Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Praful Bidwai

  • For Nuclear Sanity

    This article was first published by the Transnational Institute

    President Barack Obama’s April 5 speech in Prague calling for a world free of the scourge of nuclear weapons is a major foreign and security policy initiative that deserves applause. If he pursues its logic through to the end with the same since rity and passion with which he outlined his commitment “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”, he could be the first United States President to go beyond nuclear arms control and to put nuclear weapons elimination on the global agenda. That would mark a turning point for strategic thinking the world over and open up new avenues through which to seek security.
    This remains a big “if”. Obama has not yet worked out the doctrinal, strategic and practical consequences of his fundamental premise that a secure world without nuclear weapons is both possible and desirable. His speech only outlines some necessary steps but without specifying their sequence or time frame, numbers (of weapons to be de-alerted or destroyed), the roles of different actors, the function of legally binding treaties, and so on.
    But Obama has stated some premises upfront and emphasised their moral-political rationale in a way no major global leader has done in recent years. Thus, he said, “the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War”; these are “the ultimate tools of destruction”, which can erase the world “in a single flash of light”. The global non-proliferation regime is in crisis and “the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up”; soon, “we could reach the point where the centre cannot hold”.
    “We are not destined,” said Obama, “to live in a world where more nations and more people possess [nuclear weapons]. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.” Logically, fighting fatalism means putting “an end to Cold War thinking” and reducing “the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy”.
    This sets Obama miles apart not just from George W. Bush but also from Bill Clinton. Obama is effectively reversing a long tradition beginning with the Ronald Reagan presidency towards either a hardening of the U.S. nuclear posture, or the development of new weapons such as “Star Wars”-style ballistic missile defence (BMD), itself premised on even more dangerous doctrines than that of nuclear deterrence, which is fatally flawed.
    Thus, the U.S. has failed, even two decades after the Cold War ended, to move beyond relatively paltry reductions in its nuclear arsenal through the Moscow Treaty of 2002. Under Bush, it refused to take 2,200 weapons off “launch on warning” alert. The U.S. military establishment wants to develop a Reliable Replaceable Warhead for existing ones, find new uses (for example, bunker-busting) for old weapon designs, and has yielded to pressures from the nuclear weapons laboratories to modernise and refine existing armaments and do experimental work on fusion weapons at the expensive National Ignition Facility.
    Bush was not only obsessed with perpetuating America’s nuclear superiority. He gave it a particularly deadly edge through BMD deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic, thus exacerbating tensions with Russia and destabilising strategic balances worldwide. Bush also blurred vital distinctions between conventional and nuclear weapons, unsigned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.
    Bush’s BMD programme will militarise and nuclearise outer space, in which the U.S. seeks “full-spectrum” dominance. His paranoid response to the September 11 attacks resulted in the worst-ever fiasco in the history of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at its important review conference in 2005, liquidating all the significant gains made at the 2000 review.

    Obama promises to change course, radically. He has spoken more boldly and honestly in favour of a nuclear weapons-free world than any other U.S. President in decades. He has gone further than any other in acknowledging that the U.S. bears a “moral responsibility” for nuclear disarmament because it is the only power to have used the horror weapon. This speaks of exemplary moral clarity, as does his statement that the U.S. must take the lead on disarmament. However, that cannot be said about four other propositions in Obama’s speech. First, he betrays an unpardonably naive faith in nuclear deterrence: “Make no mistake. As long as [nuclear] weapons exist, the U.S. will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary.…” He also believes in extended deterrence – deploying nuclear weapons in non-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries.
    This column has dissected the fallacy of nuclear deterrence far too often to warrant further comment other than that it is a fallible, fragile and unreliable basis on which to premise security (via a balance of terror). It involves unrealistic assumptions about capabilities and doctrines, symmetrical perceptions by adversaries of “unacceptable damage” means, and the complete absence of miscalculations and accidents – 100 per cent of the time.
    Second, Obama continues to repose faith in BMD – he congratulated the Czech for their “courage” in hosting it – although he qualifies his support by saying BMD must be “cost-effective and proven”. This ignores BMD’s primitive, as-yet-premature status in intercepting missiles, and worse, the danger of escalating military rivalry to uncertain and risky levels where an adversary could feel tempted to neutralise a putative BMD advantage by amassing more missiles or launching wildcat strikes.
    Third, Obama, like Bush and Clinton, makes a specious distinction between responsible/acceptable/good nuclear powers (the Big Five-plus-Israel-plus-India-plus-non-Taliban-Pakistan) and irresponsible/dangerous ones (Iran, North Korea). This permits double standards and detracts from the universal urgency of abolishing all nuclear weapons. Obama’s endorsement of Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative – unilateral interception at sea of suspect nuclear-related materials – follows from this.
    Finally, Obama believes that disarmament may not be achieved in “my lifetime”. Such pessimism is unwarranted. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s thoughtful plan for global nuclear disarmament, presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 1988, set a 15-year timeline for complete nuclear elimination. This is realistic – if the U.S. and the international community musters the will for an early disarmament initiative.
    If Obama effects deep cuts in U.S. nuclear weapons through the promised Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia this year, and launches a drive for banning nuclear testing and ending fissile production worldwide, the momentum can be accelerated, especially if U.S. policy shifts to no-first-use. After all, even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – George P. Schulz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn – believe that nuclear weapons abolition can be achieved in the foreseeable future.
    Obama’s speech provides an opportunity to all those who believe in complete nuclear weapons elimination, a cause kept alive by the peace movement, a coalition of states, and several expert commissions. India too professes a commitment to this goal and must seize this opportunity.

