President Bush’s announcement of a cooperative agreement with India on nuclear power generation technology should have come as no surprise. As early as 2001 the Bush Administration was looking at ways of expanding the American relationship with India. The 2004 India-U.S. Next Step initiative suggested a ‘presumption of approval’ for American dual use nuclear equipment exports to India, and that policy is essentially what the Bush Administration’s agreement with India attempts to accomplish.

However, the Administration’s initiative is not legal under current American law, and poses a significant danger of collapsing the core obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) – the central source of authority for global non-proliferation, and the very treaty under which the Administration currently seeks to refer Iran to the Security Council. In order for the Administration to open India to American exports of nuclear technology, the Congress will have to pass a concurrent resolution waiving several provisions of the Atomic Energy Act. (for details Download CRS Report).

There are significant reasons why Congress should not do so. The most salient being the damage it would do international reliance on core commitments of the NNPT, and the resulting encouragement of nuclear proliferation and regional escalation, especially in Asia.

Political science professors Poole and Rosenthal analyze the political behavior of Congress over time using Roll Call votes to determine the relative position of representatives on a basic liberal-moderate-conservative scale. The results of the their study confirm what many would intuit; that American politics is becoming increasingly polarized, and the views of elected officials have become more extreme.

The data sorts officials by a single score reflecting their voting patterns. The lower a score, the more liberal the official; the higher, the more conservative. This ranking separates the parties with perfect accuracy, except for a few outliers who persist in marginally hostile districts. For Arizona in the 109th Congress, the data shows that several of Arizona’s representative are among the most extremely conservative in the nation – I would contend far more conservative than the mainstream of even the Republican electorate. The Arizona Delegation is ranked here, with #1 being the most liberal member of the House, and #435 being the most conservative.