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Issue 25: June 2003

COMMENT

World security is jeopardised
by ongoing nuclear testing

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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