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India in ITER: all-round support helped

R. Ramachandran

To give the entire credit to the U.S. for India's inclusion in the prestigious project is misplaced.

FOLLOWING INDIA'S admission on December 6 as the seventh member into the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, U.S. officials — and some Indian media commentators — have been all too quick to say that the U.S. has delivered on one of its promises in the July 18 Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. It is, of course, true that the U.S. support was necessary for India's entry as India's bid could have been easily torpedoed by the U.S. by voting against the proposal at the ITER negotiations in Jeju, South Korea. But so was the support of each of the other five partners to the project — the European Union, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea — because decisions at ITER Negotiations are by consensus.

There are no proliferation concerns in pure fusion research such as ITER, and so India's admission should not have posed any problem in principle. From this perspective, while it is moot how much the U.S. stance influenced the others in extending support, it is important to put matters in the correct perspective before India's ITER membership is hailed all around as a major achievement of the Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement.

Firstly, it needs to be pointed out that the U.S. has not been a permanent member of the ITER project and its commitment to the project continues to be in doubt. The U.S.' itinerant position has been dictated by its domestic politics of funding its own department of energy's fusion project. It pulled out of ITER in 1998 and rejoined in February 2003 but the internal demand to pull out of ITER continues. It is the EU, which has been at the vanguard of ITER, that initiated the process of including India as a partner. Following an indication from David King, the British Science Advisor, during his visit to India in March 2004, the issue of India joining ITER was mooted in the joint statement at the Indo-EU Summit of November 2004. In fact, an EU delegation too had visited the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) of the Department of Atomic Energy in Ahmedabad, where there is an ongoing indigenous nuclear fusion research, in November 2004 to get an idea of the Indian programme.

ITER formed an element of the July 18 agreement mainly to ensure that U.S. would not oppose India's application to join the consortium, which had already been made 10 days before (on July 8) through a letter from Anil Kakodkar, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, to Achilleas Mitsos, the director-general (Research) of the EU.

One could, of course, ask why nothing happened between November 2004 and July, and things seem to have moved rapidly since. An important reason was the resolution of the continued wrangling amongst ITER members on the location of the ITER reactor, with Cadarache in France and Rokkashomura in Japan being the two contending sites. The former was backed by the EU, Russia and China and the latter by the U.S., Japan, and Korea.

According to sources in the ITER Negotiations Committee, the U.S. was opposed to admitting India and Brazil — which too has expressed its interest informally to the EU — fearing that the vote on the site may then tilt favourably towards Cadarache. The U.S. was keen to give the ITER site to Japan in return for Japan's support to locating the Linear Collider, an international high-energy particle accelerator project, on U.S. soil. The U.S. lost out on this too to Europe.

With the final choice of Cadarache on June 28, following a compromise formula (in terms of the respective shares of industrial contribution to ITER) worked out between France and Japan, it became clear (or it was made clear) to the EU that the U.S. will no longer be a hurdle and the July 8 letter from India to the EU followed. Indeed, according to EU sources, admission of Brazil as an associate member of ITER (because it can commit to only around five per cent of the total cost) is now very much on the cards.

While the explicit statement of U.S. support to India's participation in ITER in the Indo-US agreement may have had the important effect of the ITER Committee arriving at the decision quickly, to give the entire credit to the U.S. is misplaced. A whole lot of groundwork that had been done both by India and the EU well before July 18 made this possible.

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