    India’s lukewarm response
    Regrettably, Indian policymakers have extended a lukewarm, if not cold, welcome to Obama’s speech. So fearful are they of pressure on India to sign the CTBT that they are clutching at straws. One such is Obama’s statement that “my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the CTBT”. This is different from what he wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before he was sworn in: “I will work with the U.S. Senate to secure ratification of [CTBT] at the earliest practical day, and then launch a major diplomatic initiative to ensure its entry into force.” (The letter was suppressed by South Block.)
    Indian policymakers are also reportedly relieved that Obama has not reiterated his letter’s reference to India’s “real responsibilities – [including] steps to restrain nuclear weapons programmes and pursuing effective disarmament when others do so”. They are also pleased that Obama has appointed Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat Congresswoman, as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security rather than Robert Einhorn, described by India’s nuclear hawks as “an ayatollah of non-proliferation”.
    Such timidity is unbecoming of a nation that claims to be proud of its pro-disarmament record and has pledged to fight for a nuclear weapons-free world. India opposed the CTBT in 1995-96 not for its intrinsic flaws or demerits but because it wanted to test nuclear weapons. Having done so in 1998, India should sign and ratify the treaty. Even Arundhati Ghose, who famously declared that India will not sign it “not now, not ever”, now says that she sees no problem with its signature. This may show a deplorable level of cynicism, but it is nevertheless a ground for correcting course and returning to the disarmament agenda.
    Logically, this includes several steps such as the CTBT, Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, regional nuclear risk-reduction and restraint measures (including forswearing missile test-flights and keeping delivery vehicles apart from warheads) and, of course, deep cuts in nuclear weapons by all the nuclear weapons states, beginning with the U.S. and Russia.
    India must boldly seize the initiative by updating the Rajiv Gandhi plan, opposing BMD and proactively arguing for rapid strides towards the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Here lies the litmus test of India’s commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world and of its creative and principled diplomacy.

    Praful Bidwai is a journalist and author living in India.

  • Sanctifying Mass Destruction

    The toxic terms of discourse of the nuclear debate have insidiously intruded into the public’s mind and distorted its moral perspective.

