Maybe the line shouldn't be drawn at rockets, but unless you think we should have free & open markets for nuclear weapons I daresay you think the line should be drawn somewhere.

There is also the issue of maintaining the capability domestically. If someone else is too cheap it would destroy the local capability. Imagine the US losing the ability to launch it's own satellites - like it lost the ability to launch people.

That said, there needs to be a way to make domestic launches competitive, so helping SpaceX or others while blocking foreign competition seem like a good idea all around. The goal should be to maintain domestic capability while hindering foreign nukes - not to maintain some company monopoly.

And in any case both of those are less sensitive technologies - a transport plane that other countries sell equivalents to, and a previous-generation fighter plane for which India is in any case the largest expected purchaser (the production lines in the US are being wound down, and the move to India would be part of a purchase by the IAF), and to etch the US has already approved sales.

We wouldn't sell India a Minuteman, so we're sure as hell not going to find their development of an equivalent.

We came pretty close to that brink after not bothering to invest in our own engine development. Makes the quarterly reports look great though.

The US has not remotely lost the ability to launch people in the context you're suggesting (lost knowledge, lost budget, lost political will). Its literally between launch systems. No knowledge or budget has been lost. On top of it, its doing what no other nation seems able to do, spark a space race between corporations with their own goals and cost-cutting measures. That's on top of NASA's incredible record of space science missions and robotic missions in the interim.

As far as the RD-180 issue goes, ULA buys those engines and re-packages them into domestic launch vehicles that create domestic jobs and keep the majority of the profits local. There's a big difference both practically and politically between this and having a foreign company launch your satellites. So India is not being treated that differently here.

That said, RD-180 purchasing is being phased out. The Delta IV is being retired and that only leaves the Atlas V, which I believe is no longer allowed to buy new engines since an earlier sale this year. That's on top of the Pentagon approving $162m to help fund the AR1 and BE-4 engines which will ultimately replace the RD-180 for the ULA.

NASA has failed at how many launch system projects since the Space Shuttle?

(Assuming you learn from your failures)

India is now part of MCTR (Missile Control Technology Regime) that limits ICBM development. So that's no longer a valid concern. Also, India has done well without the assistance of the US in space technology and will continue to do so. So if the US doesn't want to assist in technology, it's not going to be a show stopper for India. It will continue to eat at the small satellite launch business.

That's regime sounds like a great intent, but the simple fact is that taking a satellite launching rocket, replacing the satellite with a nuke, and aiming it back at the ground somewhere is trivial.

ICBMs use much more stable fuels so they can sit in a silo for years on end. This requires totally different engines and fuel tanks.

tldr: You can't just stick a nuke on top of a liquid fueled rocket and use it like an ICBM.

The point of MCTR is to prevent a nation from openly admitting they have such a weapon and hence it can not be used as an argument in any future negotiations.

1) Their no-first-use policy

2) Pakistan already having nuclear weapons

For example I never understood USA providing F16s to Pakistan. It is nothing but USA's attempts to escalate the tensions.

Trivial for a nation-state is different than trivial for a person. A nation like India could accidentally lose the amount of money required to hire a team of 20 to do the engineering to mount a working nuke to a working rocket.

Intentionally paying and assembling that same team would be trivial for a nation like India, USA, China or Russia. It could be as simple as a single line item on some military spending bill.

A treaty does provide a way for bureaucrats and ambassadors to meddle with, discuss and possibly prevent that attack in advance... if they know about it.

Mounting a working nuke to a working rocket can easily be done in secret by a small team.

Neither adhere to a no-first-use doctrine. That means that they reserve the right to scorch the world with nuclear fire, in response to an attack by conventional weapons.

It's hard to pin down exactly how disproportionate this level of hubris is.

But no... it must just be a double standard... if you squint hard enough.

The decades of arms reductions still put the arsenals of either the US, or Russia at ~10 times that of India and Pakistan combined.

At least India has a no-first-use policy. I'm not saying things are better in that conflict, but this is the pot calling the kettle black.

It does at least tell anyone with a scrap of skepticism though, where you're coming from. Equivocation is at the heart of apologism.

While the odds of nuclear conflict between them may be lower then the odds of one between India and Pakistan (And this is an arguable point), it will be incredibly more devastating.

As such, it's incredibly disingenuous to claim that New Delhi has it's thumb on the doomsday button, but that Moscow or Washington don't.

As for devastation, http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSciAmJan2010...

So much sensationalism in this comment! It's like watching a sensationalist news channel. Anyone who follows India-Pakistan politics know that nuclear war is unlikely. Neither of them can afford another war.

The "realistic" situation is that unless nuclear weapons end up in the hands of terrorists in Pakistan, there is no real nuclear threat.

