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In 1946 the newsreel version of the world was still captivated by the “awe-inspiring cloud” from atomic weapons. By 1950 though, with nuclear know-how spreading to other countries, some were trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, weapons of mass destruction, and the threat of dirty radiological bombs have resulted in widespread fear of all things nuclear…. Justified or not, these realities fuse the threats not only associated with nuclear weapons but nuclear energy as well.

Even before news anchors learned to pronounce the word Chernobyl, it was apparent that the Ukrainian city would become synonymous with the worst nuclear accident the world has yet seen. Back in April 1986, of course, no one was predicting that the Soviet Union would—within 5 1/2 years—fall apart. When it did, the United States moved quickly to help safeguard nuclear materials on Ukrainian soil—partly because of the scare caused by the meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

Today efforts are still under way to ensure that the enormous formerly Soviet stockpile of nuclear materials does not fall into the hands of terrorists. But elsewhere in the world, the Bush administration has been seeking to expand the abilities of some US allies to operate in the nuclear sphere, not contain them.

Uranium Mined in India

India has mined uranium since the 1960s. But the country’s rapid population growth and economic rise has left the country in desperate need of energy. Currently, only three percent of India’s power is supplied by the nuclear industry.

Ramendra Gupta, head of the Uranium Corporation of India, would like to see that figure rise sevenfold.

“If we want to sustain plus 8 percent growth, we need more power,” says Gupta, who ran India’s deepest gold mine before moving to the uranimum industry because of its “growth potential.”

“And to have enough power, nuclear power is a good alternative,” he says. “Because at present we are not having enough fossil fuel in India. And most of the fossil fuel that is being imported, it is coming from areas that are not very politically stable.”

Bush Favors India Nuclear Deal

That is an argument the Bush administration buys, and the president himself has enthusiastically proposed a new deal between Washington and New Delhi that will permit India to expand its civil nuclear program to meet its energy needs.

“India is now the world’s fifth-largest consumer of energy, and its demand for electricity is expected to double by 2015,” the president said in a recent speech. “The United States has a clear interest in helping India meet this demand with nuclear energy.”

The pride of India’s nuclear industry can be found just outside Mumbai, the commercial capital in the south of the country that used to be called Bombay. The Tarapur Atomic Power Project is the largest nuclear reactor site in the country—there are two pressurized heavy water reactors here, vast bulbous structures that buzz with the kind of quiet hum associated with the world’s most modern nuclear facilities.

Anil Kakodkar is the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission. As the highest-ranking nuclear official in the country, he oversees the industry including the Tarapur site.

He’s a firm believer that as the world’s largest democracy, India not only needs a nuclear program, but can be trusted with one as well.

“If you look at India’s track record, India has always behaved in a responsible manner. If you look at India’s nonproliferation record, you will find our record is impeccable,” he said.

“We have controlled all these technologies extremely well. So in fact I would not hesitate saying that India’s track record is better than some, shall I say, NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) states.”

Nonproliferation Treaty Not Honored

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which India is not a signatory, goes to the very heart of the concerns expressed by critics about the proposed US-India deal.

India is one of only four countries not to honor the treaty—Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea are the other three. Despite that, the proposed agreement with Washington will give India a chance to enjoy many of the benefits previously reserved for countries that have signed the treaty. Worse still, say the critics, India will be allowed to continue developing its military nuclear program.

India’s decision to test three nuclear devices in 1998—an event heralded at the time by proud coverage on Indian television—was roundly condemned by the United States and its allies.

No country that has signed the NPT has been permitted to cooperate with India’s nuclear program, nor has India been allowed to import supplies of uranium. But the deal with Washington will change all that.

Praful Bidwai, a former editor of The Times of India and an advocate of nuclear disarmament, argues the US-India deal will not enhance global security, but threaten it.

“Our calculations show that India could divert enough additional uranium to weapons to the point of making something like 24 to 40 bombs a year, which is a very, very large arsenal—in a period of ten years you’re talking about 300 to 400 nuclear bombs,” Bidwai said.

