India's Nuclear Challenge

Global Thought and Local Action for Nonviolent Social Change

"Washington's punitive actions can only be seen as the height of hyprocisy, a classic case of the besotted drunkard preaching temperance." --David Cortright June 1998 By David Cortright Original article published in hard copy in Peacework 286, Cambridge, MA (June 1998): 4–5.

India's decision to conduct nuclear tests is a threat to peace in South Asia and the world. It is a serious setback to the cause of nuclear abolition and a rebuke to the disarmament legacy of Gandhi and Nehru. In a country where hundreds of millions are illiterate and more than half the population lacks clean water and basic sanitation, the diversion of resources to develop nuclear weapons is an affront to human decency.

India's action makes it likely that Pakistan will also test nuclear weapons and that an overt nuclear arms race will develop in South Asia. In combination with rising political animosities and the ballistic missile race already underway between India and Pakistan, the nuclear tests significantly increase the danger of war and nuclear confrontation.

While it is necessary to condemn India's tests, we must recognize that the United States bears partial responsibility for these events. By its insistence on maintaining nuclear weapons and its refusal to negotiate for disarmament, the United States has reinforced the role of nuclear weapons as the ultimate currency of power. The primary motivations for India's decision to go nuclear are nationalist. India sees itself as a great civilization with a rightful role to play in world affairs. Lacking the economic prowess to advance to the front ranks of power, India has seized upon the bomb as a shortcut to presumed greatness. India sees nuclear capability as the means of realizing its ambition of global influence and leadership. The United States and the other nuclear powers have reinforced this linkage between nuclear weapons and global status and are thus partly responsible for India's decision to exercise the nuclear option.

The United States has compounded the problem by arrogantly imposing unilateral economic sanctions against India. Under the Proliferation Prevention Act passed by Congress in 1994, the United States must halt military assistance, bar foreign aid and loans, block credit by private US banks, prohibit technology transfers, and vote within the World Bank and IMF against any loans or financial assistance. These sanctions will have adverse impacts within India. If the United States succeeds in convincing other countries to join with it in voting against World Bank assistance, many vital social development programs and infrastructure investment projects will be blocked. The poor and the needy will suffer most. Population planning and women's health programs could be adversely affected.

According to the Reserve Bank of India, the US sanctions will reduce development aid to India by approximately $2.8 billion. This will be a major blow, but in a country as large and diverse as India and in an economy that has in recent years enjoyed high rates of growth, the overall impact will be relatively minor. There is little prospect that such sanctions will convince the government of India to change its nuclear policies. In fact, over the short run the political impact of sanctions is likely to be counterproductive. External pressures will help to create a rally-around-the-flag effect within India and generate greater political support for the government. Over time nationalist fervor may dissipate, but for the near term the position of the government will be strengthened. Meanwhile the social and humanitarian costs for India's most vulnerable populations will be high.

If Islamabad proceeds with its own nuclear tests as expected, these same US sanctions will be imposed on Pakistan. the impact in Pakistan is likely to be much more severe. Unlike India, Pakistan's economy is in shambles, and the country is virtually bankrupt. Pakistan is experiencing a balance of payments crisis and is heavily dependent on IMF funding to meet debt obligations and maintain basic services. Currency reserves are dangerously low. In such a condition, pakistan is highly vulnerable to US sanctions, which could have devastating consequences and might precipitate a serious economic downturn. Again the poor and needy would be most severely affected.

The United States has no moral basis for imposing unilateral sanctions when it has conducted more than 1000 nuclear tests of its own and maintains an arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons. If sanctions are to be applied they must be imposed multilaterally and directed against decision-making elites rather than against vulnerable populations. Any case for sanctions should be brought to the UN Security Council. If coercive measures are to be approved, they should be directed against the Indian leaders responsible for developing and conducting nuclear tests. Targeted sanctions might include canceling visas for India's leaders and revoking residency and work permits for their sons and daughters, many of whom study in the West. The financial assets of key decision makers could be frozen. Landing rights for Indian airlines could be suspended. These would be harsh measures but the hardships would be felt by those responsible for approving the nuclear tests, not innocent civilians.

However, there is no legal foundatuion for sanctions against India without a universal ban against nuclear weapons. This requires a commitment from all countries, most especially the nuclear powers, to abandon these weapons. In the absence of such a pledge, Washington's punitive actions can only be seen as the height of hypocrisy, a classic case of the besotted drunkard preaching temperance. Washington is attempting to maintain an inequitable two-tier nonproliferation system in which the nuclear powers maintain their weapons while denying this capability to others. As long as Washington and other major capitals cling to these weapons, leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad will insist on retaining the option for themselves. Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) specifically commits the nuclear powers to negotiate a plan for global nuclear disarmament. India and Pakistan have long insisted that the failure of the nucler powers to fulfill this commitment is a violation of the original nonproliferation bargain, and that a discriminatory regime of nuclear haves and have nots will not succeed in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Even a recent report of the US National Academy of Sciences notes that the nuclear states "cannot be confident of maintaining indefinitely a regime in which they proclaim nuclear weapons essential to their security while denying all others the right to possess them."

The most important step Washington could take to mitigate the nuclear crisis in South Asia would be to lead by example in accelerating the process of disarmament. The US Senate should reject India's defiance of the emerging global norm against nuclear tests by moving immediately to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Washington Should also commit itself unequivocally to the elimination of nucler weapons. Public opinion surveys in India sponsored by the Fourth Freedom Forum (published in the 1996 book India and the Bomb, Notre Dame Press) show widespread support for nuclear disarmament and a willingness by educated elites in India to forego the nuclear option if the major powers abandon their weapons. India's decision to test nuclear weapons confirms that the United States cannot retain its weapons and expect other nations to accept nuclear apartheid indefinitely. By announcing a major initiative to reduce its own nuclear weapons and by offering political, economic, and security assurances to India and Pakistan, the United States might be able to head off the emerging nucler arms race in South Asia and shore up the tattered nuclear nonproliferation regime.

The United States and the other major powers have committed themselves on numerous occasions to the goal of nuclear weapons elimination, most recently at the NPT extension conference in New York in May 1995. As part of the agreement that led to unanimous support for indefinite extension of the NPT, the United States and the ohter nuclear weapons states approved a document, "Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament," that recommitted them to the goal of global nuclear disarmament. The document reaffirmed Article VI of the NPT and specifically promised "the determined pursuit by the nuclear weapons states of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weaons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons." Failure to fulfill these commitments "undermines the authority of the United States and other nuclear weapons states in combating proliferation," according to the National Academy of Sciences report. Many other experts and former military officials have made the same point. In December 1996, General George Lee Butler, former commander in chief of the US Strategic Command, joined with dozens of other retired senior officers rrom around the world to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In February 1998 more than 100 civilian political leaders, including 47 present or former heads of state, issued a similar call for deep cuts and the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

It is long past time for the United States and the other nuclear weapons states to put forward a technologically and politically sound blueprint for moving forward in a step-by-step process toward the elimination of nuclear weapons in the shortest possible time. the outlines of such a plan were developed in 1996 by the prestigious Canberra Commission and have been further developed in a draft Nuclear Weapons Convention approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1997. An initiative by major powers to begin negotiating such a plan, and an invitation for India and Pakistan to sit at the table and join the process, would dramatically transform the dynamics of the nuclear competition in South Asia and the world.