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class status compared with China, Russia, and the other major nuclear powers. In all those countries, not one reactor is under any inspection regime whatsoever, yet India would place at least two-thirds of its program under the eye of the Interna tional Atomic Energy Agency. The inequity with China espe cially offends New Delhi. Indian officials will quietly point out that China has a long history of abetting nuclear proliferation, most clearly through Pakistan. Yet the United States has an arrangement to share civilian nuclear technology with Beijing. India, they argue, is a democratic, transparent country with a perfect record of nonproliferation. Yet it has been denied such cooperation for the past thirty-three years. On this issue, globalization and geopolitics operate on differ ent levels. Many American advocates of nuclear disarmament— whom the Indians call "nonproliferation ayatollahs"—oppose the deal, or would settle for one only if India were to cap its production of fissile material. But, New Delhi says, look at a map: India is bordered by China and Pakistan, both nuclearweapons states, neither of which has agreed to a mandatory cap. (China appears to have stopped producing plutonium, as have the other major powers, but this is a voluntary decision, made largely because it is awash in fissile material already.) India sees a mandatory cap as a one-sided nuclear freeze. This strategic reality figures into American calculations as well. The United States has long been opposed to a single hegemon dominating either Europe or Asia. Were India to be forced to cap its nuclear force—without corresponding con straints on China—the result would be a vast and growing imbalance of power in China's favor. A former U.S. ambassa dor to India, Robert Blackwill, has asked, Why is it in the United States' long-term national interest to favor an arrange-