ABSTRACT
On 18 July 2005, in a joint statement with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President George W. Bush announced that he would ‘work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India.’1 While the joint statement elicited a widespread and tumultuous reaction in both the domestic and international media, the statement, in and of itself, contained very little substance. Under existing US law set forth by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (P.L. 95-242; 42 U.S.C. § 2153 et seq.) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, the President lacked the authority to sanction nuclear fuel exports of the sort implicitly promised in his joint statement with the Prime Minister. Sections 123 and 128 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act (NNPA) laid out a requirement for full-scope safeguards in order that the United States could proceed with signifi cant nuclear exports to a non-nuclear weapons state — safeguards that India neither had nor had promised to impose. Furthermore, Section 129 of the NNPA forbade the US government from exporting nuclear fuel to any country that had detonated a nuclear weapon after 1978, a criteria that India also failed.
