[sacw] South Asians Against Nukes Dispatch (6 Jan 2000)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asians Against Nukes Dispatch (29 dec.99)
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#1. India: The CTBT End-Game
#2. India finds big new uranium deposits
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#1.
THE CTBT END-GAME: From charlatanry to cynicism

By Praful Bidwai

Now that the government has gone through the motions of consulting
various political parties on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT),
three things can be said with some confidence. First, there is no consensus
on the issue. Most non-BJP parties have either taken an ambivalent position
(Congress), or firmly opposed the CTBT-e.g. the Communist parties and
Samajwadis,. Second, the government, undeterred, will probably go ahead and
sign the treaty before or during the forthcoming talks with Mr Strobe
Talbott. Third, many in the "strategic community" are drumming up support
for the CTBT as part of what passes off today as a "debate" on it.

Nothing testifies to the coarsening and trivialisation of our entire
strategic discourse as eloquently as this "debate". This bears a sharp
contrast to the contestation over that very issue in 1996, when in an
ironic twist of history, India, the CTBT's pioneer, became its most vocal
opponent. The debate then too was one-sided and steeped for the most part
in a hawkish brand of nationalism. But it had a reference to doctrines and
principles, most important, to nuclear disarmament. Today, that reference
is glaringly absent. The current debate betrays utter contempt for
principles and doctrines. It is solely about (presumed) interests, as
understood by our nuclear policy-making and -shaping elite. More
specifically, it is about how this elite wishes to harmonise its own
interests with those of the United States Administration.

That is not the only contrast. Yesterday's fiercest CTBT opponents and
warriors for "principle" have turned into its most pitiable apologists.
Most plead for it not because it is a worthy nuclear restraint treaty, but
because it will help legitimise India's nuclear weapons however detrimental
that may be to global nuclear abolition. Consider this:

In 1996, these warriors for "principle" presented the CTBT as an
extension of the NPT, and as an expression of "Nuclear Imperialism."(K.
Subrahmanyam, The Times of India, Jan 24). This was an argument about the
CTBT's intrinsically flawed nature. Today, Subrahmanyam advocates CTBT
signature and admits that the treaty is not unequal and discriminatory:
"there is a sense of undue fear about the intentions of the US and other
industrial nations". (TOI, Dec 13, 1999). Thus, the "imperialist" nations
have suddenly undergone a metamorphosis while all references to the CTBT's
"intrinsic" flaws have vanished.

In 1996, the typical editorial caption or article headline read: "CTBT a
Trap for India", "Stay Firm on the CTBT", "Stop the CTBT Talkshop", and
even branded much of the discussion on the CTBT as "vapid, uninformed and
pointless". Most papers played up Ms Arundhati Ghose's "bold" and
"principled" interventions in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) even while
failing to note a shift in India's stand from "universal principles" to the
"national interest" as the criterion for opposing the CTBT. Some went into
raptures over her famous statement: no signature--"not now, not ever."

Today, the typical headline caption stresses "consensus", "realism", and
unleashes tirades against "The Great Indian Cussedness" (Indian Express,
Dec 18). It talks about "the challenge before the political class to eschew
the rhetoric of the past and make a cold assessment of India's options"
(The Hindu, Dec 12). This implicitly concedes that the earlier official
assessment was less than sober.

Even worse for its breathtaking inconsistency is the argument of another
nuclear hawk, C. Raja Mohan, who long described the CTBT as a treaty
"designed" "to preserve the hegemony of the nuclear weapon powers." One of
its "principal effects" would be "to place a qualitative cap on the nuclear
potential of India". (The Hindu, June 13, 1996) However, now the same
strategic "analyst" admonishes the CTBT's opponents for rejecting "the one
instrument which would restrain India from further developing its nuclear
weapons, the CTBT" (The Hindu, Dec 9). In other words, the CTBT was bad in
1996 because it put a cap on India's nuclear weapons capability. But it is
good today precisely because it puts such a cap! This is not the rational
argument of an analyst, but the cheap rhetoric of a charlatan or salesman.
Such sophistry is a blatant insult to reason.

To commit this deplorable violation in logic, Raja Mohan distorts the
rationale on which the Indian government rejected the CTBT in 1996. He
resorts to two false claims. First, India moved away in the mid-1990s >from
its "moral approach" to international politics-in other words to immoral
realpolitik; this was only "realistic". And second, India's attempt to
conduct a test in December 1995 was aborted due to public disclosures,
"external pressure and internal doubts." This "fundamentally altered
India's position." Thus, "having failed to test, New Delhi began to
compensate" at the CD. But why "compensate" (what a word for opposing the
treaty if the intention was only to test) when there were "internal
doubts"? Of course, such "analysts" are never burdened by consistency or
logic.

