having said that.. why do you all so surprised to see India's resistance to this deal? what do you expect India's response to be? Didnt Pakistan object to the India-US deal before? Didnt China try it's best till the last moment to wreck the deal? now it's India's turn to reciprocate..
I appreciate your honesty re India's knee jerk opposition. But you are incorrect re Pakistan's objections... Pakistan didn't object to the US-India deal. It objected to discrimination. We are very happy India has the deal. No one should stand in our way either. Discriminating against countries and preventing access to technology - specially technology of such monumental importance - is a colonial, exploitative practice and we thought India, of all countries, would understand this and take a principled position on this issue. However, that, we have come to discover, is not to be and India cannot get beyond its petty Pakistan-centricism.
leaving aside all these opposition.. it would also be a ploy for pak to extract some thing more from the US to get out of this nuclear deal ..and i have to accept that pakistan plays this game very well to it's advantage... and this only time will tell..
I have a feeling you are right and Pakistan and China will move forward with this deal.
and you should keep this in mind that this deal is not only a civilian nuclear deal but it will also have ripple effect in the military field too.. and thats what making pakistan to go all out for "this" kind of energy deal for it's energy problems ..even though it has huge coal reserves and with negligible coal fired thermal energy plants...
I have answered this earlier. Our thirst for energy is tremendous and we can't just rely on unclean sources of energy such as coal. China is busy shutting down coal based power plants in massive numbers. If I am not mistaken, in 2008, they shut down more than 10GWh of coal fired capacity. We will continue to use coal from Thar and develop new plants there (two or three in the works as we speak) but nuclear power is essential for us.
As for military uses, please realize that these particular plants really don't change the military equation much. Khushab, which is almost exclusively for military purposes and is a key component of the Plutonium program, is already up and running - without much international ado - and is a reality on the ground.
So making the nuclear weapons argument in the case of these power plants is indefensible.
at the end it's all geo politics.. India would have surprised if Pak and China didnt oppose it's deal and Pak would be surprised if India doesnt oppose this deal..
But Pakistan never asked the Americans to deny this tech to India. We said these exchanges should happen on a level playing field and we should not be excluded. Contrary to the views you are expressing here, we really don't care how much nuclear technology you acquire. We both have enough nuclear weapons to flatten each other, so what does it matter now? Now the issue is civilian technology and India should have not played into the discriminatory, exploitative colonial mindset.