The Grave
Threat Posed by Indian Nuclear Weapons
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- The unanswered question for the new government
in India: is the country now going to come out of the closet
and declare itself an armed nuclear power, ready and
prepared if necessary to strike a mortal blow at its
adversaries? Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said
shortly after the election that the government has resolved
to "re-evaluate the country's nuclear policy and exercise
the option to induct nuclear weapons". Yet the delicate
balancing act of his coalition government is clearly a brake
on what his Hindu-nationalist Bharitiya Janata Party would
do if left to its own devices. But how much of a brake
remains unclear.
If the government does go ahead then the world before very
long should expect to see a series of nuclear tests and
within a year the commissioning of around a 100 aircraft to
carry nuclear weapons and a step up in the pace of an
already advanced research program of miniturising the bomb
so that it can fit on the cone of the rockets India has
already produced, sophisticated enough to hurl into orbit
large satellites.
A formal announcement that such a policy was in train
could be the dose of realism that wakes up a lethargic
Washington, Moscow, London, Paris and Beijing, the present
"official" nuclear powers and thus the guardians of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Is this what it will take
to provoke them into a radical re-think of the existing
somnolent, self-satisfied, not to say self-serving, nuclear
order?
The fact remains, even with this tough,
ultra-chauvinistic government, India could be dissuaded from
going nuclear, but it would mean the big powers agreeing to
a timetable for their own nuclear disarmament and it would
mean offering confirmation that India will soon have a
permanent, veto-wielding, seat on the Security Council. (And
India too would have to agree, as part of this package, to
solve the original reason for the nuclear armaments race on
the sub-continent, by reversing its refusal to implement a
1950's UN resolution to hold a referendum to determine
whether the people of Muslim-majority Kashmir want to remain
part of India or join up with Muslim Pakistan.)
Doubters will argue that this is an unrealistic goal and
anyway it leaves out of the equation that the real reason
for India possessing nuclear weapons is China- to assure
that in the 21st century there are two equal superpowers in
Asia and that they will balance each other in an
old-fashioned Congress of Vienna mode, one that Henry
Kissinger would surely approve.
Numbers in this power game do count. Switzerland may have
the highest national income per head in the western world
but no one seriously suggests it is a major power. Its
population is small and Swiss financial power aggregated
remains relatively modest. This is how it will be with the
U.S., once India and China have another half century of
rapid economic growth averaging 7-8% a year. They will not
be as rich per head as the U.S. or the European Union but
with populations five times as large they will each wield
enormous collective financial and economic power and thus
possess the wherewithal to outspend their American and
European rivals on military procurement. The locus of world
power is bound to shift decade by decade in the coming
century gradually but surely eastward.
There are no points to be won for observing this happen,
only for anticipating it and taking preventive action.
It is profoundly in the interest of both the West and
Moscow to encourage the economic rise of India and China but
to forestall their military rise. Nuclear weapons even if
kept safely in their silos do confer degrees of power that
non-nuclear states can only gape at. They are, in the old
phrase, the currency of power.
And they are very dangerous, as we now know from the
horse's mouth- men such as General Lee Butler, former
commander in chief of U.S. Strategic Nuclear Command, who
has spelt out how in the years of the Cold War, by both
accident and intention, the world came close to incinerating
half itself, and that the situation is even more accident-
prone today.
Has America to lose a city to an accidental launch of a
Russian missile before it wakes up? Or has it to read the
headlines one day that India has decided to come out of the
closet?
Washington and Moscow cannot afford to sit on their
behinds for any longer. A radical re-think is pressingly
necessary, on the lines proposed by Robert McNamara, once a
hawkish U.S. Secretary of Defense, to get American and
Russian nuclear disarmament rapidly under way, quickly
followed by Chinese, British and French.
Mr. Vajpayee's election victory and his nuclear rhetoric
has touched a raw nerve. A formal announcement of intent
would touch an even rawer one. But it could serve humanity
as a whole rather well if it works as an overdue wake-up
call.
April 8, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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