"Rejecting the nuclear deal would do a lot more damage to the bilateral relationship than would have been done had the deal not been made in the first place," said Michael A. Levi, coauthor of a recent report from the Center on Foreign Relations that recommends a strategy for negotiations on nuclear cooperation with India. He noted that the deal is a major issue in India, whereas here it has fallen off the radar.

"There is a strong residual anti-American sentiment in India going back to the Cold War," Walter Anderson, associate director of the South Asia Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, told United Press International. "There's a sense you can't really trust the United States."

A good relationship with India, a secular state that contains the world's second-largest Muslim population and rests next door to a rising China, could be an asset for the United States.

"Neither the U.S. or India wants this to appear as an anti-Chinese measure," Anderson said, but "both know that a multi-polar Asia is better for gaining stability."

Now is the opportune moment to "work out a closer relationship with the country that's the rising power in the Indian Ocean area," Anderson said. "That's an important area because it's through the India Ocean that goes most of the world's oil and gas."

While the deal is flawed, Levi and coauthor Charles D. Ferguson conclude in the CFR report that "patience and a few simple fixes would address major proliferation concerns while ultimately strengthening the strategic partnership."

For the promises to become policy, the United States and India must formalize the deal, Congress must amend U.S. law, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an international cartel that controls most trade in nuclear technologies and of which the United States is a founding member, must alter their rules so America can engage in nuclear commerce with India.

"The problem is that once you get all this out in public it becomes a political football and then the pace is sort of forced," Justin Logan, a foreign policy analyst at the CATO Institute, told UPI.

As part of the deal, India has committed to a moratorium on nuclear tests, strong nuclear export controls, separation of civilian from military nuclear facilities and negotiation of a system of permanent inspections for civilian facilities with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which supports the deal.

Critics point out that India's promise not to test is contingent on other nations' commitments to the same principle, and that it is not required to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would legally bind it to a testing moratorium.

However, forcing India to sign the treaty would be hypocritical, the CFR report states, considering Congress rejected its ratification and even flirted with removing the United States' signature.

Additionally, the deal leaves eight of India's nuclear reactors unmonitored, since only the 14 reactors India designated as civilian will be open for inspection. India can also choose to designate future facilities as military, and thus closed to inspection.

Levi and Ferguson advocate an annual report on the labeling of additional Indian reactors so that abuses of the designation authority are made public and America will be more likely to correct misuse of that control.

India has remained steadfastly against a unilateral cap to its nuclear arsenal since the Clinton administration's efforts at a nuclear deal. The Bush administration proposed in May that India negotiate on a fissile material cutoff treaty.

India has proposed its own version of such a treaty, which includes terms that Levi and Ferguson applaud for the monitoring of nuclear sites that they say would lead to nuclear transparency in Asia.

Levi and Ferguson suggest that Congress expresses acceptance of the deal quickly, but waits to alter legislation until the NSG alters their rules, the IAEA creates an inspections arrangement and bottom-line requirements issued by Congress are met.

But Anderson says, "It's sequence - the U.S. really has to move first before they're going to move."

Opponents of the deal contend that the United States should have waited until a later date when it could have demanded more concessions from India.

The deal "was inevitable anyway because the relationship was unsustainable with the anomalous nuclear policy that we had towards India," Stephen Cohen, senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, told UPI.

India has a tremendous energy deficit, Cohen said, so while nuclear energy will help India satisfy its needs and keep costs from fluctuating, it will not lower the price of energy or solve India's energy problems.

"One of the tradeoffs of this deal is that it's absolutely going to be used by countries like Iran and North Korea to say that the United States is hypocritical," Logan said.

Yet Ferguson and Levi emphasized that India received nuclear cooperation only after a waiting period of 32 years from its first nuclear test, during which time the country displayed a commitment to largely responsible foreign policy, democratic government and just law.

"It's hard to have a one-size-fits-all nonproliferation approach," Ferguson said, arguing that India's punishment for testing should not be a life sentence.

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