By Ramesh Thakur and Ralph A. Cossa

The international community needs to recognize this and work together to repair the breach and reverse the nuclear tide. Petulant sulking will not help. Nor are sanctions alone likely to prove effective.

The crisis is genuine. The three wars between India and Pakistan since they gained independence just over 50 years ago, their geographical proximity and the resulting hair-trigger response time for using nuclear weapons, the insurgency in Kashmir, the complicating triangular relationship with China, and their lack of survivable command, control and communications facilities make their nuclear balance unstable.

One strategic reality has not changed, however: Not a single country that had nuclear weapons when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed in 1968 has given them up. Nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin. The whiff of hypocrisy in statements from those who have nuclear weapons robs their condemnation of much value in shaping the nuclear choices of India and Pakistan.

Nuclear weapons are of little military use to anyone anymore. But it is difficult to convince some states of this while all who have such weapons insist on keeping them. In present circumstances, there are some security arguments for the United States, Russia, and China to keep nuclear stockpiles even while working more seriously to reduce their numbers. But the continued possession of nuclear weapons by Britain and France seems to be driven more by national pride and a quest for status than by genuine national security concerns.

A dramatic gesture by either of these states toward genuine nuclear disarmament might be able to reverse the nuclearization trend before India and Pakistan come to blows.

The British government could usefully make a unilateral, but conditional, declaration of nuclear disarmament. Prime Minister Tony Blair could announce that Britain was prepared to give up its nuclear weapons, but only if India and Pakistan renounced the nuclear option and signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as non-nuclear states.

This is different from unilateral disarmament, which the Labour Party abandoned. Now there are actually two more nuclear powers. A conditional offer could therefore help to bring about the disarmament of three states.

India has long campaigned for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and has justified its nuclear program by pointing to the total coincidence of nuclear weapons status with permanent membership of the Security Council. Ironically, India has itself broken the link: There is universal agreement that India's prospects of becoming a permanent member have nose-dived as a result of the nuclear tests.

Britain could complete the break by becoming non-nuclear. There would then be a permanent member of the Security Council that did not have nuclear weapons. The process of reforming the council could be accelerated. Britain's moral authority in the world would be greatly increased.

A conditional unilateral offer is a no-lose situation for Britain. If the offer is turned down, London would have lost nothing by its gesture.

But the offer just might be taken up. Both India and Pakistan have ended up with a worse security environment than before the tests. Their attention and resources have been diverted from the urgent tasks of economic development. And there has been a cutback in assistance from the outside world.

In the sobering post-test awakening, they might be more receptive to a face-saving formula that permits respectable retreat.

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