This is not all. Raja Mohan condemns his own hawkish strategic
brotherhood. "Searching for an exit strategy, India moved amendments to the
draft CTBT and began to step up its rhetoric against the treaty. At home,
the drumbeat of opposition to the CTBT became frenzied and every possible
argument was invoked." And who invoked "every possible argument"? That very
brotherhood, itself a haven of intellectual mediocrity. The vast majority
of this community's members did not, like the BJP, openly demand that the
nuclear threshold be crossed-not until May 11, 1998. But that very day,
they duly fell in line.

Since then, these "experts" have invented fanciful arguments for signing
the CTBT-not because it is a non-discriminatory, effective, nuclear
restraint measure, as argued by this columnist for many years, but because
signing it will help legitimise India's nuclear weapons and give New Delhi
a chance to get close to the US and possibly host a Clinton visit. Nothing
demonstrates this more clearly than the glee in the corridors of power at
the concessions made by Karl Inderfurth in his December 21 briefing to the
effect that India has "the right to have a minimum nuclear deterrent" even
after signing the CTBT.

Some in the strategic "community" have ludicrously tried to elevate the
minor distinction between signature and ratification of the CTBT to the
status of a principle; and some have sought to make adherence to it
conditional upon other "deals" like technology transfer, sharing of weapons
codes, and lifting of sanctions. Some of these arguments are downright
contradictory. People who once said that the sanctions are totally
ineffective, indeed counter-productive, now cite their lifting as a big
"gain." Subrahmanyam now begs that the P-5 include India in their own
private understandings or "side-deals" (hinted at by the US negotiators of
the CTBT) on non-explosive testing techniques which the treaty does not
ban.

Regrettably, not one "expert" has honestly grappled with the content of
the treaty or re-examined the past arguments officially advanced against it
for devious reasons. They don't bother to ask why the US Senate under
Right-wing Republican pressure rejected the CTBT if it was only meant to
advance US "nuclear hegemony". Their arguments are purely expedient,
instrumental and extraneous to the treaty's content: e.g. signing it will
help improve relations with the US, and that having tested, India may as
well fall in line. Even less convincing is the plea that the CTBT doesn't
ban non-explosive testing, which India has mastered with its May 1998
explosive tests. Sober scientific opinion questions that claim.

Such sophistry falls woefully short of the minimum rationale needed for a
major shift of stand on the CTBT. Principled CTBT supporters, like this
columnist, have fundamental, irreconcilable, differences with its
opportunistic backerswho, in reality, are the Bomb's apologists. The
differences go beyond divergences with sincere, non-cynical, if mistaken,
CTBT opponents on the Left. The apologists are guilty of deceit,
intellectual dishonesty, double standards, and worse. They now espouse what
they themselves long described as an "abhorrent" doctrine-viz. nuclear
deterrence-and rationalise India's condemnable decision to join the unequal
"discriminatory" global nuclear order-on the side of the discriminators!
They falsely contend that India's basic interests have changed because a
particular regime crossed the nuclear threshold, as if this were an
irreversible step.

Such politically irresponsible and intellectually reprehensible conduct
would be easier to condone if the hawkish "experts" in question were mere
individual publicists. As it happens, many of them are members of bodies
like the National Security Council and Advisory Board, although they are
accountable to no democratic forum. They are now further distorting our
whole security discourse by anchoring it in cynical notions of realpolitik,
arbitrarily defined and whimsically altered to suit the preferences of
deterrence worshippers. The CTBT should be signed on meritsbecause it is a
worthy restraint measure which will enable India to return to the global
disarmament agenda; not because signing it will allow New Delhi to
legitimise nuclear weapons and eventually help perpetuate them globally. It
is bad enough that India has nuclearised. It is even more worrisome that
its nuclear policy is being hijacked by charlatans.end

_________
#2.
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_592000/592055.stm
Wednesday, 5 January, 2000, 15:21 GMT
SOUTH ASIA

INDIA FINDS BIG NEW URANIUM DEPOSITS

The Indian government says it has found two new deposits of uranium ore big
enough to meet the country's nuclear fuel needs for the next twenty years.

All India Radio quoted a spokesman of the Department of Atomic Energy as
saying that each site one in Andhra Pradesh and the other in Karnataka
contains about twenty thousand tons of uranium oxide.

At present, India's only large-scale uranium mine is in Bihar; the country
uses nuclear power on a wide scale, as well as now being a declared nuclear
weapons power.