Leaders or representatives from 47 countries recently attended the nuclear security summit in Washington. By holding a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama and delivering an important speech at the summit, Hu Jintao highlighted China's positive image for people across the globe and helped reverse the deterioration of US-China relations.

Obviously, it takes a long path toward establishing a global mechanism to counter nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Many of these leaders were not quite sure whether they would come away from the summit empty-handed.

However, they decided to attend the summit mainly to respond positively to Obama, who had launched a number of initiatives to build a nuclear-free world. The same is true for Hu Jintao and his decision to attend the summit.

Hu's visit to Washington will help lead the bilateral relations toward a positive direction. Although some disputes continue between the two countries, Hu's visit to Washington will no doubt contribute to lowering U.S. hostility toward China.

Earlier, the rapid increase in GDP had stimulated some Chinese diplomats to take blind pride in dealing with their foreign counterparts. Now, it is time to rethink whether it is necessary to adhere to the well-established principle of keeping a low profile in handling Sino-American relations.

China's GDP will soon become the second largest in the world. Who is the greatest beneficiary from the pursuance of this principle over the past three decades? Needless to say, it is China.

Now, China is just halfway through its course of "peaceful rise." In the foreseeable future, the United States will remain the No. 1 power in the world. Two decades from now, who will become the greatest beneficiary if China, as the biggest developing country, is able to maintain stable relations with Washington? Obviously, the answer is China.

In his opening statement at the summit, Obama pointed out that in today's world, the world has reduced the risk of a nuclear war between big powers, but the threat of nuclear terrorist assaults is increasing. He is right. Terrorists can penetrate all places throughout the world without leaving a trace.

It is difficult for all major powers, especially the United States, to detect and prevent them from launching assaults including sudden attacks with "dirty bombs" as weapons. As such, the whole world faces the most serious security challenge.

Such a strategic assessment prompted Obama to convene the nuclear security summit as well as his earlier initiative of "a world free of nuclear weapons." Preoccupied by this assessment, he has spared no effort to promote the campaign of countering nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

To fight nuclear terrorism, the summit focused on establishing an international nuclear security mechanism. The United States and many countries face the threat of nuclear terrorism. China is no exception.

In case the East Turkistan separatists consider the timing is mature to intensify conflicts with Beijing, they will no doubt take whatever means necessary to penetrate nuclear facilities or acquire "dirty bombs." Moreover, the large-scale construction of nuclear power plants in China introduces more security challenges. China will be in the peak period of building such plants in the next two decades.

The ongoing construction of such plants scattered in coastal areas would expose the nation to threat. A terrorist attack on even one plant would result in consequences more serious than that of detonating a nuclear bomb over a city. Taking this into account, Beijing has adopted various measures to strengthen nuclear security in recent years.

As a positive response from China to the international community, Hu Jintao made the decision to attend the summit, which reflects that Beijing and Washington actually are sharing common interests by making joint efforts to establish a global mechanism for countering nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

This action indicates that Beijing regards nuclear terrorist assaults as a huge threat to national security interests and it hopes to strengthen international cooperation to limit or even eliminate this type of threat.

Also, this decision has indeed enabled China to avert a head-on collision with the United States and helped reverse a deterioration of U.S.-China relations. Based on this, we can suppose that Beijing is able to conduct strategic adjustment at a critical moment and formulate appropriate foreign policies.

The state-owned company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) is India's largest company devoted to exploration and production (E&P). This paper attempts to unpack the dynamic of the government-ONGC relationship. Focusing specifically on how government ownership and control has influenced ONGC's performance and strategy, this paper makes four main arguments.

First, ONGC exists, just as with national oil companies in many other countries, because of a legacy of suspicion about outsiders.  It performed well when it was tasked with things that were not that difficult and when it had help for the more difficult ventures, such as frontier E&P and development.

Second, ONGC has run into trouble as it matured, and the roots of its troubles are mainly in its interactions with the GoI and secondarily in its management.

Third, a slew of reforms instituted since the mid 1990s have fundamentally changed the landscape of the E&P sector in India and the dynamic of government-ONGC relationship. Targeted at improving corporate governance, enhancing competition in E&P, and eliminating price controls, those reforms have had a mixed impact on ONGC's performance and strategy. They also highlight the difficulties the government has had in encouraging higher efficiencies in ONGC and the oil and gas sector.

