By Alexander Cockburn
There's been handwringing about India's underground nuke tests in May, three kilometers north of Khetolai, near Pakistan's border, but I say, Good on you, Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee! Here are some reasons to regard the tests as evidence of the forward-moving nature of things.
§ A poke in the eye for the C.I.A. The agency's prime function these days is to destroy or censor files displaying its past criminal activities, but defenders of the C.I.A.'s $3 billion budget say we need the spies to monitor peace treaty compliance, play watchdog over the environment and guard against the wrong people getting nukes. So how come Langley couldn't penetrate India's atom secrets? Fire George Tenet. Abolish the spy nest.
§ Another jab in the ample midriff of international hypocrisy. President Clinton vows that India will pay for its temerity. Meanwhile, the United States plows ahead with its subcritical nuclear tests, designed to keep Livermore and Los Alamos in business. (One of candidate Clinton's most ebullient messages in 1992 was to nuclear submarine builders of Connecticut in praise of the Sea Wolf program. Not long ago two of these nuclear subs collided off Long Island, in a mishap infinitely more perilous to mankind than the subterranean blasts near Khetolai.)
§ A possible boon for the Indian economy. There's excited talk in Washington that under the terms of the nonproliferation law passed by Congress in 1994 the United States will ban "aid" and loans to India and vote against loans from outfits like the World Bank. Anything that slows U.S. corporate penetration of India (a process usually referred to in the press as "market reforms") is all to the good. As things are, companies like the Texas-based Enron are far too eager to pillage India to allow the U.S. government to interfere with their plans in any serious way.
§ Equal time for Hindus. The Christians have their nukes. So do the Jews. So do the atheists (and, given recent ideological changes, the Russian Orthodox). The Muslims, in the shape of the Pakistanis, have one, more or less. This leaves the Buddhists, who probably don't want one anyway. (Oddly enough, the coded message sent by scientists at the test site to Vajpayee's office after the successful test was "The Buddha has smiled.")
§ A sound tweak of Jonathan Schell's nose. Schell argued at great length in The Nation in February that the time has come for nations to give up nuclear weapons, stuff the genie back in the bottle, etc., etc. Given the time The Nation takes to reach India, Vajpayee probably plowed his way through Jonathan's essay last month and said, To hell with it. Since the genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle, it's probably best that every nation have at least one nuclear device. If we're going to have Mutual Assured Destruction, let's at least democratize it.
§ A boost to the nonproliferation industry. At news of the Indian explosions, joy erupted in foundations like the Carnegie Endowment and Brookings, where the arms control crowd had been out on half pay and forced to write horror stories about biological terrorism to justify their existence.
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