World Watch

Manmohan Singh enjoyed an early Indian summer during a state visit to Washington last week, winning plaudits and an extraordinary agreement for the US to supply his country with civilian nuclear technology - while ignoring its military efforts. No wonder the prime minister was feted back home in Delhi for achieving a "historic breakthrough" - and one that has implications for far more than India's massive energy needs.

India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, like Pakistan and Israel outside the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), before it publicly crossed the "threshold" in 1998. Now the world's largest democracy has reaped the rewards of its rapidly warming relationship with the world's most powerful one. It's a far cry from the cold war decades of Nehru, close links with Moscow and leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement. But George Bush's nuclear "exception" - yet to be approved by Congress - comes at the cost of a potentially grave blow to global proliferation controls.

The bomb and bombast have always gone together in India, where nuclear ambitions are linked to the legitimacy of the independent nation state. The rightwing BJP government won praise for flaunting its "megatons of prestige" when it resumed testing seven years ago. India has, in fairness, behaved more responsibly than Pakistan, where the government scientist AQ Khan helped North Korea, Iran and Libya with their designs for nuclear weapons. It renounces the first use of a weapon whose declared purpose is "credible deterrence".

Since September 2001 both countries have been wooed by Washington: Pakistan for its help with Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (though the London bombings and the failure to curb extremist madrasas have tarnished a patchy record). India is seen increasingly as a counterweight to China. Both are being offered advanced US military hardware.

US sanctions imposed over the 1998 test were lifted after 9/11, but the new agreement will allow India to obtain nuclear fuel and advanced reactors from the US and other suppliers, including uranium for those reactors it places under international safeguards - crucially while keeping military activities separate, and secret. Bush described India, which had long complained about "nuclear apartheid", as "a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology", cynically stopping short of calling it a "nuclear weapons state" - which it evidently is.

Bush may be right to want to please Singh, but it is a mistake to give higher priority to curbing Chinese hegemony than to bolstering non-proliferation. It would have been better to have backed India's long-standing and justified bid for permanent membership of a reformed UN security council, where it has a stronger case than Japan.

The American move proves the familiar point that unless you act multilaterally, you will face problems on many fronts. The US has already weakened the NPT by failing to meet its obligation to gradually disarm. And proliferation is a seamless web: France, Russia and China may make up their rules or their own definition of "responsibility" to justify selling uranium and technology to Iran, Pakistan or Syria. Such a selective, unilateral approach is unlikely to encourage other would-be proliferators to abide by the NPT and give up weapons in exchange for civilian technology, as Brazil and South Africa have done.

In the short-term, the US-India deal will make it harder to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear card. It is also likely to influence Iran, resuming what promises to be difficult negotiations with the EU next week - insisting it has a right to civilian nuclear power while glossing over past cheating. Singh's Washington agreement represents the triumph of power politics over the cause of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons - another example of the massive collateral damage caused by the exigencies of the war on terror.