Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard argued in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday it was now time for her Labour Party to clear the sale of uranium to India. She followed this with the same message at a press conference later. Canberra’s changing mood will be widely welcomed in this country, except perhaps by some anti-nuclear hawks, but it’s yet to be seen if Ms Gillard can carry her party with her at Labour’s annual conference next month.
She clearly has work ahead: Labour’s moralistic posturing, in line with similar Western viewpoints endorsing building nuclear weapon stockpiles but refusing to allow other democratic societies to use the atom even for peaceful purposes has long irked this country. We refused to sign the discriminatory Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and were punished for decades by the United States and its allies through denial of technologies.
The West’s approach to India changed after a tormented debate in America, after which Washington signed the civil nuclear agreement with India though it was not an NPT signatory, and also had a weapons programme to defend itself in what Henry Kissinger once said was the world’s “most dangerous neighbourhood”. Other major Western powers since made their adjustments, falling in line with Washington’s position, though debate still persists in some. In Australia, it’s yet to be seen if the Greens, in a coalition with Ms Gillard’s Labour, will back her stand on selling uranium to India. The earlier Conservative government under John Howard had allowed uranium exports to India, but this was overturned by Labour’s theological approach to nuclear matters.
This line appears to be changing now. If Australia insists that the uranium it sells to us must be used as fuel only in reactors producing electricity, that’s fair enough. It has a similar condition for China, to which it sells reactor fuel. India is desperately short of uranium. Domestic supplies are woefully inadequate for our ambitious power projects. The country is scouting for uranium supplies in all directions, including Central Asia and Africa. Australia is the biggest owner of economically exploitable uranium and the element’s third largest exporter. It is thus in India’s interest to establish terms with it on a sound footing. This does not mean, of course, that we should join some West-inspired missile shield project in the region aimed at targeting a third country like China, but there’s no harm in cooperation on Indian Ocean security.