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In 1974 India tested what was formally called its 'Peaceful Nuclear Explosive' and informally its 'Smiling Buddha', and in doing so provoked widespread international disapproval. There were more trials in 1998, which again evoked much international tut-tutting, until India placed itself under a voluntary moratorium on testing. With this qualification made, it appears India is now a welcome member of the nuclear club. On September 6 India was forgiven its sins of poor international citizenship, or rather, for its steadfast refusal to sign both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) gave the nod to a controversial US-India nuclear deal, making India the only non-signatory country to be provided access to nuclear fuel and technology.

Critics of the deal, such as the Japanese Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center, assert that this agreement will substantially weaken the already strained NPT and "erode prospects for a consistent, equitable, rules-based approach to the critical global security and health issue of nuclear non-proliferation". They contend that it will "further worsen the ongoing nuclear arms race in South Asia by significantly increasing India's capabilities for fissile material production for weapons, and entirely predictably stimulate a nuclear proliferative response by Pakistan". Alongside the vocal anti-nuclear critics, there are pro-nuclear NSG opponents slamming the waiver as well.

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha said India had "given up our right to test forever", and Communist Party of India leader D. Raja declared that the country had become a subject of US strategy, tricked into a deal with rules so like the NPT it may as well have been the NPT. The argument that this deal erodes India’s sovereignty and with it, their ‘right’ to use nuclear weapons, evokes a rather pertinent question; if, as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee says, India remains "committed to a voluntary, unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing…[does] not subscribe to any arms race, including a nuclear arms race…[and has] always tempered the exercise of our strategic autonomy with a sense of global responsibility", why does India require nuclear weapons at all?

The final part of Mr Mukherjee’s statement is certainly the most telling, and the most useful for answering this question: "We affirm", he says, "our policy of no-first use of nuclear weapons". Nuclear retaliation, however, is apparently perfectly acceptable. For this reason, India’s notoriously itchy anti-Pakistan trigger-finger is causing a few nervous twitches. Ironically, both pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear groups argue that the NSG’s decision is extremely irresponsible given that India may yet choose to use a nuclear weapon against Pakistan if provoked, though they argue this point from quite opposite sides of the court. One is concerned with state sovereignty and the other with international security.

In the face of both these arguments, Prime Minister Singh has hailed the deal a landmark agreement, marking "the end of India's decades long isolation from the nuclear mainstream and of the technology denial regime". He went further to describe it as "recognition of India's impeccable non-proliferation credentials and its status as a state with advanced nuclear technology".

So is the decision to excuse India and approve the US-India deal responsible or irresponsible of the NSG? The answer ultimately lies in whether India would, in reality, launch a nuclear assault at all. Recognising the contemporary international consensus on nuclear arms, it can be argued that an Indian nuclear attack (on any state, not just Pakistan) is highly unlikely. This is because whether we recognise it or not, the majority of the international community has grasped the amorality of nuclear attack, and therefore understands its futility as a weapon of war.

To launch a nuclear attack is an action that is outside the realms of morality because the deed itself exists in a sphere separate to that in which humanity- the quality or condition of being human- exists. Knowingly and deliberately depriving another individual of life is a particularly human enterprise because we, as humans, have at our disposal the ability to comprehend the ambiguities of existence, to consider consequences and to justify actions. War is therefore one of the most human of all activities, relying as it does on knowing and deliberate life-taking. It can thus be considered immoral: measurable by our consciences and understood within a framework of social ethics. The humanity of death is precisely what renders a nuclear attack amoral. The sheer scale of it robs the dead of the inherent power of their deaths and as such, removes their individual significance as human beings. This ultimately removes their power as weapons of war because they become an incomprehensible mass.

Due to their unintelligibility, neither nuclear attack nor nuclear retaliation can be presented as acts of war, because in reality, they cannot be understood as attacks at all. To attack involves the idea of a beginning, of an on-set: aggressive and offensive. Nuclear warfare, however, operates outside of this discourse. It is an end, rather than a beginning, for both warring parties. Rather than aggressive or offensive it is simply numbing. Neither party becomes a victor because of the amoral and inhuman nature of nuclear warfare. To win or lose is human, but to destroy on a nuclear scale is almost divine in its disproportionate boundlessness. If the warring parties are no longer able to conceive of the action as an attack, because it is placed outside the conceptual framework of what they understand an attack to be, then the action itself becomes futile. States rarely (deliberately) engage in such obvious acts of futility.

This is precisely why India should be admitted into the NSG. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human beings- with our ability to comprehend the ambiguities of existence, to consider consequences and to justify actions- are fully aware of the disproportionate boundlessness of nuclear weapons. Though we may find it difficult to articulate, we are able to comprehend of the act of war as being essentially human and therefore essentially separate to the act of nuclear destruction. For this reason, it is extremely unlikely that any sovereign state would actually launch a nuclear attack, at least in the current international climate. Wars must be won, but the spectre of nuclear retaliation in the face of nuclear assault makes victory worthless, and therefore meaningless. This spectre does exactly the same to nuclear weapons.

Letting India into the nuclear club will probably not result in a nuclear holocaust. What it will do, however, is extend the ever-widening debate over nuclear proliferation and this can only be a positive development.