192. Memorandum From Gerald Oplinger of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski)1
SUBJECT
- Soviet Heavy Water to India (S)
According to a recent TD,2 the Soviet sale of an additional 250 tons of heavy water to India will bring an unexpected improvement in the Indian safeguards situation. It appears that some of this heavy water is to be used in the Indian-built and previously unsafeguarded Madras (MAPP–I) reactor, and the Soviets are requiring as part of the deal that this reactor and any fuel irradiated in it will have to come under international safeguards. (S)
The Soviets had a lot of leverage since without the Soviet heavy water two major power reactors might have been delayed for years. Two Indian reactors might not have been safeguarded, and the Madras reactor almost certainly would not have been, except for the Soviet deal. (S)
This is progress, of a sort, but there is an opposite side to the coin. India’s indigenous heavy water production can now be used—without cost to its nuclear power program—for the R5, a large Indian built research reactor which will produce gobs of weapons-grade plutonium, and would be the backbone of any serious Indian weapons program. This is the trouble with an incremental safeguards approach (which we tried earlier without success); safeguards on three power reactors are now insured, but at the cost of making life somewhat easier for Indian bomb builders. (S)