    Whatever the final fate of the India-United States nuclear deal, it is undeniable that the media-driven debate over it has had a profound impact on public consciousness. Thus, not just television anchors, but even college students, are mouthing phrases like the “historic opportunity” (the agreement offers to India to become a world power) through a “strategic partnership” with the U.S., and promoting India’s “national interest” (which self-evidently lies in superpowerdom and in containing China) and “energy security” via nuclear power development (as if there were no alternatives).
    One notion that is rapidly becoming part of middle-class commonsense is that the deal undoes the iniquitous technology-denial sanctions imposed on India since the 1970s and rewards it as a “responsible” nuclear weapons state (NWS), or, as the July 2005 agreement put it, “a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology”.
    “Responsible” nuclear weapons state? Can this be anything but an oxymoron? NWSs not only possess the ability to kill millions of non-combatant civilians instantly but are prepared and willing to use that capability in cold blood. Indeed, they make their security dependent upon keeping scores of these weapons of terror ready to be fired at short notice.
    All NWSs, regardless of intent or the size and lethality of their arsenals, and despite their professed faith in nuclear deterrence, have doctrines for the actual use of nuclear weapons to incinerate whole cities — that is, to commit unspeakably repulsive and condemnable acts of terrorism against unarmed civilians. The world’s greatest terrorist act was not the Twin Towers attack (which killed 3,600 people), but Hiroshima (where 140,000 perished).
    Yet, those who erase this terrible, yet fundamental, truth from their consciousness still justify the idea that India is a “responsible nuclear power”. They advance six claims in support. First, India has an impeccable non-proliferation record and has never diverted civilian nuclear materials to military use or participated in clandestine nuclear commerce. Second, India practices exemplary nuclear restraint through its “minimum deterrence” doctrine and its policy of no-first-use.
    Third, India has always responded positively to, if not advocated, proposals for non-discriminatory and equal treaties for arms control and disarmament. Fourth, India’s foreign policy orientation is strongly multilateralist; New Delhi rejects collusive bilateral agreements in favor of multilateral, universal treaties leading to disarmament. This derives from the view that the nuclear threat/danger is global.
    A fifth claim is that India abhors any policy or action that will start or aggravate a nuclear arms race, especially in its neighborhood. It has not triggered such a race and will never do so. Finally, India is a peaceful, mature, stable and law-abiding democracy, which respects human rights and can be trusted to act with restraint – unlike, say, Pakistan.
    All these claims are questionable, if not altogether specious. True, India has never run an A.Q. Khan-style “nuclear Wal-Mart” or willingly proliferated nuclear technology. But, India has been an active proliferator and has participated in clandestine as well as open nuclear commerce with a host of countries to develop its military and civilian programs.
    Right from its very first nuclear reactor, Apsara, to the latest pair under construction (at Koodankulam), India has bought, borrowed and both overtly and covertly procured nuclear technology, equipment or material from states as varied as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and later Russia, France, China, and even Norway.
    The basic design of its mainline power generator is Canadian – the pressurized heavy water reactor named CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium). India’s very first power reactors, at Tarapur, were donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development and were executed as a turnkey job by General Electric and Bechtel. The much-touted Fast Breeder Test Reactor, the only such reactor to operate in India, was developed with French assistance.
    India used spent fuel from CIRUS (Canada-India Research Reactor, to which the U.S. supplied heavy water, adding to the acronym) for military purposes by reprocessing plutonium from it. This was used in the 1974 Pokhran blast. CIRUS was designed and built by the Canadians.
    A condition for Canadian and U.S. assistance was that the products of CIRUS would only be used “for peaceful purposes”. India blatantly violated this and, to evade legal liability, declared Pokhran-I a “peaceful nuclear explosion”.
    India also clandestinely imported heavy water from Norway and, later, from China. We do not know what price was paid for these transactions, but it is unlikely to have been purely monetary in the Chinese case.
    None of this speaks of “responsibility” or strict adherence to legality, leave alone of India’s “clean hands” as far as dubious nuclear trade goes. In truth, nuclear materials are among the world’s well-traded/transferred commodities. Many countries have participated in such trade. India is no exception and cannot pretend to be Simon-pure.
    Second, the restraint claim is belied by India’s official nuclear doctrine, which commits it to a large triadic (land, sea and air-based) nuclear arsenal with no limits whatsoever on technological refinement. This super-ambitious plan sits ill with the profession of “minimum nuclear deterrent”, which is generally understood as a few dozen weapons. (How many does it take to flatten half-a-dozen Chinese or Pakistani cities?)
    India has also diluted its no-first-use commitment by excluding from it states that have military alliances with NWSs and including retaliation against other mass-destruction weapons. In practice, given the lack of strategic distance from Pakistan, it is doubtful if no-first-use has much meaning.
    Besides, the nuclear deal will allow India to expand its nuclear arsenal substantially by stockpiling huge amounts of weapons-grade plutonium.
    Third, India has refused to sign any multilateral nuclear restraint/disarmament agreement since the mid-1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, India also turned down at least seven Pakistani proposals for regional nuclear restraint or renunciation, including mutual or third-party verification — without making a single counter-proposal to “call Pakistan’s bluff”.
    Fourth, the very fact of India’s signature of the bilateral nuclear deal with the U.S. puts paid to its professed multilateralist commitment. The deal marks a major departure from New Delhi’s earlier insistence on international and universal non-discriminatory treaties on arms control/disarmament. But this bilateral agreement is now meant to be imposed upon the multilateral International Atomic Energy Agency and the plurilateral Nuclear Suppliers 7; Group for their approval — a procedure that India would have strongly objected to in the past.
    India has taken a parochial course, which in future could mean giving the go-by to multilateral approaches in favor of expedient bilateral ones.
    Fifth, a considerable likely expansion of India’s nuclear arsenal, which the deal facilitates, will inevitably escalate the regional nuclear arms race. There is evidence that in response to the India-U.S. deal, Pakistan is building at least one (and probably two) plutonium reprocessing plants, which will help it maximize the production of weapons-grade material with its limited uranium reserves. That is what a nuclear arms race is all about.
    More worrisome, as India builds up its arsenal to the same level as the lower range of estimates of China’s nuclear weapons (250 or so), Beijing can be expected to make more warheads and missiles. This spells a dangerous nuclear arms race. Yet, as U.S. strategists see it (see Ashley Tellis’s quote in Frontline, August 10), a major purpose of the deal is precisely to help India amass more nuclear weapons to deter China — via an arms race.
    Finally, it stretches credulity to contend that India’s behavior towards its neighbors has been exemplarily benign and peaceful. India’s past record of belligerence towards Sri Lanka, Maldives and Nepal (on which it imposed an economic blockade in the late 1980s) negates that claim, as does its annexation of Sikkim in 1975.
    India is, of course, a democracy, but it is by no means a rule-of-law state. India’s human rights record is deeply flawed — not just in Kashmir and the northeastern region, but also in respect of religious minorities, Dalits and Adivasis, and more generally, numerous underprivileged groups. One only has to recall the 2002 Gujarat carnage, the 1992-93 Mumbai communal clashes, the savage repression under way against the tribals of Chhattisgarh through Salwa Judum, and police brutality against mere suspects in countless terrorist attacks.
    Our history of strategic misperception and miscalculation (for instance, during 1987-88, 1990 and 1999) also bears recalling. At any rate, having a democratic government is no guarantee that a country will not use mass-destruction weapons.
    The only state to have ever used nuclear weapons was the democratic U.S. It would be tragic if our citizens look for Washington’s recognition of India as a “responsible” nuclear power while deadening their own moral sensibilities against weapons of terror.

