View Point: The Nuclear deal
India has an ambitious plan, the vision 2020, to become one of the most developed and advanced countries of the world. For achievement of Vision 2020, India needs to have development at the rate of 10pc. The country will need a large quantum of energy to run its enormous infrastructures. The present conventional source of energy from the fossil fuel is insufficient to fulfil the future demand of the country. The deposits of the fossil fuel are limited, that too would be consumed in the next 50 years. The fissile element uranium would only be the future source of energy. Uranium is a radioactive fissile element which was named after the planet Uranus by its discoverer Klaproth in the year 1789. In the year 1901, Sir Thomas Holland reported the presence of uranium in Gaya dist and Singhbhumi in Bihar. Unfortunately India has very little deposit of uranium. Nevertheless there is a huge deposit of thorium in Travancore in the seacoast of Kerala. At present thorium cannot be used as nuclear fuel as it requires some scientific processing, hectic researches are going on by the scientists but no dependable method to use thorium has been evolved up till now. It will take many years to develop some process to use thorium as an atomic fuel. But, sooner or later, thorium will become missile element like uranium. India requires uranium and the latest advanced technology in nuclear science which only the US and other advanced countries of the nuclear club can provide. America, on the other hand, has its own post-cold war global foreign policy in which India stands as its natural allay in their assessment. India is going to be the global player in the world economy, next after China and the US. China has a plan to surpass the US in future economic and political scenario and posing a threat to the unipolar status of the super power America. The future nuclear fuel demand of India and the future foreign policy of the US has made the nuclear deal imperative for both big democracies of the world. In this process India and US signed 123 agreement which is a part of the nuclear deal. India needs to have a safeguard agreement with the nuclear watchdog - the IAEA on specific safeguards which is very essential because of the sensibility of the n-deal in order to prevent nuke proliferation. RK Gupta