India will build any technology that it needs given sufficient time and money. Time is not something that USA has anymore. It's global influence is only going go down with time.

At least in my opinion it makes lot more sense for USA to see India as a potential borrowed knife/insurance against China and help her have good defense capabilities as well as build strong economic ties across all possible avenues.

It appears that trade and economic exchange is a much more important factor to avoid full scale war than anything else.

If you can enrich uranium then you can build an ICBM - it takes a lot of good engineering talent and very expensive equipment for either project. Unless you can somehow get another state to sell you the necessary stuff... but I'd consider purchasing uranium enrichment centrifuges vs purchasing ICBMs to be similarly highly-sketchy endeavours (the ICBM more so, but only because it can be used more or less immediately).

http://spacenews.com/customers-of-indias-pslv-rocket-say-ind...

I think the idea that it's primarily a security concern is very misleading.

Protectionism can always, always be framed as a matter of national security.

So imagine that what you're trying to achieve is this:

Allow companies that want to use rockets for their business purposes to buy capacity from other countries when your local capacity is maxed out, but don't take money off the table of your local capacity which is using that revenue to drive development and research. That is what the treaty was all about, can you imagine what would happen if the Chinese (for example) subsidized rocket launches for third parties like they have solar cells, or rare earth materials? Nobody would pay full price for launches locally, there would be no local business, and local rocket companies would shut down. (We've already seen this in other businesses) Now China decides to no longer sell those services or raise the price astronomically? (remember they did that with rare earth materials?) Now you are in a really tight situation. The whole RD-180 engine issue is exactly this problem.

Challenging indeed. So India could "fix" this by signing on to the treaty and agreeing to the restrictions. They choose not to it seems (I have no idea why) and so they are excluded. Is that a US policy failure or an India policy failure?

Indians are fiercely proud of their space program, which is in opinion a wonderful feat in terms of technology. Their main objective is to use it for Indian interests, like Oceans, weather and defence etc. They've no interest in pursuing extra business, if it comes at the cost of bowing down to US stipulations. They're getting nice business from many countries in the world like Germany, France, African nations etc.

Source : I've read "Wings of fire" by APJ Kalam, which gives an interesting insiders view into ISRO/DRDO.

Also I'm not sure how much it matters in this case but India only joined the Missile Technology Control Regime a few months ago whereas Russia signed it a long time ago and China has agreed to abide by the original guidelines and applied for full membership in 2004.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...

That's a bit of rewriting of history right there.

I suppose you will claim that India's involvement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Dadra_and_Nagar_... was simply connivance and instigation by the government, not active participation by the Indian military? But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Portuguese_India was definitely the Indian military, not just random groups supported by the government.

You could argue that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War#Indi... was an instance of Pakistan attacking first, but note that India was actively arming and training insurgents inside what was at the time Pakistan. So it's hard to claim that this is an instance of Pakistani aggression without at the same time viewing the fairly symmetric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 as an instance of Indian aggression. Personally, I would consider the latter as Pakistani aggression, and the former as Indian aggression....

It's also hard to say who was the aggressor in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siachen_conflict because both sides were acting basically equivalently as far as I can tell.

The first and second article you link to is Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence. At that time, India was not even a nuclear power.

The third article (about Bangladesh liberation) was not because "India was actively arming and training insurgents inside what was at the time Pakistan". Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

The issue was that Pakistan itself was an aggressor which caused massive migration crisis (similar to what is happening now in Syria). With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict. Even to this day there are hundreds of thousands of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who have settled in India (who fled from the atrocities of East Pakistan).

About Siachen conflict: What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor? I really think you have superficial understanding of India's policy towards it's neighbors.

I can counter all your points with just 1 point: During the 1971 Indo-Pak war (with Pakistan as the clear aggressor), Indian army not just defeated Pakistan, but it also marched all the way to Lahore, Pakistan and occupied parts of Lahore. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

India could have kept the occupied territory to itself (like how Pakistan has done with Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir and China with parts of Arunachal). However, it chose to honor a ceasefire agreement that was about to be signed (Note: "about to be signed". Pakistan continues to violate that ceasefire agreement to this day) and returned parts of the city of Lahore back to Pakistan. Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

We also returned 90,000 odd war prisoners to Pakistan with dignity and respect (Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_(1971)_pris...). See a video of the surrender here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6qymVwkVA

Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Probably true. I need to read up on almost every topic in existence.

> Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence

Please see my response to AkshayGenius at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866503

> At that time, India was not even a nuclear power

That's not relevant to the veracity of the "was never the aggressor" claim, which was not conditioned on nuclear anything.

> Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

It's possible that the sources cited in Wikipedia for this claim are all Pakistani propaganda, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukti_Bahini#cite_note-47 doesn't obviously look like it to me.

> With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict.

Now we are back to deciding at what point national interest justifies military action, yes?