  • India’s Nuclear Disarmament Gets Critical

    In October 2006, eight years after India and Pakistan crossed the nuclear threshold, the world witnessed yet another breakout, when North Korea exploded an atomic bomb and demanded that it be recognised as a nuclear weapons-state. Talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, in return for security guarantees and economic assistance, collapsed last week.

    In 2006, the ongoing confrontation between the Western powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear programme got dangerously aggravated. The United Nations Security Council imposed harsh sanctions on Iran but these may prove counterproductive.

    Tehran dismissed the sanctions as illegal and vowed to step up its “peaceful” uranium enrichment programme. It added one more cascade of 164 uranium enrichment centrifuges during the year and is preparing to install as many as 3,000 of these machines within the next four months. (Several thousands of centrifuges are needed to build a small nuclear arsenal.)

    Developments in South Asia added to this negative momentum as India and the United States took further steps in negotiating and legislating the controversial nuclear cooperation deal that they inked one-and-a-half years ago. The deal will bring India into the ambit of normal civilian nuclear commerce although it is a nuclear weapons-state and has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

    Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continued to test nuclear-capable missiles and sustained their long-standing mutual rivalry despite their continuing peace dialogue. Looming large over these developments in different parts of Asia are the Great Powers, led by the U.S., whose geopolitical role as well as refusal to undertake disarmament has contributed to enhancing the global nuclear danger in 2006.

    According to a just-released preliminary count by the Federation of American Scientists, eight countries launched more than 26 ballistic missiles of 23 types in 24 different events in 2006. They include the U.S., Russia, France and China, besides India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

    “One can list other negative contributing factors too,” says Sukla Sen, a Mumbai-based activist of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, an umbrella of more than 250 Indian organisations. “These include U.S. plans to find new uses for nuclear armaments and develop ballistic missile defence (“Star Wars”) weapons, Britain’s announcement that it will modernise its “Trident” nuclear force, Japan’s moves towards militarisation, and a revival of interest in nuclear technology in many countries.”

    “Clearly,” adds Sen, “61 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has learnt little and achieved even less so far as abolishing the nucleus scourge goes. The nuclear sword still hangs over the globe. 2006 has made the world an even more dangerous place. The time has come to advance the hands of the Doomsday Clock.” The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published from Chicago in the U.S., currently stands at seven minutes to midnight, the Final Hour. Since 1947, its minute hand has been repeatedly moved “forward and back to reflect the global level of nuclear danger and the state of international security”.

    The Clock was last reset in 2002, after the U.S. announced it would reject several arms control agreements, and withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits the development of “Star Wars”-style weapons.

    Before that, the Doomsday Clock was advanced in 1998, from 14 minutes to midnight, to just nine minutes before the hour. This was primarily in response to the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May that year.

    The closest the Clock moved to midnight was in 1953, when the U.S. and the USSR both tested thermonuclear weapons. The Clock’s minute hand was set just two minutes short of 12.

    The lowest level of danger it ever showed was in 1991, following the end of the Cold War and the signature of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Clock then stood at 17 minutes to midnight.

    “The strongest reason to move the minute hand forward today is the inflamed situation in the Middle East,” argues M.V. Ramana, an independent nuclear affairs analyst currently with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore.

    “Iran isn’t the real or sole cause of worry. It’s probably still some years away from enriching enough uranium to make a nuclear bomb. But there is this grave crisis in Iraq, which has spun out of Washington’s control. And then there is Israel, which is a de facto nuclear weapons-state and is seen as a belligerent power by its neighbours in the light of the grim crisis in Palestine. All the crises in the Middle East feed into one another and aggravate matters,” adds Ramana.

    At the other extreme of Asia, new security equations are emerging, partly driven by the North Korean nuclear programme.

    “Today, this is a key factor not only in shaping relations between the two Koreas, but the more complex and important relationship between North Korea, China, Japan and the U.S.”, holds Alka Acharya, of the Centre of East Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University here. Adds Acharya: “The U.S. has failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis diplomatically. North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme will spur Japan and South Korea to add to their military capacities. There is a strong lobby in Japan which wants to rewrite the country’s constitution and even develop a nuclear weapons capability. Recently, Japan commissioned a study to determine how long it would take to develop a nuclear deterrent.”

    Japan has stockpiled hundreds of tonnes of plutonium, ostensibly for use in fast-breeder reactors. But with the fast reactor programme faltering, the possibility of diversion of the plutonium to military uses cannot be ruled out. Similarly, South Korea is likely to come under pressure to develop its own deterrent capability. “Driving these pursuits are not just nuclear calculations, but also geopolitical factors,” says Prof. Achin Vanaik who teaches international relations and global politics at Delhi University. “The U.S. plays a critical role here because of its aggressive stance and its double standards. It cannot convincingly demand that other states practise nuclear abstinence or restraint while it will keep it own nuclear weapons for ‘security’. Eventually, Washington’s nuclear double standards will encourage other countries to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities too.”

