[sacw] [ACT] India's Nuclear Tests: The idea that bombed

[Harsh Kapoor]

Posted below is a paper by Achin Vanaik a well known Indian anti Nuclear
activist and member of the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament (MIND)
(South Asians Against Nukes)
--------------------------------------

The Hindustan Times
12 February 2000
Op-Ed.

The idea that bombed
(By Achin Vanaik)

POKHRAN II represented a shift in Indian nuclear policy that was
politically immature.

Moreover, it is a decision that has itself promoted greater immaturity
on the part of our political leadership. Our nuclear elite perhaps has
to trade on the shortness of public memory. Weren't we told that
although Pokhran II would push Pakistan to carry out counter-tests, both
countries going nuclear would enhance both nuclear and general regional
security? So much for the anticipatory 'wisdom' and 'insight' of our
pro-nuclear lobby. After Kargil and Kandahar, relations between India
and Pakistan have reached their lowest point in decades.

Kargil, of course, was facilitated by the emergence of a "nuclear
shield" in Pakistan. Lest we wax eloquent about the nuclear
irresponsibility of Islamabad, we should remind that for decades
Pakistan officially offered India any number of ways to denuclearise the
region permanently, all of which were summarily rejected because India's
nuclear weapons capability had to address much more grandiose ambitions
(the utterly abstract, never-exercised Chinese nuclear threat, the
desire for greater global status) than 'mere' issues of South Asian
survival, security and tensions.

Even the small section in Pakistan which always wanted the bomb were
always sidelined by a much larger group which clearly recognised that
non-nuclear parity between the two countries was always preferable to
either the tensions or burdens that would erupt if both countries went
openly nuclear. Even today, the official position of Islamabad is that
it will not be the first to openly deploy. However, the view of those
who want Pakistani nuclear weapons to 'compensate' for the conventional
military imbalance is now more influential than ever and is one major
reason (besides the technical impracticality) why Pakistan will not
adopt a "No first use" posture.

Howsoever justified we may or may not be in believing that Pakistan is
primarily responsible for the terrible plight of India-Pakistan
relations because of its role in Kashmir, it is India which is the
biggest culprit in nuclearising the South Asian region. It has added a
qualitatively new level of danger - the possibility of a nuclear war -
that did not exist before. Worse, having initiated this development, we
have a Prime Minister who in his latest speeches at Jalandhar and
before, feels the need to deliberately flex his nuclear muscles in order
to show both his Pakistani counterpart and his domestic critics that he
too is tough. How can a pro-nuclearist who is sane, talk of not being
afraid to engage in a nuclear war? How can so-called sober strategic
thinkers who believe in the supposed efficacy of nuclear deterrence even
tolerate such irresponsibility of language and behaviour from no less
than the Prime Minister of India?

Why is there so much screeching about the country being ready to fight a
limited war with Pakistan when it is precisely "hot wars" that are most
likely to create the political-psychological conditions when military
escalation goes out of control? Why is Vajpayee deliberately upping the
ante by talking of retrieving PoK? Why is there today so much
willingness to demonise Pakistan and play into the hands of those there
who most strongly wish to demonise India? Is this the way to achieve
greater security between two rivals who are now both equipped with
nuclear weapons? Who among the pro-nuclearists is willing to be honest
enough to state unequivocally that nuclear retaliation is not an act of
security enhancement but of senseless revenge, indeed insanity, because
it only leads to further nuclear exchanges? That Pakistani politicians
and strategists are being irresponsible in their statements is still no
excuse for Indians to be the same.

To expect our pro-nuclear elite who welcomed Pokhran II, admit today
that they were seriously wrong in their strategic-political assessments
is unrealistic. Indeed, the political egos of our "strategic experts"
being what they are, we shouldn't even expect them to have second
thoughts about the 'wisdom' of regional nuclearisation or wonder whether
it might not be wise to reconsider going down such a path. In fact, what
we should expect is what we have just got. National Security Advisor
Brajesh Mishra, at a security meet in Munich, declared that nuclear
weapons saved India-Pakistan confrontation from escalating during the
Kargil conflict!

Mishra, like so many others, got it dead wrong earlier. The advent of
nuclear weapons failed to reduce Indo-Pakistani tensions or prevent even
conventional wars from breaking out. So now he has to find some other
reason for claiming that the "wondrous properties of nuclear deterrence"
are working. Hence the claim (which can neither be refuted nor
confirmed) that the presence of such weapons prevented further
escalation during the Kargil conflict. But both historical evidence and
logic make this claim highly implausible. First, take the point of
logic. Going in for nuclear bombs like all forms of military
weaponisation are the symptoms or expressions, not the causes of a prior
relationship of rivalry or hostility. They cannot therefore ease that
hostility (whose sources are fundamentally political, not military) nor
resolve it. But what their presence also does is to exacerbate political
tensions because of the new military threat they deliver.

Again, Kargil showed levels of military activity which went beyond
anything seen anywhere else in respect of two nuclear-equipped rivals
engaged in a "hot conventional war." On the Indian side, some 30,000 to
40,000 troops were amassed in concentration. There were hundreds of air
sorties, and early forms of mobilisation of the navy had taken place.
Throughout the Ussuri river border conflict between China and Russia
(the only other comparable example) things never came close to reaching
the scale of military action that took place at Kargil.

So already the post-nuclear scenario of armed conventional conflict in
South Asia has proved markedly different and much more serious than
anywhere else. Moreover, the nature of the border conflict between China
and Russia is profoundly different from the nature of the India-Pakistan
conflict. The first was never the cause of Russian-Chinese hostility but
itself the reflection of that hostility whose sources lay elsewhere. The
moment the Sino-Soviet political conflict ended it became very easy to
permanently resolve the border conflict. But Kashmir and its related
territorial claims are at the heart of the subcontinental conflict.

The issue can neither be eased nor resolved by the advent of nuclear
weapons, only worsened. What our pro-nuclearists have no interest in
admitting is that the India-Pakistan nuclear face-off is dangerous in
terms of the likelihood of eruption in a way which no other nuclear
face-off (whether US-Soviet, Sino-Soviet, Israeli-Arab or Sino-Indian)
was or is. To acknowledge as much would be to admit that nuclearising
South Asia could then perhaps be seen as an act of their
irresponsibility and immaturity, when Indian anti-nuclearists must
perforce be portrayed as naive idealists at best, and anti-patriotic at
worst.