Fourth, given the deep interconnects of the oil and gas sector with India's political economy, fixing the oil and gas sector essentially entails fixing the larger political economy within which the sector is embedded.

The release last week of the Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review brings long overdue attention to the vital issue of U.S. strategic posture. Issues raised in the NPR and START have reinvigorated a crucial national nuclear dialogue that has been missing.

As the chairman and vice chairman of Congress's bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission, which issued its report last May, we have watched with great interest the administration's steady progress this past year on its Nuclear Posture Review and the START negotiations.

Themes from our report run through the Nuclear Posture Review and are embodied in the new START agreement. While debate and disagreement must be part of the crossfire in this renewed nuclear dialogue, we want to emphasize important dimensions of both the Posture Review and START treaty that figure prominently in our bipartisan report.

Now that the NPR is completed, we see that it is compatible with our recommendations. The review gives a comprehensive and pragmatic plan for reducing nuclear risks to the United States. We believe it offers a bipartisan path forward - while allowing for healthy disagreements on specific issues.

And it incorporates many of our points - such as pursuing a quick and modest reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia and sustaining the nuclear triad of land-based ICBMs, sea-based SLBMs and bombers. It also recognizes that nuclear weapons safeguarded U.S. security during the Cold War by deterring attack and that we will need them for deterrence in the foreseeable future, as long as others also possess them.

We also see that the NPR puts special emphasis, as our report recommended, on improving the nation's complex nuclear infrastructure and enhancing programs to recruit and keep the nation's best scientific minds. The administration's commitment to increase investment in our national laboratories also ensures that they continue their important role in sustaining a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal and in solving many other problems facing the nation.

The review is correct to make preventing nuclear terrorism and proliferation the top priority, while also seeking to strengthen deterrence and to reassure U.S. allies and recognizing the importance of strategic stability with Russia and an emerging China. Our commission reached the same conclusions.

The NPR's changes in U.S. declaratory policy - especially the assurance that Washington "will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear parties to the Nonproliferation Treaty that are in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations" - go beyond our recommendation that the U.S. retain "calculated ambiguity."

It is, however, a sensible variation on a theme that the U.S. should support nonproliferation while preserving deterrence for itself and its allies.

We also note that the NPR chose, as we advised, to avoid adopting a "no first use" policy for nuclear weapons while narrowing the scope of possible first use to "extreme circumstances" - language that was in our bipartisan report.

We believe that the substantial edge the U.S. has developed in conventional military capabilities, which the NPR notes, permits this country to sharply reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. But we caution those who make light of this major U.S. strategic advantage and its implications.

We support the NPR's call for the U.S. not to develop new nuclear weapons now. Our report similarly called for a case-by-case approach to extending the life of today's warheads. And we agree that the focus should be on safety, security and reliability - not developing new military capabilities.

The NPR echoes our call to negotiate a worldwide end to the production of new fissile materials - the key ingredients of nuclear weapons.

Our final report strongly endorsed the U.S. deterrence policy to cover our allies and partners with the U.S. nuclear umbrella - an objective the NPR also embraces.

The report suggested deploying proven missile defenses against threats such as North Korea and Iran but emphasized, as the NPR does, that these defenses should not be so big as to encourage Russia to add warheads to counter them, which would only undermine efforts to reduce nuclear weapons. We included China as well as Russia in this.

But in two areas, we believe the NPR might have fallen short of the mark.

First, we understand that the review considered declassifying additional information about the size and composition of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. It should have done so. This would demonstrate U.S. leadership on the transparency that is needed to secure nuclear materials globally and to bolster strategic stability with Russia and China.

Second, the NPR called for the consideration of conventional "prompt global strike" capabilities. But it did not explain whether these systems would have a niche role against small regional powers such as North Korea or be an ultimate substitute for nuclear weapons in deterrence with Russia and China.

We feel the former is the only sensible approach. Keeping this issue ill-defined creates needless anxiety in Moscow and Beijing that could lead to future problems.

Even with these two caveats, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review makes important strides in charting a sustainable bipartisan path forward for the United States.

Healthy disagreement over some NPR specifics should not obscure the valuable contribution it makes to advancing U.S. security interests - resting, as it does in part, on our bipartisan 2009 Strategic Posture Commission report.

William J. Perry served as secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. He was chairman of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. James R. Schlesinger was the nation's first energy secretary and served as secretary of defense from July 1973 to November 1975. He was vice chairman of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.