I'm not claiming the action was not justified, because I do not have sufficient knowledge to make that determination. But the original post I replied to wasn't talking about "justified" aggression either.

> What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, and maybe in this case it's not, then the situation here was as follows:

1) The territory in question was disputed, and not generally permanently occupied by either side.

2) Pakistan was granting permission to mountaineering expeditions into the territory, based on various maps claiming that parts of the territory were in Pakistan as opposed to correctly showing that the border was not agreed on.

3) India responded by sending a military-sponsored (but not clear whether "military" in the sense of "armed") expedition .

4) Pakistan decided to establish a more permanent military presence in the area.

5) India found out about this plan and acted first to move its military into the area.

6) Pakistan attempted to dislodge the Indian troops.

etc. As I said, hard to decide who exactly is the aggressor here, as in most slowly-escalating disputed-area conflicts.

> I can counter all your points with just 1 point

I think you misunderstood my points. You seem to be responding to a strawman "India is an aggressive country out to get its neighbors" claim that I never made. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I think India has done a pretty good job of not being a military aggressor, and I think Pakistan has clearly been the aggressor a number of times in wars with India. I also think the claim that India was _never_ an aggressor is wrong.

> You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

That's about the 1965 war, not the 1971 one. It also says India did not occupy Lahore, though it did get quite close to doing so. But to your larger point....

> Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

Assuming we're still talking about the 1965 war, Wikipedia's article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 claims:

"Hostilities between the two countries ended after a United Nations mandated ceasefire was declared following diplomatic intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration."

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965#Cea... talks about some of the same.

If we're talking about that situation, then the 1956 capture and return of the Gaza Strip and Sinai by Israel is a similar situation.

Going a bit further back in time, Prussia returned almost all of the territory that it controlled at the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1872, though they extracted a monetary indemnity for doing so. Even further back, in 1814 the Sixth Coalition restored the territorial integrity of France after exiling Napoleon.

Again, India acted honorably here, and such actions are reasonably rare. They're not unique.

> Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Sure. At the end of World War I, millions of POWs were released by the various belligerents. Numbers from back then are not very reliable, but http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_o... lists somewhere in the 300k-400k range for just German prisoners of war held in France.

Returning prisoners of war at the end of the conflict is the _normal_ thing that happens. Not always, of course; an obvious counterexample is the Soviet Union after World War II, and to a lesser extent the other Allies at the end of that war. But nevertheless, it's the expected behavior. Obviously it's to India's credit that it did that, but it's a much lower bar than the return of territory, in my view.

Quite easily. The claim was that India was never the aggressor, not that all the aggressions were justified by some extenuating circumstance or national interest or whatnot. The "never the aggressor" claim clearly doesn't hold for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Portuguese_India. I'm not saying that India shouldn't have done it, note, just that India has in fact used military aggression when it felt its national interests warrant it, which is perfectly normal for nation-states.

We can have a long discussion about whether we expect such situations, where national interests are judged to warrant military aggression, to arise in the future. But that's a discussion that should be had, not dismissed by appealing to untrue claims about history.

> It was the only time India had to resort to military action

Did you stop reading halfway though my comment?

Seriously, I think India has done a quite good job, as nation-states go, at not attacking its neighbors. But claiming things like "it was the only time India had to resort to military action" just doesn't look like it's supported by the facts to me. "One of the few times", yes.

I understand what you're saying, but I feel the "aggressor" is the party that first commits an unwarranted action. India was in the process of decolonization and the Portuguese refused to leave, despite prior repeated non-violent requests. If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

That right there is a problem at the heart of the concept of "aggressor": what time point do we pick as the baseline such that actions that lead to changes after that are aggression but actions before that are the status quo?

This played out in Europe with Alsace-Lorraine, where the Germans felt that the French took it away from them in 1919, while the French felt that the Germans took it away from them in 1871 and they just recovered it in 1919. Oh, but the Germans felt like the French had taken that territory away from them in the 17th and 18th century...

This is obviously a situation that is somewhat different from that of the Portuguese possessions in India. But it highlights the fact that "unwarranted" can be hard to define objectively. In practice, it tends to get defined by the victors writing the history books, though nowadays it can get decided by self-determination referenda and _then_ the victors (possibly of the referendum, possibly of resulting armed conflicts) writing history books.

From our point of view at the beginning of the 21st century, the Portuguese possession of Goa in the mid-20th was unwarranted but the British possession of the Falklands right now is... well, depends on whom you ask, but generally considered warranted. How much of that is because the population of the Falklands is happy being British subjects, and how much is because the British won the Falklands War? I wish I knew. :(

> If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

No, I would not. But this isn't a perfect analogy either. I think it would be _very_ apt as an analogy if India had gotten a UN resolution that the Portuguese need to leave; even more so if UN security forces then threw the Portuguese out. Yes, I realize that this was not realistic at the time, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was the US explicitly saying it would veto any such resolution, if I read the history correctly.

