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.