Although it is nearly two years since the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement between President George Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced their intention to facilitate civil nuclear commerce between India and the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the process is still to be completed with even the first step towards that goal, an Indo-US agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation, still under negotiations with apparently strong differences between the two countries on a number of issues. Expectations are that the agreement may be finalised by the end of this year.

From all accounts it appears that the much talked about India-US nuclear deal is slowly but surely unravelling. This should not come as a surprise. Right from the beginning when the US secretary of State declared her country's intention to help India become a major power, we should have become alert since it is not very often that one major or superpower will help another to become a possible contender in the future. There were many other indications as well in terms of opposition to the deal. The US non-proliferation lobby vehemently opposed it.

With the passage of a year since the visit of President George W. Bush to India, it is the business communities of the two countries that have benefited the most from the momentum created by the upsurge in Indo-US relations. While two-way trade and investment had been growing at a steady clip, the announcement and subsequent passage of the Bill on Co-operation in Civil Nuclear Energy, intended to remove the last vestiges of the adversarial relations between the two countries, have taken business relations to a new level.

On February 5, 2007, President Bush presented his administration's budget for fiscal year 2008 (October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008). Out of a total budgetary allocation of US $2.9 trillion for all sectors, $623 billion (21 per cent) was earmarked for defence purposes, including those for war efforts in various parts of the world. With the new budget, America's military budget has doubled since Bush took office in 2000 and is now higher in real terms than any other year in the last half-century.

Earlier speculations negating the possibility of one-on-one talks between the United States and North Korea after Pyongyang conducted a nuclear test have proven wrong. Irrespective of the merits or the disappointments attached to the process, the negotiations that started between US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan in Berlin on January 16-18, 2007 made it possible for them to find common ground at the six-part talks held in Beijing on February 13, 2007.

With President Bush signing the India-US nuclear co-operation bill into law, critics and supporters of the bill have once again reinforced their stated positions over the future benefits and losses accruing to both countries as well as the world at large. While supporters have left no stone unturned in emphasising upon the strategic, bilateral and political importance of the bill, critics have flatly described it as an 'historical mistake' which will hound efforts to curb nuclear proliferation in years to come.

Among the foremost security concerns of the US after 9/11 is the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) by terrorists on its territory and their proliferation through inimical states. The global stretch of the predominantly maritime threat and the 'overstretch' of the US Navy have led to the initiation of a series of American initiatives like Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), Container Security Initiative (CSI) and Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI), all aimed at mobilizing global support to secure the US 'homeland'.

The speed and relative ease with which the Indo-US nuclear deal raced through the respective committees of Congress and the margin by which it was assented to by the House of Representatives on 27 July, scarcely four months after it was introduced in Congress, created the expectation that the same scenario would play out in the Senate. These hopes have been belied by the failure of the Senate to pass the Bill before it recessed for the mid-term elections.