It is not an “international crime” to engage in nuclear weapon proliferation and there is no binding international requirement to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency of all transfers of equipment vital to producing fissile materials and nuclear weapons, according to one of America’s leading nuclear experts. George Perkovich, director of the non-proliferation programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s operations were detected well before news of them broke in 2002. “And most of the network’s key technology suppliers and middlemen were Europeans whose activities were well known to their governments. More than technological determinism, the problem was political-legal laxity,” he points out in a short study titles ‘Democratic bomb: failed strategy.’Perkovich writes, “Since the mid-1960s, the United States has not sought to pressure or cajole Israel to give up its nuclear weapon capabilities. Israel’s discretion is not demonstrating that it has nuclear weapons has facilitated Washington’s tacit support; the fact that it is a democratic friend makes it worthy of a double standard. The Bush administration extends the logic of US treatment of Israel into a strategic principle. India is the first explicit application of the strategy.”
He points out that the Indo-US nuclear cooperation treaty “abandoned a long-standing international approach to non-proliferation that prohibited nuclear cooperation with any states that do not apply international safeguards on all of their nuclear facilities. He quotes US under secretary of state Nicholas Burns, who said, “If people are bothered by double standards in the world, they happen all the time. We treat law-abiding democratic countries that are friends of ours differently than law-breaking authoritarian governments.”