The India Deal: A 10 Year Assessment - 2015 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference

From its announcement in 2005 to today, the U.S.-India civil nuclear deal has been controversial. Proponents of the deal argued that it would allow both states to forge a strategic partnership; that it would facilitate an expansion of nuclear energy in India; and that it would bring India into the nonproliferation “mainstream.” Opponents argued that the structure of U.S and Indian interests are sufficiently divergent that a strategic partnership would prove impossible; that India would not be able to adopt nuclear power on the scale described by the deal’s advocates; and that it would undermine the nonproliferation regime by institutionalizing a double standard, when NPT universality had long been a consensus objective. A decade after the fact, how should we assess the impact of the deal?