Tuesday, May 20, 2003
The nuclear super-cop
By M.R. Srinivasan
What the U.S. should be doing is to address the question of elimination of nuclear weapons with all countries... Regional weapon-free zones are no substitute for a nuclear weapon-free world.
JAY GARNER, the U.S. viceroy in Iraq, a designation which has caught the imagination of the American public, in spite of its strong Republican tradition, revealed to journalists that the U.S. wishes to see the Kashmir conflict resolved by December 2004 and further that South Asia should be free of nuclear weapons. Gen. Garner is already speaking as a future Viceroy of the U.S. in Asia. He went on to say that it was Pakistan's official policy to see South Asia as a nuclear weapon-free zone. Surely Gen. Garner would not have been unaware that India has rejected the concept of a regional nuclear weapon-free zone while it is committed to a world free of nuclear weapons. The Pakistani spokesmen have stated that Pakistan would dismantle its nuclear weapons if India did so. It is the old formulation of the U.S. from the 1990s when it proclaimed that its policy was to `cap, roll back and eliminate' the nuclear weapon capabilities of India and Pakistan. Recently the Syrian President called for a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East, obviously targeting the nuclear weapons with Israel. The U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, promptly rejected this suggestion.
Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, has referred to India and Pakistan possessing nuclear weapons outside "the system of international restraints". He is simply obfuscating the issue by implying that a system of restraints is in place among the five recognised nuclear powers. One of the restraints the nuclear weapon powers had accepted was the non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear States, for almost four or five decades. But under the Bush doctrine, this position was given up and the U.S. stated it could use nuclear weapons if any enemy threatened it with the chemical and biological weapons. While not underplaying the horrendous consequences of the use of chemical and biological weapons, it is the U.S. that adopted this asymmetry. Echoing the new American thinking, the U.K.'s Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, has stated that Britain should be prepared to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states if British forces were attacked with chemical or biological weapons.
India has been urging all nuclear weapon states to adopt a 'no first use policy'. But the U.S., Britain and Pakistan refuse to adopt this policy. Under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which the U.S., the USSR and the U.K. sponsored in the late 1960s, the nuclear weapon powers were required to take steps to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world in an expeditious manner. But as the NPT review conference in the late 1990s showed, there was hardly any real progress on nuclear disarmament. Only in recent times have the U.S. and Russia agreed to bring down their nuclear weapons to the range of 2,200 to 2,700 though no time frame is fixed. Also, there does not appear to be any commitment to return the weapon-grade material irreversibly into the civilian domain.
Though India carried out its first nuclear test in 1974, it exercised remarkable restraint and did not embark on a nuclear weapons programme. It continued to work on peaceful uses of nuclear energy, namely production of electricity and applications in the fields of industry, health and agriculture. These civilian applications continue to be the major preoccupation of its large and diverse nuclear infrastructure. In the late 1980s, the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, proposed a time-bound programme of elimination of all nuclear weapons from the world. While the timetable then proposed by India may have been unrealistic, the approach was a workable one. The proposal was welcomed by Mikhail Gorbachev, then President of the USSR. The U.S., however, rejected the proposal out of hand. By about the mid-1990s, the geopolitical realities in the South Asian neighbourhood had changed to such an extent that possession of nuclear weapons by India became a necessity. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee's decision to conduct tests in 1998 and create a credible minimum deterrence enjoys widespread support among the Indian people. Concerns on Pakistan formed a part, but only a part, in arriving at this national consensus.
Some strategic thinkers in the U.S. may take the view that in the backdrop of the successful operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the time is propitious for the U.S. to pursue its other foreign policy goals. We must not lose sight of the fact that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq did not enjoy any great popular support. Afghanistan had no modern weapons worth the name and Iraq's weaponry had been decimated by the incessant bombing by the coalition forces. They were both unequal battles. The reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq will be a challenge to the U.S. and its allies. They will be well advised to associate other countries in the region and outside to bring about normality as early as possible.
In the last four or five years, the U.S. and India have kept the nuclear dialogue generally muted and at an enlightened level. If the likes of Gen. Garner and Mr. Armitage bring it up as a matter of urgency and especially suggest that India should cap its programme and eventually dismantle it, then we will once again be starting an acrimonious debate and cause immense harm to the emerging Indo-U.S. bilateral relations. It has to be recalled that India never agreed to the NPT and reserved its right to develop nuclear weapons if the security situation so warranted. It went about developing nuclear technology with a major emphasis on civilian applications. Indeed, the weapon component of the programme is small. The U.S. has rationalised why it will need to keep nuclear weapons into the indefinite future in spite of conventional weaponry which can take on any state or a combination of them. What the U.S. should be doing is to address the question of elimination of nuclear weapons with all countries and in this effort India will certainly play its part. Regional weapon-free zones are not a substitute to a nuclear weapon-free world.
The U.S., the nuclear super-cop, is now presented with a unique opportunity to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Its old nuclear rival, Russia, has a formidable agenda of reconstruction and has no quarrel with the U.S. warranting a nuclear war. China is engaged in modernising itself and would like to reduce its defence expenditure if its national interests are not under threat. France and Britain have no enemies against whom they have to target nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and Israel have small arsenals to protect their geopolitical interests and would like to limit their outlay on nuclear weapons.
Can the U.S., given its supremacy economically and militarily, provide the imaginative leadership to show the way in dismantling all nuclear weapons with all the countries possessing them? It is indeed possible to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle with the participation of the nations concerned.
(The writer is a former Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission.)
Copyright © 2003, The Hindu.