    In particular, the joint planned development of ballistic missile defence weapons by the U.S. and Japan is likely to be seen by China as a threat to its security and impel Beijing to add to its nuclear arsenal. Adds Vanaik: “The real danger is not confined to East Asia or West Asia alone. The overall worldwide impact of the double standards practised by the nuclear weapons-states, and especially offensive moves like the Proliferation Security Initiative proposed by the U.S. to intercept ‘suspect’ nuclear shipments on the high seas, will be to weaken the existing global nuclear order and encourage proliferation. The U.S.-India nuclear deal sets a horribly negative example of legitimising proliferation.” “A time could soon come when a weak state or non-state actor might consider attacking the U.S. mainland with mass-destruction weapons. The kind of hatreds that the U.S. is sowing in volatile parts of the world, including the Middle East, could well result in such a catastrophe,” Vanaik said.

    The year 2006 witnessed a considerable weakening of the norms of nuclear non-proliferation. Until 1974, the world had five declared nuclear weapon-states and one covert nuclear power (Israel). At the end of this year, it has nine nuclear weapons-states — nine too many.

    No less significant in the long run is the growing temptation among many states to develop civilian nuclear power. Earlier this month, a number of Arab leaders met in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and decided to start a joint nuclear energy development programme.

    “Although this doesn’t spell an immediate crisis, nuclear power development can in the long run provide the technological infrastructure for building nuclear weapons too,” says Ramana. “The way out of the present nuclear predicament does not lie in non- or counter-proliferation through ever-stricter technology controls. The only solution is nuclear disarmament. The nuclear weapons-states must lead by example, by reducing and eventually dismantling these weapons of terror.”

     

    The writer is a Delhi-based researcher, peace and human rights activist, and former newspaper editor.

  • The World’s Worst Terrorist Act

    As the clock struck 8:15 a.m. in Japan this very day exactly 60 years ago, the world witnessed a wholly new kind and scale of brutality, leading to mass death. The entire city of Hiroshima was flattened by a single bomb, made with just 60 kg of uranium, and dropped from a B-29 United States Air Force warplane.

    Within seconds, temperatures in the city centre soared to 4,000 C, more than 2,500 higher than the melting point of iron. Savage firestorms raged through Hiroshima as buildings were reduced to rubble. Giant shock-waves releasing blast energy ripped through the city, wreaking more destruction.

    Within seconds, 80,000 people were killed. Within hours, over 100,000 died, most of them crushed under the impact of blast-waves and falling buildings, or severely burnt by firestorms. Not just people, the body and soul of Hiroshima had died.

    Then came waves of radiation, invisible and intangible, but nevertheless lethal. These took their toll slowly, painfully and cruelly. Those who didn’t die within days from radiation sickness produced by exposure to high doses of gamma-rays or poisonous radio-nuclides, perished over years from cancers and leukaemias. The suffering was excruciating and prolonged. Often, the living envied the dead. Hiroshima’s death toll climbed to 140,000.

    This was a new kind of weapon, besides which even deadly chemical armaments like mustard gas pale into insignificance. You could defend yourself against conventional-explosive bombs by hiding in an air-raid shelter or sandbagging your home. To protect yourself from a chemical attack, you could wear a gas mask and a special plastic suit. But against the nuclear bombs, there could be no defence –military, civil or medical.

    Nuclear weapons are unique for yet another reason. They are, typically, not meant to be used against soldiers, but are earmarked for use against unarmed non-combatant civilians. But it is illegitimate and illegal to attack non-combatant civilians. Attacking them is commonly called terrorism. Hence, Hiroshima remains the world’s worst terrorist act.

    Hiroshima’s bombing was followed three days later by an atomic attack on Nagasaki, this time with a bomb using a different material, plutonium. The effects were equally devastating. More than 70,000 people perished in agonising ways.

    US President Harry S. Truman was jubilant. Six days later, Japan surrendered. The US cynically exploited this coincidence. It claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an early end. This was a lie. Japan was preparing to surrender anyway and was only waiting to negotiate the details of the terms. That entire country has been reduced to a wasteland. Most of its soldiers had stopped fighting. Schoolgirls were being drafted to perform emergency services in Japanese cities.

    American leaders knew this. Historians Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden have just disclosed in the British New Scientist magazine that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed Japan was “looking for peace”.

    General Dwight Eisenhower said in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, also said that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.

    The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender”.

    The real function of the two bombs was not military, but political.

    It was to establish the US’s superiority and pre-eminence within the Alliance that defeated the Axis powers, and thus to shift the terms of the ensuing new power struggle in Washington’s favour.

    The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings inaugurated another rivalry: the Cold War, which was to last for four decades. They also triggered fierce competition among the other victors of the World War to acquire nuclear weapons. The insane arms race this launched but hasn’t ended yet.

    From a few dozen bombs in the early 1950s, the world’s nuclear arsenals swelled to several hundred warheads in a decade, and then several thousand by the 1970s. At the Cold War’s peak, the world had amassed 70,000 nukes, with explosive power equivalent to one million Hiroshimas, enough to destroy Planet Earth 50 times over.

