HVK Archives: What India did was right for Indians
What India did was right for Indians - The Asian Age
Andrew Mack
()
May 21, 1998
Title: What India did was right for Indians
Author: Andrew Mack
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: May 21, 1998
India's five nuclear tests have generated predictable global
outrage, but are they really the huge threat to global security
that critics claim?
Pessimists are correct to note the high probability that Pakistan
will respond with tests of its own, but there is little reason
for other states to follow suit, since Indian and Pakistani
nuclear programmes have long been factored into their strategic
calculations. The fact that India has moved from being a covert
to an overt possessor of weapons makes little military
difference.
India did not violate the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in
exploding its five nuclear devices because it was not a
signatory. There is no doubt that the tests violate the spirit of
the non-proliferation, yet the US, one of India's most vociferous
critics and the major global champion of non-proliferation, is
also pursuing nuclear activities that undermine the spirit, if
not the letter, of the test ban treaty.
One of the aims of the ban on testing was to halt development of
new nuclear weapons. The conventional wisdom held that if
strategic planners were to be confident that their bomb designs
would work as intended, they had to test them. Stop testing, the
argument went, and you stopped the qualitative arms race. But, as
the case of Israel reminds us, in today's nuclear world, bombs
can be developed without testing.
To get support from Congress, the Pentagon and the government's
nuclear weapons laboratories for a US commitment to the test ban
treaty, the Clinton administration agreed to set up the benign
sounding, multi-billion-dollar "Stockpile Stewardship" programme.
Ostensibly intended to enhance the safety and reliability of the
tens of thousands of nuclear weapons still in the US stockpile,
the programme provides funding for developing what are
effectively new nuclear weapons, such as the B61-11 earth-
penetrating warhead, and for upgrading existing systems.
Relying in part on data collected in past tests, the United
States can now "test" bombs using computer simulations, aided by
so-called "sub critical" tests. In other words, nuclear weapons
can be developed while avoiding politically unpopular nuclear
explosions. Less technologically advanced states do not have this
option. A test ban thus has more serious strategic implications
for states such as India than for highly advanced industrialised
nations like the United States.
This is not the only problem with the test ban treaty. Supposedly
the major restraint on nuclear testing, the treaty is something
of a legal paper tiger, thanks in part to the efforts of the
nuclear weapons states. During the tortuous negotiations leading
up to the signing of the treaty in 1996, a clause was added to
the text requiring all 44 of the world's "nuclear capable" states
to sign and ratify the pact before it could formally enter into
force.
But there was. never any prospect that India would sign such an
agreement. The inclusion of the clause thus ensured that the
treaty would not enter into force. As a result, it is not legally
binding - even on the states that signed it. Some arms
controllers suspect that the insertion of the provocative clause
was a deliberate ploy by the nuclear weapons states, in
particular Britain and Russia, which now confront no legal bar to
restarting their test programs.
The Indians have long claimed that the nuclear powers, especially
the United States, are discriminatory and possibly racist. Why,
Indian analysts ask, are nuclear weapons supposedly security
enhancing in the hands of Americans and the other declared
nuclear weapons states and yet a threat to global peace and
security in Indian hands? The nuclear powers have proffered no
good answer.
But the Indian position is also hypocritical. If nuclear tests
were not strategically necessary for 24 years after the first
Indian nuclear device was exploded in 1974, why should they be
necessary now? India's strategic circumstances have not
deteriorated over the years; they have considerably improved.
What has changed is the government Domestic, political
considerations provided a major impetus for the tests. India's
exercise in nuclear machismo was strategically unnecessary, it
undermined the global non-proliferation norm and it demonstrated
contempt for international opinion.
Yet something useful might conceivably be salvaged from it. In
the media furore of the past week, an intriguing statement from
Brajesh Mishra, the Indian Prime Minister's principal secretary,
went largely unnoticed. India, Mr Mishra said after the first
round of tests, now supported a comprehensive ban on nuclear
tests, provided the ban also excluded "related experiments" such
as sub critical testing. Significantly there was no mention of
the preconditions that the Indians had previously insisted be met
before agreeing to a test ban - preconditions that were
unacceptable to the nuclear weapons, states.
The implication of Mr Mishra's remarks seemed to be that, having
formally joined the nuclear club, India was now prepared to
forego further testing if the United States and other nations
were willing to abandon practices that were also a clear breach
of the spirit of the test ban treaty. That would not be such a
bad deal.
The writer is a fellow at Auckland University's New Zealand Asia
Institute and the author of Proliferation in Northeast Asia. He
was also a consultant to the Canberra Commission on the Abolition
if Nuclear Weapons. By arrangement with the International Herald
Tribune.
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