May 25, 1998

If the era of N-tests returns, the world will blame India.

By Christopher E Paine

India's nuclear weapon test explosions have rocked Washington as few other events have in recent years. A more vivid example of the old adage "from the frying pan into the fire" can scarcely be imagined. Why has the new Indian Government leapt so precipitously into the fires of international disrepute?

India has gone down this road before. While it was widely hailed within India at the time, the May 1974 test in Pokhran was hardly the act of a confident and capable government that knew what it wanted from the development of nuclear weapons. Despite all the hoopla, a nuclear deterrent force never materialised.

Further, very little was learnt from that test which could not have been established by well-diagnosed, non-nuclear experiments and calculations. However, India's civil nuclear sector paid dearly over the years for that little demonstration of nuclear scientific hubris and political desperation.

This time around, it is still by no means clear that India now knows what it wants to achieve with nuclear weapons. The idea that a more convincing demonstration of India's nuclear weapon capabilities will somehow boost the country's international standing is so out of step with the times that it could almost be considered quaint if it were not also so damaging to the very cause of disarmament that India professes to support.

The Cold War ideological rivalries that spawned the nuclear arms race are gone. Nuclear arsenals are in steep decline. Something of a global consensus has emerged that the interests of international security are best served by halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons while reducing existing arsenals and building the international system.

President Bill Clinton's administration is responding to the recent Indian tests with stiff sanctions because under the US law it has little choice in the matter. And also because it feels that the credibility of the entire US non-proliferation effort is at risk if India's nuclear explosions are not met with a strong response. The Indian Government's public and private statements to date have offered little guidance on where India is headed -- and what kind of limitations on its nuclear capabilities it is prepared to accept.

In his letter to President Clinton, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee cites an "atmosphere of distrust" stemming from the 1962 border conflict with China as a symptom of a "deteriorating" Indian security environment that needed shoring up with a demonstration of nuclear weapon prowess. I wonder how credible an American president would be explaining to an Indian prime minister that the US had resumed nuclear testing because of residual tension with Russia stemming from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis! There would, at the least, be serious doubts about his fitness for governing.

As for the nuclear threat from Pakistan, exactly how does detonating five nuclear explosives control, reduce or in any way mitigate this threat? Think about it. Pakistan does not pose a conventionally superior military threat to India. So Indian nuclear weapons are not "needed" for this purpose. And it is absurd to think that Pakistani leaders must be actively "deterred" from deliberately launching a bolt out of the blue nuclear attack for the unprovoked and purely genocidal purpose of killing millions of Indians, including millions of fellow Muslims.

So one is left thinking that India's leaders have been seduced by the now discredited mythology that nuclear weapons will somehow confer usable leverage in resolving peripheral crises and confrontations involving the conventional forces of a nuclear-armed opponent. But this is a risky and potentially very dangerous illusion. Many such crises are sufficiently peripheral to national survival that nuclear threats are neither credible nor, indeed, morally admissible -- usually both.

Such was the US experience in Vietnam and the Russian experience in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons could not be used, either on the battlefield or strategically, to dissuade one side or the other from continuing the conflict. Nuclear deterrence in this case merely ensures the opportunity for a long and bloody conventional "proxy war".

India may end up with the worst of both worlds: a nuclear "deterrent" that emboldens and then ensnares the national leadership in crisis situations -- but ultimately provokes rather than deters nuclear attack.

If the CTBT ultimately unravels as a result of India's ill-considered actions and nuclear explosions once again rock the earth, I doubt if the rest of the world will find much consolation in the notion that India was ostensibly acting in accordance with its "principled" stand against "nuclear discrimination" and in favour of a "timebound disarmament". Instead, the international community will remember a nation whose long-delayed and now utterly improbable nuclear ambitions came cloaked in the rhetoric of disarmament; and it won't be fooled again.

The author is co-director, nuclear programme, Natural Resources Defence Council, Washington DC

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