    One-and-a-half decades after the Cold War ended, the world still has 36,000 nuclear weapons. Nothing could be a greater disgrace!

    Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and have never ceased to horrify people and hurt the public conscience. The damage they cause is hard to limit in space –thanks to the wind-transporting radioactivity over thousands of miles –or in time. Radioactive poisons persist and remain dangerous for years, some for tens of thousands of years. For instance, the half-life of plutonium-239, which India uses in its bombs, is 24,400 years. And the half-life of uranium-235, which Pakistan uses in its bombs, is 710 million years!

    Nuclear weapons violate every rule of warfare and every convention governing the conduct of armed conflict, they target non-combatant civilians. They kill indiscriminately and massively. They cause death in cruel, inhumane and degrading ways. And the destruction gets transmitted to future generations through genetic defects. That’s why nuclear weapons have been held to be incompatible with international law by the International Court of Justice.

    The world public overwhelmingly wants nuclear weapons to be abolished. The pro-abolition sentiment is strong and endorsed by 70 to 90 percent of the population even in the nuclear weapons-states (NWSs), according to opinion polls. More than 180 nations have forsworn nuclear weapons by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But a handful of states remain addicted to their “nuclear fix”. Led by the US, five NWSs refuse to honour their obligation under the NPT to disarm their nuclear weapons. And three of them, India, Pakistan and Israel, haven’t even signed the treaty.

    India and Pakistan occupy a special position within the group of NWSs. They are its most recent members. They are regional rivals too, with a half-century-long hot-cold war, which has made South Asia the world’s “most dangerous place”. There is an imperative need for India and Pakistan, rooted in self-preservation, to negotiate nuclear restraint and abolition of nuclear weapons. But the chances of this seem rather dim.

    Even dimmer is the possibility of the five major NWSs embracing nuclear disarmament. Their reluctance to do so largely springs from their faith in nuclear deterrence. This is a dangerously flawed doctrine. It makes hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about unfailingly rational and perfect behaviour on the part of governments and military leaders and rules out strategic miscalculation as well as accidents. The real world is far messier, and full of follies, misperceptions and mishaps. Yet, the deterrence juggernaut rolls on.

    Today, the system of restraint in the global nuclear order is on the verge of being weakened. The US-India nuclear deal (discussed here last week) is a bad precedent. But even worse are US plans to develop nukes both downwards (deep-earth penetrators or bunker-busters) and upwards (“Star Wars”-style space-based Ballistic Missile Defence). If the US conducts nuclear tests in pursuit of this, that will impel others to follow suit, and encourage some non-nuclear states to go overtly nuclear, raising the spectre of another Hiroshima.

    Sixty years on, that would be a disgrace without parallel. Humankind surely deserves better.

    The writer is a Delhi-based researcher, peace and human rights activist, and former newspaper editor.

    Originally published by The News International.

  • Sliding into Nuclear Abyss

    The more the rulers of countries like Pakistan and India emulate, collaborate with, or strain to demonstrate their loyalty to, hegemonic powers like the United States, the more they caricature themselves-and mock at their own national interest. That is what happened during the exchange of hostilities between Pakistani and US troops in Southern Waziristan when Washington asserted its “right” of “hot pursuit” in the “war against terrorism” and went on to bomb a madrassa.

    The US has once again shown just how disdainfully it treats its allies. This is not the first time it has done this, least of all to a state outside its core-alliance, NATO. America routinely treats NATO members much like an emperor treats his vassals. Within an alliance which is asymmetrical and demands unquestioning obedience from the top, the minor allies are at best “consulted”, or simply told what to do.

    For instance, there has never been a “dual trigger” on NATO’s weapons, one operated by the host member-state, and the other by the US. Operationally, there has always been a single, unified, line of command. Therefore, it’s not for nothing that the UK, America’s most loyal ally, has been called its “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier”. The latest report of a Pakistan-US deal on “hot pursuit”, albeit to be conducted “quietly”, underscores the same asymmetry.

    India may soon experience Pakistan’s sense of hurt and humiliation thanks to its two latest acts: signing away some of its sovereign rights in Washington’s favour, and doctrinally emulating the US. On December 26, India signed a “bilateral” treaty with the US which gives impunity to their citizens who may be wanted by multilateral agencies or third countries for human rights offences including genocide or crimes against humanity. By signing it, India has joined the ranks of states like Gambia, Tajikistan, East Timor and Israel.

    These bilateral pacts are worse than Status of Forces Agreements. They are meant to sabotage the worthy global effort to bring into force the International Criminal Court, to try crimes against humanity. As of now, 139 states have signed the ICC’s Rome Statute; 87 have ratified it. Notable exceptions are the US, China, India and Pakistan. The US was originally a signatory, but “unsigned” the Statute under Bush.

    That isn’t all. America blackmailed the UN into delaying the functioning of the ICC and is asking a host of states to bypass the Court altogether. That means that, say, if Henry Kissinger were to be hauled up for war crimes while on a visit to India, New Delhi would refuse to surrender him. This will work against the interests of Indian (and American) citizens-as the Bhopal case shows.