“It’s absurd. It’s going to lead to an arms race, a nuclear arms race not just with Pakistan but with China, and that is going to degrade security in the region, is going to create instability in the region…and drain our budget of the resources that we need to fight poverty and give food and water to the people.”

Professor P. R. Chari with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi argues that the proposed deal with Washington—which is still under negotiation and subject to congressional approval—would lift virtually all the sanctions India has faced, without seeking any of the NPT’s commitments in return.

“I don’t think India could ever have had it so good,” Chari says.

“This particular Indo-US nuclear deal, it really drives a horse and carriage through the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It makes it meaningless. I mean any other country, especially the 180 or so that have signed and have accepted its prohibitions and its qualifications, could very well ask their own question: Well, why don’t we go ahead and explode a nuclear device? If an exception can be made for India, why not for us?”

Mines Heavily Guarded

Because, say Indian officials, they’re at the helm of a burgeoning democracy that is poised to become a regional economic superpower—and the country’s uranium mines are heavily guarded by Indian soldiers around the clock.

Ramdenra Gupta, head of the Uranium Corporation of India, says he is certain there is no risk that India’s nuclear materials could ever fall into the hands of terrorists

“I am very sure we have the necessary security arrangements as well as the safeguards in place. So I am very sure none of these things are going to happen. Up to now it’s not happened, so it’s not going to happen in future also.”

But just five miles away from the Jaduguda mine, located in a picturesque region 900 miles southeast of Delhi, recent events suggested all that security at Jaduguda might be prudent.

During a reporter’s visit to the area, the local member of Parliament was assassinated by Maoist insurgents who are operating increasingly boldly in the region.

As his body emerged from the local morgue, throngs of people vowed to avenge his death. Many of them took to the streets with makeshift weapons. And as the cortege, garlanded with marigolds, carried him through the streets, tens of thousands of people lined the route to pay their last respects to a seemingly popular local political figure.

The Maoist insurgents—called the Naxalites—are waging an armed struggle against India’s rapid capitalist transformation. This attack was considered their boldest move yet. There is no suggestion that they have made any attempt to target India’s strategic nuclear sites, but the very presence of armed militants so close to the Jaduguda mine underscores the need for watertight security measures to keep India’s nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands.

Dismantling in Ukraine

The Bush administration’s decision to offer India a deal represents—at the very least—a shift in nonproliferation strategy. In other parts of the world, the US focus previously sought to eradicate nuclear weapons, and safeguard nuclear materials designed for peaceful purposes.

Three thousand miles from Delhi, in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, there is evidence of that approach at the Paton Electric Welding Institute. Originally built to serve the Soviet military, engineers at the plant are now finding commercial customers for their services.

“Well, it is to change swords into ploughshares. That’s certainly a good way to put it,” says US State Department contractor Victor Korsun, deputy executive director of the Science and Technology Center of Ukraine. The center is jointly funded by the United States, the European Union, and Canada and it oversees the conversion of plants like the Paton Institute.

“The mission here is to work with former weapons scientists to redirect their skills into peaceful applications,” Korsun says. “The various countries—US, Europe, Canada—wanted to make sure that the scientists that used to work on nuclear, chemical, biological weaponry didn’t leave the country and go off to work for rogue states around the world.”

It wasn’t only the fate of Soviet scientists that worried Western governments when the USSR collapsed. Nuclear warheads themselves were dismantled—enormous chainsaws were taken to Soviet weaponry that had been scattered throughout Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. The US government encouraged—and paid for—the removal of all Soviet nuclear weapons based on Ukrainian soil. And a legislative initiative, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, has over the last 15 years made enormous progress safeguarding nuclear sites across the former Soviet Union in a bid to ensure their materials don’t fall into the hands of terrorists.

Improving Nuclear Safety

“The technical assistance which we received from the United States was important at that time for our national efforts towards improving nuclear safety,” says Nikita Konstantinov, the first vice president of Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy utility.

He points to sites like the Kiev Institute for Nuclear Research, which houses one of the country’s reactors. Here, Nunn-Lugar funds were spent improving security, installing perimeter fences, training guards, and trying to ensure that the nuclear materials on the site are held under the strictest possible conditions.

