A ban might prevent India from deploying miniaturized warheads on ballistic missiles, but it would not cancel India's current status as a de facto nuclear weapons-capable nation. And so, India, like China, may want the talks to drag on for a while. But the treaty could stumble on either or both of these proposals. This text should appear early in the May-June session, if not before. One approach is to look at how much support these proposals have among other delegations.
China alone favors PNEs.
Including PNEs in the final text would have only one purpose-getting Beijing to approve the treaty. Probably, but there is no way to know for sure. In contrast, there is a great deal of support among non-nuclear nations for the general thrust, if not the specifics, of the Indian proposals. The clean text needs to be acceptable to these states-as well as to India, if it is willing to negotiate. The desire for language that bans new types of nuclear weapons reflects the overall unease among the delegates about the U.S. stockpile stewardship program and the plans of other weapons states to continue weapons-maintenance activities.