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UNU Update | |
The newsletter of United Nations
University and its network of research and training centres and programmes |
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Issue 25: June 2003 |
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COMMENT World security is jeopardised
In
May 1998, India and Pakistan conducted 11 tests to crash through the
nuclear barrier and destroy the Indian summer of complacency induced by
the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1995
and the adoption, under Australian leadership, of the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty in 1996. What are the enduring lessons for the world's security
architecture of the tests of five years ago? First, no matter how dominant, economics has not totally replaced geopolitics. Strategic calculations, raw politics and emotions have driven the nuclear policies of India and Pakistan even at the cost of economics. The old hard questions of nuclear proliferation, nuclear conflict and nuclear disarmament were put back on the international security agenda. The current crisis on the Korean Peninsula is but the latest manifestation. Second, the vital interests of key actors have to be accommodated in any security regime, otherwise it will unravel. The world was dismissive of India's security concerns in drafting the clauses of the CTBT and of Pakistan's security dilemma once India tested. Outsiders overestimated their own capacity to coerce compliance, and underestimated India's and Pakistan's ability to break out of the attempted strangulation of the nuclear-weapons option. International
regimes, if they are to avoid falling into the feel-good trap, must rest
on conjunctions of interests. If the possession of nuclear weapons is
accepted in the arsenals of some states, then nonproliferation cannot be
forced on those who reject the treaties underpinning it. India was never
going to accept the semi-colonial status of a nation whose security
prescriptions are determined for it by others. Similarly,
if we accept that regime survival is an overriding goal of the North
Koreans, then their recent actions may be dangerous and irresponsible from
the point of view of regional consequences and international security, but
not necessarily irrational from the point of regime security. Third,
nonproliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin:
elimination of nuclear weapons. The tests by India and Pakistan were a
major setback to the anti-nuclear cause. The five nuclear powers have also
to be called to account for their complacency and go-slow tactics on
nuclear disarmament. Richard Butler puts forth his ''axiom of
proliferation'': as long as any one country has nuclear weapons, others
will seek to acquire them. Not one country that had nuclear weapons when
the NPT was signed in 1968 has given them up. It is impossible to convince
everyone else of the futility of nuclear weapons when some demonstrate
their continuing utility by keeping, deploying and developing new
generations of such weapons. Fourth,
the consequences of the tests have finally registered the reality of what
many of us have been arguing for years: nuclear weapons confer neither
power, prestige nor influence. South Asians are less secure today than
before May 1998. India still lacks effective deterrent capability against
China. Pakistan's nuclear capability may be technically superior to
India's, but the latter has greater depth. History and geopolitics make
their nuclear equation more unstable than US-Soviet deterrence in the Cold
War. Nuclear weapons failed to deter Pakistani infiltration and Indian
retaliation and escalation in the two-month Kashmir war in 1999, and a
full military mobilisation by both for all of last year. Nuclear weapons
are not going to help them combat internal insurgency, cross-border
terrorism or parasitical corruption. Nor can nuclear weapons help to solve
any of their real problems of poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition. India
does have a higher international profile today. This is despite, not
because of nuclear weapons, and rooted in its economic and information
technology credentials. Outsiders' negative images are based on daily
power shortages, crowded roads, congested seaports, user-hostile airport
facilities and personnel, pervasive petty corruption, almost non-existent
sewage and sanitation facilities, child brides, dowry deaths, caste
warfare, religious fundamentalism, etc. Fifth,
sanctions are too blunt to be useful diplomatic instruments. The contrast
between the policy of constructive engagement with China and destructive
disengagement with South Asia was painfully obvious. Nor did it make much
sense for the world community to be mounting a rescue effort in Asian
countries afflicted by the financial crisis while at the same time pushing
Pakistan towards the same precipice of economic collapse and
socio-political meltdown. Having imposed sanctions, Western powers found
themselves imprisoned in the classic termination trap: how to lift
sanctions without appearing to back down, on the one hand, or rewarding
''bad'' behaviour on the other. Often, sanctions are maintained because
policy-makers cannot decide on the best time to lift them. Sixth,
in the clash between new strategic realities and selective nuclear
puritanism, the latter has to give way: that which has been tested may be
detested, but cannot be de-tested. The 1998 tests unmasked the Alice in
Wonderland nature of the NPT where words mean whatever the nuclear haves
choose them to mean. India and Pakistan could make, deploy and use nuclear
weapons, but would not qualify as nuclear powers under the NPT because
they did not test before 1967. If one of the existing five gave up nuclear
weapons, it would still be a nuclear power. In the real world, the issue
soon became not whether India and Pakistan were going to be nuclear
powers, but what kind of nuclear powers they would be. The
challenge is to reconcile national security imperatives in the
subcontinent, the Middle East, and the Korean Peninsula with legitimate
international concerns regarding nuclear weapons. Like chemical and
biological weapons, nuclear weapons too are the common enemy of mankind. Ramesh Thakur is UNU Vice Rector and director of the Peace and Governance Programme. This commentary first appeared in the May 19 edition of the Canberra Times. These are his personal views. |
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