“Before Soviet times, we practically don’t have simulators, and believe me simulators for nuclear reactors is a big device,” Konstanitinov says. “It’s actually a facility that includes very big software and hardware components. Thanks to the United States, now all our nuclear power plants are equipped with modern simulators provided in the framework of United States’ assistance.”

On the streets of Kiev it’s apparent that the US investment not only helped achieve a geopolitical security goal, it also won friends among Ukrainians.

“I personally think we’re safer without nuclear weapons,” says a Kiev resident named Alexander. “Because some catastrophe or explosion could have happened. And what’s the use of them anyway. Doesn’t make any sense. Where can you use them? But their very presence brings about danger.”

Says another resident, “I think any nuclear power in the world is not safe, because it takes one second to destroy everything if we abuse it.”

Production Continues in India

Back on the traffic-clogged streets of Delhi, there is some confusion about US proliferation policy. The country that worked so hard to get so many Soviet nuclear weapons destroyed is seen here as becoming complicit in India’s desire to acquire more nuclear bombs. P. R. Chari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies argues the United States is guilty of double standards that will only cause Washington more difficulty.

“There the United States took the point of view that it wanted to reduce the number of countries which had possession of nuclear weapons,” he said.

“But in the case of India, what one finds is that the United States has no problem with the extension of the number of countries which has nuclear weapons. So there is a certain inconsistency in this…when the US wishes now to make a distinction between India and North Korea and Iran, there are difficulties.”

At the uranium mine in Jaduguda, production continues around the clock. And India has plans to open two more uranium mines within the next five years. Officials here say whether the US-India nuclear deal goes ahead or not, the domestic nuclear industry will continue to thrive, keeping the lights on all over India, but also building India’s nuclear arsenal.

Two Key Senators Disagree

The two luminaries in the field of nonproliferation disagree with each other about the proposed US nuclear deal with India.

Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana—who along with former US Senator Sam Nunn 15 years ago created the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to eradicate the threat posed by the Soviet nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons stockpiles—is backing his president.

“I see no evidence that the Indians are eager for an arms race, or are really avidly building more weapons,” Lugar says. “They would claim they are in a dangerous neighborhood, that Russia has nuclear weapons, the Chinese have demonstrated nuclear weapons, their neighbors in Pakistan have at least a fledgling program, maybe more. And they would say to us you have to understand that that’s the predicament we’re in.”

Nunn, retired from the US Senate, sees things differently and calls the deal a missed opportunity.

“We didn’t in my view bargain nearly hard enough,” he said. “I think it was a great opportunity to say to the Indians, ‘OK, we know we need to be partners, you know we need to be partners, let’s be partners, but let’s do it in a way that is conducive to reducing the dangers of nuclear and catastrophic terrorism.’ That would have meant having a deal that said to India cut off your production of weapons-grade fissile material, and we’ll do the same thing. Don’t keep making the very materials that we are trying desperately to secure all over the world. But that wasn’t part of the deal.”

Nunn worries that having said India CAN develop its civil and military nuclear programs, it will be tough to tell other nations they can’t.

“Well, it’s very difficult to have the United States in a position where we pick out those that we think are good guys, and say, ‘OK good guys get to do all this, and the bad guys don’t,’ ” he said. “But to most of the world that smacks of high-level superpower hypocrisy, and I think that is the problem with the India deal. I think it makes our job in encouraging other nations to help us prevent proliferation much more difficult.”

Lugar takes a more pragmatic view, arguing that collective security is better served by seizing chances that arise—like a strong alliance with an emerging India. And he rejects the notion that the United States projects contradictory policies often based on fear.

“I wouldn’t characterize our foreign policy as essentially based on fear,” he says. “I see it much more based on opportunity, on all these possible challenges that are out there. But likewise, optimism, that we will be able to work, sometimes incrementally, sometimes more dramatically, through many of these challenges towards some significant advances.”

This material is part of the public radio documentary "Beyond Fear: America's Role in an Uncertain World" from the Stanley Foundation in association with KQED Public Radio. The program is produced by Simon Marks, Kristin McHugh, Keith Porter, and hosted by David Brancaccio. All material related to "Beyond Fear" can be found here.