China is moving ahead with a deal to export nuclear reactors to Pakistan despite grave misgivings in the West, in a sign it too can shape the rules of global nuclear trade after the United States forced a waiver for India. By winking at India's nuclear weapons program and opening up exports of nuclear fuel and material to the rising Asian power, the United States had created an opening for China and Pakistan to pursue similar cooperation, despite the risk of proliferation, analysts said. Under the 2008 deal, the United States lifted a 35-year embargo on nuclear trade with India and then leaned on the 46-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that lays the rules for peaceful use of nuclear exports, to grant an exemption so that a $150 billion market opened up. China too is hoping to help meet the energy needs of its ally Pakistan which was denied a similar deal by the United States on the grounds that it had to improve its nuclear proliferation record first. This week, as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao travels to India first and then Pakistan, where he is expected to affirm strategic ties, the race to expand nuclear energy programs in South Asia has added another layer of instability in a troubled region. While the collaboration is meant to boost nuclear energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuel for the growing economies of India and Pakistan, analysts say the deals indirectly help both nations' weapons programs by freeing up domestic reserves of uranium which are not under international inspections. “The Chinese are proceeding with the export of the reactors, but they want to be prudent about it. They might want to look for some kind of support for it,” said Mark Hibbs, an expert on South Asian nuclear issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. China plans to build two new reactors at Pakistan's Chashma complex in addition to the one already operating there and another nearing completion. China says it is supplying the reactors to Pakistan under a 2003 bilateral agreement that it signed a year before it joined the NSG, and that its cooperation with Pakistan is purely for peaceful purposes. “China and Pakistan will further develop their nuclear energy cooperation, and this is restricted to the civilian nuclear sphere, and conforms to the international duties assumed by both countries,” Liang Wentao, a deputy director general at the Ministry of Commerce, told reporters ahead of Wen's trip. “It is entirely for peaceful purposes, and comes under the safeguards and oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
