HVK Archives: India's Nuclear Irresponsibility
India's Nuclear Irresponsibility - Washington Post
Editorial
()
May 13, 1998
Title: India's Nuclear Irresponsibility
Author: Editorial
Publication: Washington Post
Date: May 13, 1998
India's Nuclear weapons tests assault the controlled nuclear
universe the United States has been trying to build for 50 years.
In this scheme, a handful of nuclear powers would ensure that
others did not join the club, nor lose for not joining. It worked
pretty well. Three other states -- India, Pakistan, Israel -- had
moved toward nuclear status but paused short of full and declared
membership. This is the arrangement India has now broken by its
first testing -- this time unambiguously of weapons -- since
1974. The danger is that its defiance of global non-proliferation
standards will stir others to follow suit.
An inexperienced Hindu nationalist government with great-power
ambitions took office last month. In a setting of tension (of
different sorts) with both regional rival Pakistan and strategic
rival China, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee undertook to
review nuclear policy and exercise India's long-available nuclear
option if necessary. American officials asked New Delhi for
"dialogue and discretion" and were told there was no "rush."
These Indian assurances were overtaken even before the policy
review was fairly launched. The Indian military-scientific
complex made sure that inquiring American officials and
satellites got no advance sign. The CIA heard the news from CNN.
Frightened Pakistan, fearful of being overwhelmed by giant India,
had promised an "equal response" to an Indian nuclear surge. It
now comes under immense domestic pressure to respect that unhappy
pledge. American law mandates early and severe economic sanctions
against non-nuclear countries that test. President Clinton seemed
to be suggesting yesterday, however, that first he wants to try
to talk India into finally signing the pending test ban treaty,
the very treaty for whose terms the Indians have just shown their
contempt. It is important to get the order of events straight.
India has taken a huge slain at the United States and at the
whole global campaign of non-proliferation. Sanctions are a blunt
instrument, but they have a punitive impact and are crucial to
American credibility. It is not for Washington to take the global
heat off India. It is for India, a nation supposedly otherwise
bent on economic modernization, to find its own way back from its
nuclear irresponsibility.
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