    The second example, of imitation, is worse. On January 4, India’s Cabinet Committee on Security offered a general commitment to no-first-use (NFU) of nuclear weapons. But closely following the December 2002 US “National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction”, it said India would use nuclear weapons in response to “a major attack against India or Indian forces anywhere” made with “biological or chemical weapons” too. This means killing lakhs of non-combatant citizens in response to chemical or biological weapons which kill on a smaller scale ie, a few hundred soldiers.

    This further dents India’s claim to nuclear “restraint” and sobriety-even assuming that the embrace of horror weapons, and search for “security” based on them, is compatible with “restraint”. This is part of New Delhi’s further plan to “operationalise” its “nuclear deterrent” by setting up a Nuclear Command Authority.

    The NCA announcement validates this Column’s assessment that India and Pakistan are “hurtling towards inducting nuclear weapons into their armed forces” and getting into a form of rivalry from which they will find it hard to extricate themselves. The establishment of India’s NCA comes almost three years after Pakistan set up its own command. The principal difference between the two NCAs pertains to two items.

    First, in India, authorisation for a nuclear strike is solely vested with the civilian leadership, the Political Council, chaired by the Prime Minister. The Executive Council, which is expected to have military personnel and bureaucrats on it, will have a limited role: eg, advise on security threats, etc.

    In Pakistan, the military is unlikely to easily give up its hitherto-unquestioned control over nuclear weapons and policy. In February 2000, Islamabad announced that the NCA would be chaired by the Head of Government. Then, the head was Chief Executive Musharraf. Today, he is Prime Minister Jamali. But going by the NCA meeting last Monday, which Jamali “attended”, declaring Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to be in “good hands”, he seems loath to assert his authority over the NCA.

    Exclusive control over nuclear weapons by the military poses a problem: no military has the popular mandate to take a life-and-death security decision, although civilian control doesn’t guarantee “responsible” decision-making-witness Hiroshima-Nagasaki.The second difference is doctrinal. Pakistan has a nuclear first-strike policy. India doesn’t, but is under pressure to abandon NFU. According to one report, the last National Security Advisory Board-whose first avatar in 1999 produced the “Draft Nuclear Doctrine”-had recommended that New Delhi rescind NFU. In practice, it is unclear, given the lack of “strategic distance” between India and Pakistan, if NFU will mean much once hostilities break out. The temptation to retaliate the moment a strike is considered imminent will be high. Differences notwithstanding, both India and Pakistan face three similar problems in operationalising their “deterrents”; neither says how it proposes to resolve them. First, there is the question of survivability of nuclear “assets”, and, very important, command structures. This problem is acute in a situation of “decapitation” of military and political leaderships.

    Second, and related to this, is succession within the command authority and the ability of each state to install uninterruptible communications channels between different levels of succession. The general technological backwardness and accident- or disaster-proneness of both societies will complicate matters here.

    Third, India and Pakistan will inevitably have to move towards demonstrating their capacity to inflict “unacceptable damage” upon each other. This means they must be far more transparent in projecting their capabilities: through deployment and high-alert readiness to pull the trigger. This will impel both to escalate from a state of “existential deterrence” to actual threats, backed by battle-readiness.

    Given the secrecy prevalent in the subcontinent’s military establishments, the absence of adequate testing of many sub-systems, and lack of symmetrical perceptions of each other’s specific capacities, this could make for terrible strategic miscalculation and panic reaction, greatly raising the chances of a pre-emptive or launch-on-warning response.

    The only way to contain these risks is to undertake Nuclear Risk-Reduction Measures, discussed in this Column (July 4). But that presumes a high degree of transparency and the will to negotiate. That seems infeasible in today’s situation, marked by the lowest point in bilateral relations-lower even than in 1971.

    This makes a Nuclear Armageddon likelier than before-unless India and Pakistan urgently pull back from the brink. Kargil happened barely a year after they overtly crossed the nuclear threshold. With their NCAs and their ramshackle nuclear deterrents, the present situation may be infinitely worse-to the collective peril of 1.3 billion South Asians.

  • From Pokharon to Kargil: The Nuclear Danger is No Fantasy

    However one looks at its genesis and its remarkably inept handling by New Delhi, the Kargil crisis highlights, as nothing else, the sub-continent’s strategic volatility and the fragility of the Lahore process. If the Indian army had to wait till May 6 to be informed of the unprecedentedly large-scale intrusion by a shepherd, and then took six days to report this to the defence ministry, and if the ministry two days later still said the infiltrators only occupied “remote and unheld areas”, then there is something deeply wrong with our security decision-making. The sudden switch from smugness and inaction to high-profile air strikes with their high-risk escalation potential testifies to the same flaws. One year after Pokharan-II, these put a huge question-mark over nuclearisation’s claimed gains. The Bomb has comprehensively failed to raise India’s stature, strengthen our claim to a Security Council seat, expand the room for independent policy-making, or enhance our security.

     

    India stands morally and politically diminished: a semi-pariah state to be equated with Pakistan, and periodically reminded of Security Council Resolution 1172. Most Third World countries see India as contradictory: a nation that for 50 years rightly criticised the hypocrisy of the Nuclear Club, only to join it; a country that cannot adequately feed its people, but has hegemonic global ambitions. Our neighbours, crucial to our security, see us as an aggressive, discontented state that violated its own long- standing doctrines without a security rationale.

