LONDON– The unanswered question for the new government in India: is the country now going to come out of the closet and declare itself an armed nuclear power, ready and prepared if necessary to strike a mortal blow at its adversaries? Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said shortly after the election that the government has resolved to “re-evaluate the country’s nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons”. Yet the delicate balancing act of his coalition government is clearly a brake on what his Hindu-nationalist Bharitiya Janata Party would do if left to its own devices. But how much of a brake remains unclear.
If the government does go ahead then the world before very long should expect to see a series of nuclear tests and within a year the commissioning of around a 100 aircraft to carry nuclear weapons and a step up in the pace of an already advanced research program of miniturising the bomb so that it can fit on the cone of the rockets India has already produced, sophisticated enough to hurl into orbit large satellites.
A formal announcement that such a policy was in train could be the dose of realism that wakes up a lethargic Washington, Moscow, London, Paris and Beijing, the present “official” nuclear powers and thus the guardians of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Is this what it will take to provoke them into a radical re-think of the existing somnolent, self-satisfied, not to say self-serving, nuclear order?
The fact remains, even with this tough, ultra-chauvinistic government, India could be dissuaded from going nuclear, but it would mean the big powers agreeing to a timetable for their own nuclear disarmament and it would mean offering confirmation that India will soon have a permanent, veto-wielding, seat on the Security Council. (And India too would have to agree, as part of this package, to solve the original reason for the nuclear armaments race on the sub-continent, by reversing its refusal to implement a 1950’s UN resolution to hold a referendum to determine whether the people of Muslim-majority Kashmir want to remain part of India or join up with Muslim Pakistan.)
Doubters will argue that this is an unrealistic goal and anyway it leaves out of the equation that the real reason for India possessing nuclear weapons is China- to assure that in the 21st century there are two equal superpowers in Asia and that they will balance each other in an old-fashioned Congress of Vienna mode, one that Henry Kissinger would surely approve.
Numbers in this power game do count. Switzerland may have the highest national income per head in the western world but no one seriously suggests it is a major power. Its population is small and Swiss financial power aggregated remains relatively modest. This is how it will be with the U.S., once India and China have another half century of rapid economic growth averaging 7-8% a year. They will not be as rich per head as the U.S. or the European Union but with populations five times as large they will each wield enormous collective financial and economic power and thus possess the wherewithal to outspend their American and European rivals on military procurement. The locus of world power is bound to shift decade by decade in the coming century gradually but surely eastward.
There are no points to be won for observing this happen, only for anticipating it and taking preventive action.
It is profoundly in the interest of both the West and Moscow to encourage the economic rise of India and China but to forestall their military rise. Nuclear weapons even if kept safely in their silos do confer degrees of power that non-nuclear states can only gape at. They are, in the old phrase, the currency of power.
And they are very dangerous, as we now know from the horse’s mouth- men such as General Lee Butler, former commander in chief of U.S. Strategic Nuclear Command, who has spelt out how in the years of the Cold War, by both accident and intention, the world came close to incinerating half itself, and that the situation is even more accident- prone today.
Has America to lose a city to an accidental launch of a Russian missile before it wakes up? Or has it to read the headlines one day that India has decided to come out of the closet?
Washington and Moscow cannot afford to sit on their behinds for any longer. A radical re-think is pressingly necessary, on the lines proposed by Robert McNamara, once a hawkish U.S. Secretary of Defense, to get American and Russian nuclear disarmament rapidly under way, quickly followed by Chinese, British and French.
Mr. Vajpayee’s election victory and his nuclear rhetoric has touched a raw nerve. A formal announcement of intent would touch an even rawer one. But it could serve humanity as a whole rather well if it works as an overdue wake-up call.