But as it was, the situation is more akin to the owner of the property being trespassed on seeing that the courts and the police won't help him out and personally kicking the trespasser off the property. Would that be described as "aggression"? It starts to depend on your biases, especially if the trespasser had been there for a while. This last is why the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession exists in English common law, so arguments over squatting and tresspassing won't continue ad infinitum. To some extent this gets applied in the international arena. Of course it doesn't always; then you get wars over territorial changes that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago; no shortage of those in recent history.

Anyway, at the time, there were a number of countries that condemned the Indian military action, including some which in principle supported the idea that the Portuguese possessions in India should become part of India. That is, they felt that the ends were good, but that the means were in fact military aggression and needed to be called out as such. We could try to fit that sort of dynamic into the individual trespasser being removed scenario; that would involve there being a dispute about whether the trespasser was in fact now more like a squatter, as well as dispute about whether forceful removal now, as opposed to peaceful removal, or at least removal by police, after some period of time gaining support for the removal was the better course of action...

Where all that leaves me personally is that I consider violent attacks on a previously broadly accepted status quo as "aggression" but I then have to allow that some "aggression" must be morally acceptable when the status quo either was unjust or has become unjust and no other solutions are available. Unfortunately, "unjust" is not an objective judgement either. :(

The situation with the Portuguese possessions falls into the "has become unjust" bucket for me, assuming the population of those areas wanted the Portuguese out. The Portuguese did not put this to a vote at the time, which is somewhat telling; I'm willing to assume based on time period and general zeitgeist that in fact the population did want them out.

Of course I would be happier to assume that sort of thing if I didn't know about counterexamples like the Falklands and Gibraltar. :( But as a point of comparison, Gibraltar _did_ have a vote on the matter in 1967, which is a pretty similar timeframe; presumably the Portuguese didn't put things to a vote because they were fairly certain they would lose.

Not just the point in time, there's also the level of aggression. Many wars have a set of ever-increasing nonmilitary conflicts leading up to them. If you're not defining aggression as a concrete military action, you have to choose a baseline for this too.

If you're allowing governmental-agression-that-may-incite-war to be counted as a "first aggression", then India is doing this right now in Kashmir. Yes, I know, that situation is more complex (and I'd prefer not to discuss it online; there's a lot of nuance lost and it's frustrating), but there are similarities in the situation.

----

Anyway, the definition of "aggression" to be used in this context depends on the context of the original statement, which was the argument that India is less likely to be a security threat because it has never been the aggressor. In this context, it is about military aggression, the argument being that a country more likely to escalate a civil issue to war is more likely to escalate to nukes in this modern age. To be clear, I don't feel that India is at all likely to escalate to nukes, due to various other reasons (including possibly personal bias). But I don't think that "India was never the first aggressor" is a valid argument in support of that.

By the latter, if country A is arming/training/providing insurgents in country B with no previous attacks by B on A, then A is the aggressor. So in the eastern Ukraine case Russia would be the aggressor.

In fact, annexing another country's territory without any provocation is pretty much the definition of "a war of aggression".

Civil wars are hard to classify in terms of "who is the aggressor", but none of my examples were civil wars.

The American Revolution can plausibly be argued to be a US aggression, but it doesn't really match any of my examples either.

Of course I would never make the totally daft claim that the US was never the aggressor in a military action, since that claim is quite obviously and demonstrably false.

Of course I never claimed you did, I just made a clever remark.

It's a hard call. For example, is it more of an analogue for the fighting in New York, or more of an analogue for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Quebec_(1775) ? Would your answer be different if the Continental Army had managed to hold on to Quebec and it had become part of the United States?

Or, given the time lags involved in both cases, is it more like the US invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, which I view as a US war of aggression? Again, that invasion failed, but had it succeeded would that make it less a war of aggression?

Note that there is a significant difference here in that the US that was invading Canada in 1812 had no reasonable claim along the lines "we are all one polity that was just colonized by different people and should be a single state" to justify its attempt to annex part of Canada. But that same issue applies to the rest of the war of independence too.

It's admirable that while the China obtained its tech from USSR, India led by Homi Bhabha used a civilian Canadian reactor to do it all by themselves.

Uh, what? This is complete bullshit. Where do you get this kind of garbage from?

China and Russia are already cats out of the bag. Other more sophisticated means are required where they are concerned

It is also possible they are not entirely out of the bag and pushing them out may not be a desirable goal.

Critics and advocates of American economic policy like to label it as capitalist and / or free-market (like there's a difference), but it's really not.

For one major example, consider the incredible level of restriction on immigration.