June 8, 1998

The 'feel good' factor. Or how to live with the bomb -- and love it.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Well, well, well, well, well, as my sister in sin might put it. So we now have a real nice, cuddly bomb of our own. Can't eat it, wear it, live in it. But gosh, how good it feels to have it. Har Har Mahadev!

We do not, of course, have the bomb. At least none the Government can confess to. But that is a technicality. Since Atal Bihari Vajpayee has declared us a nuclear weapons state (albeit without nuclear weapons), so be it.

What has the bomb given us? No more succumbing to blackmail, says Kushabhau Thakre, the BJP president. Oh really, and which blackmail were we succumbing to pre-bomb? Pakistan's? Of course not, says the prime minister, I started good relations with them, Islamic bomb or no Islamic bomb. Chinese blackmail, then? Good God, no, says the prime minister. The Chinese are our chums, even if George Fernandes does not quite think so. Whose blackmail, then? Bhutan's? Maldives'? Bermuda's?

It is poppycock to pretend we were succumbing to anyone's blackmail these 50 years without the bomb. Indeed, it was when we were much weaker economically, politically and militarily that our voice was heard loudest. Remember Gandhi? India under that peacenik Nehru had a far higher status than Vajpayee's India will ever have. And if the Chinese invasion rather tarred that reputation, China becoming a nuclear weapons power did not frighten defeated India into compromising its claims. Even as our becoming a nuclear weapons state is not going to panic the Chinese into rehousing the Dalai Lama, surrendering Aksai Chin, returning to the McMahon Line or withdrawing their installations in the Bay of Bengal.

It is two states who have foresworn the bomb, Germany and Japan, who are sure to make it to the expanded UN Security Council. Not nuclear India. If not having the bomb didn't make us any weaker, then having it doesn't make us any stronger. Only more vulnerable.

More vulnerable because there has been no real apprehension of a China-Pakistan gang-up against us since 1965. Pokhran II has driven the Chinese closer to the Pakistanis than at any time in the past 35 years. And the US into a renewed military relationship with Pakistan, including the repeal of the Pressler Amendment. Yes, we've got our bomb. But are we any safer?

The BJP says our nuclear tests were necessary because the Pakis had gone nuclear. Post-Pokhran II, the BJP scoffs that the Pakis can't go nuclear because they are decades behind us. The fact is Pokhran II has resulted in two nuclear weapons states without nuclear weapons. One is India, the other is Pakistan. The Pakis will get their bomb either by pulling it out of the basement, or by making one of their own, or by importing it from China, or by securing a nuclear shield from the Chinese, the US or both. Whatever happens, Pokhran II has gifted us two nuclear weapons powers at the Wagah-Attari border. We created a deterrent. Now we're creating a weaponised Pakistan to deter.

The profound truth is nuclear weapons may deter other nuclear weapons. They can deter little else. The Cubans were not fazed by the American nuclear deterrent: 38 years after his revolution and just 70 miles from the coast of the world's sole nuclear superpower, Fidel Castro is still the president of his country. Non-nuclear Saddam cocked his snook at nuclear Bush. George Bush is history, Saddam Hussein still lords it over Iraq.

The Vietnamese said "Pish" to the invading armies of nuclear China even as the Indian foreign minister, the self-same Vajpayee, now prime minister, bumbled in for his first visit to China. Gustakhi maaf, in 1978 it was the non-nuclear foreign minister of India who stalked out on his nuclear hosts saying a non-nuclear India could not sit by while a nuclear China invaded a non-nuclear Vietnam. There is nothing quite so useless as a bomb when it comes to sorting out enemies or differences.

I served in Vietnam, that is North Vietnam, the year of the Tet offensive (1968-69). A British diplomat told me an American U-2 flying over Vietnam at 60,000 ft could cross the country in 10 minutes and take a photograph that would show up the pattern on the saucer of my coffee cup. How, he asked with the rhetoric now reverberating in BJP circles, were these jokers on bicycles going to take on American technology? L.K. Advani needs to be reminded that Pakistani mercenaries are going to remain as unimpressed with our big bomb as bicycle-riding Vietnamese were with nuclearised Americans. Unless, of course, Advani intends to nuke them. Does he?

The nuclear weaponisation of India's armed forces can do only one of two things. One, it can alarm the Pakistanis to run the hell out of occupied Kashmir. It could, by the same token, teach the Chinese that the uncounted thousands of square miles of mountain wilderness they are sitting on are ours, not theirs. If neither will listen, the second thing we can do with our bomb is nuke Lahore.

A few seconds later, the good people of Amritsar will start dying of radiation. A few hours later, Delhi will succumb. A few days on, Mumbai and Chennai will be affected. Unless, of course, someone's vapourised them before the radiation gets there. Well, well, well, well, well.

The author is secretary, All-India Congress Committee.

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