     

    After prolonged talks with the U.S., in which we put our “non- negotiable” security up for discussion, India remains a minor, bothersome, factor in Washington’s game-plan as a non-nuclear weapons-state. South Asia’s nuclearisation has enabled Washington to grant Pakistan what Islamabad has always craved, and which New Delhi has always denied it, viz parity with India. Today, India and Pakistan act like America’s junior partners. Washington last August drafted both to smash the unity of the Non-Aligned in the Conference on Disarmament on linking FMCT talks with the five NWSs agreeing to discuss nuclear disarmament. If nuclearisation had enhanced our capacity for independent action, we would not have been mealy-mouthed on the U.S. bombing of Sudan and Iraq nor capitulated to unreasonable U.S. demands on patents. Nuclearisation has put India on the defensive in SAARC and ASEAN, in NAM and the World Bank. Damage control remains the main preoccupation of our diplomacy one year after the mythical “explosion of self-esteem”. Worse, nuclearisation has drawn India into dangerous rivalry with Pakistan and China. India has eight times more fissile material than Pakistan. But in nuclear, more isn’t better. The truth is, India has become for the first time vulnerable to nuclear attacks on a dozen cities, which could kill millions, against which we are wholly defenceless.

     

    By embracing the “abhorrent” doctrine of nuclear deterrence, we have committed what we ourselves used to describe as a “crime against humanity” This article of faith assumes that adversaries have symmetrical objectives and perceptions; they can inflict “unacceptable” damage on each other; and will behave rationally, 100 per cent of the time. These assumptions are dangerously wrong. India-Pakistan history is replete with asymmetrical perceptions, strategic miscalculation, and divergent definitions of “unacceptable”. For fanatics, even a few Hiroshimas are not “unacceptable”. Deterrence breaks down for a variety of reasons: misreading of moves, false alerts, panic, and technical failures. The U.S. and USSR spent over $900 billion (or three times our GDP) on sophisticated command and control systems to prevent accidental, unintended or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons. But the Cold War witnessed over 10,000 near-misses. Each could have caused devastation. Gen. Lee Butler, who long headed the U.S. Strategic Command, says it was not deterrence, but “God’s grace”, that prevented disaster.

     

    Generally disaster-prone India and Pakistan will have no reliable command and control systems for years. Their deterrence is ramshackle, if not ram-bharose. A nuclear disaster is substantially, qualitatively, more probable in South Asia than it ever was between the Cold War rivals. Kargil starkly highlights this. It would be suicidal for India and Pakistan to deploy nuclear weapons and then “manage” their rivalry. They must never manufacture, induct or deploy these weapons. India must not erase her own memory. For decades, she correctly argued that deterrence is illegal, irrational, strategically unworkable, unstable, and leads to an arms race. The “minimum deterrent” proposition does not weaken this argument’s force. Minimality is variable and subjective, determined not unilaterally, but in relation to adversaries. Embracing deterrence means entering a bottomless pit. That is why the NWSs’ “hard-nosed” realists ended up amassing overkill arsenals–enough to destroy the world 50 times. The danger that India could get drawn into an economically ruinous and strategically disastrous nuclear arms race, especially with China, is very real.

     

    Consider the larger truth. Nuclear weapons do not give security. Because of their awesome power, their use, even threat of use, is determined less by military, than by political, factors. That is why America cannot translate its enormous atomic prowess into real might. Nuclear weapons have never won wars or decisively tilted military balances. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Falklands, the Balkans, all expose their a-strategic nature. They are not even effective instruments of blackmail. State after state, from tiny Cuba to China, has defied nuclear blackmail attempts. Nuclear weapons are false symbols of prestige. But they are ruinously expensive. To build and maintain a tiny arsenal, about a fifth of China’s, will cost about Rs. 50,000 crores. This will further inflate our bloated military budget. Already, New Delhi spends twice as much on the military as on health, education and social security put together.

     

    With Pokharan-II, and now Kargil, Kashmir stands internationalised. It is widely seen as a potential flashpoint for a nuclear confrontation. Largely symbolic events like Lahore, while welcome, do not alter the causes or conditions of Indo- Pakistan rivalry. The Lahore agreements do not even commit the two to slow down nuclear and missile development, only to inform each other of their tests. Such limited confidence-building can easily collapse, as Kargil vividly demonstrates.

     

    Add to this debit side the enormous social costs of militarism, tub-thumping jingoism and male-supremacist nationalism; of further militarisation of our science; legitimisation of insensate violence; and psychological insecurity among the young. The Pokharan balance-sheet looks a deep, alarming, red. But there is good news too: nuclear weapons aren’t popular. According to recent polls, 73 per cent of Indians oppose making or using them. After November’s “Pokharan-vs-Pyaaz” state elections, politicians know that nukes don’t produce votes. And now, Kargil should induce sobriety. For sanity’s sake, the nuclear genie should be put back into the bottle. What human agency can do, it can also undo.