India and the NSG Membership: What Lies Ahead

In the pre-2005 period, the Indian government as well as most Indian analysts had approached the four export control regimes – the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Wassenaar Arrangement (WA) and the Australia group (AG) – with suspicion. Such an approach was not unnatural considering the fact that the first two, namely the NSG and the MTCR, had actively worked against Indian interests. The NSG denied fuel for the Tarapur Atomic Power station (TAPS) while the United States used MTCR provisions to prevent the transfer of cryogenic engine technology – a purely civilian space technology – by Russia to India thereby setting back the Indian space programme by more than a decade.

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