The issue proceeds with topics focusing on nuclear doctrine, security of the weapons themselves, the implications of the U.S.-India nuclear agreement, and the options for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). A timeline of events in South Asia up to August 2009 completes the publication.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe