[sacw] SAAN Post (19 May 2000)

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Sat, 20 May 2000 22:36:47 +0200


South Asians Against Nukes Post
19 May 2000
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#1. India: Pokharan In Retrospect : The High Costs of Nuclearism
#2. Pakistan: Safety fears radiate from over new nuclear plant
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#1.

Appeared in "The Times of India", New Delhi, May 13, 2000

Pokharan In Retrospect
The High Costs of Nuclearism

By PRAFUL BIDWAI

Two years after India and Pakistan exploded their way into the Nuclear
Club, they bristle with paradoxes. Consider just three. China went nuclear
in 1964. For a good 34 years after that, India did not consider extreme or
emergency measures, e.g. raise military spending by 28 percent in a single
year, or build nuclear-proof shelters.

Indeed, it didn't even protest against Chinese nuclear tests until the
mid-1990s. India's knowledge of Pakistan's nuclear pursuits, for over a
decade before Pokharan-II happened, didn't warrant extreme measures either.
But Nuclear India, supposedly far more secure, now proceeds to build
underground nuclear-command shelters costing Rs. 1,100 crores-more than the
Centre is spending to fight the drought! Does this speak of security or
rationality? According to classical deterrence theory, nuclear
weapons-states (NWSs) do not go to war with one another. Less than a year
after Pokharan-II-Chagai, India and Pakistan did just that. One more year
on, they appear close to yet another confrontation.

Lest it be thought that Kargil was only an "aberration," as high deterrence
theory once termed the Sino-Soviet Ussuri river conflict, we are being
treated to a new strategic doctrine: routine, normal, "limited wars"
between NWSs! This comes not from some charlatan in the "strategic
community," but from India's defence minister, who declares that we can win
such conventional wars with ease-despite New Delhi's loss of overwhelming
strategic superiority over Islamabad. Cold logic or nuclear bravado?
Nuclearisation, many believed, would induce much-needed sobriety, stability
and maturity into India-Pakistan relations.

But our government taunted, chided, and cajoled Islamabad into testing by
linking nuclearisation with Kashmir. Today, instead of sobriety, we have
unprecedented exchanges of vitriolic, hostile, rhetoric, heightening of
tensions, and mutual demonisation. The number of Indians who believe that
Pakistan's destruction is a precondition for peace in this region (and vice
versa), has never been greater. One of the subcontinent's two rivals is
convulsed by a coup. In the other, there is an explosion of tub-thumping
chauvinism, book-burning bigotry and majoritarian prejudice. Conducive to
strategic "balance" between states which can rain mega-death, but won't
talk to each other? The Pokharan-Chagai balance-sheet should impel serious
introspection.

Pakistan is gravely crisis-ridden. Nuclearisation has strengthened
fundamentalist forces there. Chagai accelerated Pakistan's economic
downslide through "austerity" measures and impounding of foreign-currency
deposits. India and Pakistan together have lost to sanctions $3 billion in
aid and concessional loans-equivalent to their annual foreign direct
investment inflows. India's assets side too looks ungainly-despite the
Clinton lovefest, lifting of sanctions, and vague talk of a Security
Council seat. New Delhi is plain lucky that the long-overdue "correction"
of South Asia's relations with the world, especially America, a decade
after the Cold War's end, should have coincided with Mr Clinton's discovery
of India, American NRIs' successes, the IT boom, and with Pakistan's
marginalisation.

A gap has opened between US softness on India's nuclear posture and
Security Council Resolution 1172. But it is delusory to imagine that India
has gained stature as a "nation on the march" with a booming economy, or as
a responsible, mature, state with a relaxed nationalism, at peace with
itself and its neighbours. India has wantonly antagonised its biggest
neighbour. As for India's upbeat commercial image, one IT swallow does not
an economic summer make! Nor does a Kargil decisively alter regional
strategic equations. Pessimistically, Indian is still one of the sick men
of the world; optimistically, a country with much potential (couldn't that
have been said pre-Pokharan, or 50 years ago?)-although it shines beside
Pakistan. The liabilities side looks grim.

Both countries have hardened their nuclear postures-especially India with
its Draft Nuclear Doctrine, ambitions for a triadic, open-ended arsenal,
and cynicism towards nuclear restraint, leave alone disarmament. A special
synergy now operates between nuclearism, a growing "national security"
obsession, jingoism over Kashmir, and rank communalism: Two-Nation Theory
prejudices are under revival, complete with condemnation of "Hindu
cowardice" and Pakistan's "design" to "disintegrate" India. Never since
Partition have militarist hawks and communalists worked in such perfect
unison inside and across borders.

These are the heaviest political costs nuclearisation has claimed anywhere.
Once "national security" mindsets and "military necessity" doctrines
prevail, values of transparency, inclusion, pluralism, participation and
human rights are jettisoned. Nuclearisation's economic costs could prove
ruinous. Even a small arsenal, one-fifth the size of China's, could over
some years cost Rs. 50,000 crores, which exceeds India's entire annual
expenditure on primary education. Should India go in for a bigger arsenal,
its cost could exceed a frightening three to five percent of GDP,
especially if there is an arms race. India will race not just against
Pakistan-utterly devastating it-but with China, perhaps devastating itself
economically. Nuclear weapons manufacture imposes high ecological costs
too.

Cleaning up the environmental mess left behind by the US weapons programme
is officially estimated to cost $250 billion-the same order of magnitude as
India's GDP. There are harmful radiation and waste releases at each stage
of the nuclear "fuel cycle" from uranium mining onwards, including
handling, transportation and storage of nuclear materials. The social
costs of nuclearisation dwarf all others. Embracing the "abhorrent"
doctrine of nuclear deterrence means seeking security through insecurity,
terror, and threat to cause havoc on a mass scale, with pitiless disregard
for life. This is incompatible with civilised, humane, values.

Nuclearisation spells matsyanyaya-big fish swallowing small ones, as the
"natural" order of things, extendable to society itself. Nuclearism entails
getting our children to accept a deeply immoral state of society as normal.
It means rationalising and routinising mass terror and a grotesque version
of "Might is Right". From here, a "realistic" embrace of barbaric
"reasons-of-state" irrationality and fundamentalism is one small step.
Putting the veneer of "responsible" behaviour and "rational" conduct by
"us", and the opposite by "them," won't help. We have seen restraint and
sobriety take far too many knocks. Ultimately, we must ask if we want to
leave this irrational, violent, legacy to future generations.

If the answer is no, we must change course-to preserve sanity and gain
security. Real security can come only through democracy and pluralism,
equity and social cohesion, caring and sharing, compassion and justice.
Food security, minimum entitlements, gender security, human
capacity-building and empowerment, are more important here than military
security. India can still claim greatness if it struggles for comprehensive
security. It has a historic opportunity: unilaterally freeze nuclear and
missile programmes for a limited period, so that the NWSs make deep arms
reductions and move towards abolition. Morally and politically, this will
be electrifying. That's when the world will take real notice of India.-end-

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#2.

Asia Times
18 May 2000

Safety fears radiate from over new nuclear plant

By Nadeem Iqbal

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan's new Chinese-built atomic power plant has worried
environmentalists and nuclear experts, who have urged the country's
military rulers to hold a safety review of the facility. Although the
atomic energy establishment has allayed such fears, some nuclear safety
experts claim that the Chashma reactor has a faulty design. They have also
questioned the quality of the equipment provided by the Chinese. In an
open letter to the country's Chief Executive Pervez Musharraf, a coalition
of nine leading green groups has urged him not to allow the commissioning
of the 300-megawatt plant until a detailed environmental safety
investigation is carried out. Chashma is the country's second nuclear
power plant. Located in the central Punjab province, the reactor went
critical on May 3 and will begin feeding the national grid later this year.
Nuclear fuel was loaded in the reactor in November 1999. The green groups,
jointly known as the Advocacy and Development Network, have also written to
Environment Minister Omer Asghar Khan who chairs the apex Pakistan
Environmental Protection Council. They have expressed concern about the
likely seismic hazards, the reactor design, the quality of its components,
and the limited capability of its foreign supplier to provide technical
support in case of an accident. The groups say their fears are based on
independent investigations by concerned Pakistani scientists. They want an
independent review, with public involvement, of the reactor's safety and
environmental impact. Built under a turn-key contract with China's
National Nuclear Corporation that was signed in December 1991, the Chashma
reactor will use about 12 tonnes of nuclear fuel annually. A similar
capacity thermal power plant would use about half a million tonnes of oil
every year. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) asserts that the
plant was made critical only after rigorous testing of various reactor
safety systems. ''Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) and the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) have reviewed
the plant design and the construction work, and endorsed these to be of
international standards,'' says a PAEC statement issued when the plant went
critical. However, A H Nayyar, an assistant professor of physics in
Quaid-i-Azam University, who is among those demanding a safety review, is
not satisfied. ''Our main objections to the reactor relate to its site, and
the design. On the site we have reasons to believe that it is earthquake
prone, and we found out that some experts contracted by the PAEC to study
the site advised against building a reactor there,'' he told IPS.
According to Nayyar, the Chashma plant is based on China's Qinshan reactor
in which a ''serious design flaw'' has been discovered. Chashma is only the
second power reactor of its type made by the Chinese, he says. While the
major components for the Qinshan were supplied by Japanese, Korean and
western industry, ''all such crucial components for Chashma were made for
the first time by the Chinese,'' he adds. ''The Qinshan reactor had a
serious problem in 1998 and the problem could not be sorted out by the
Chinese themselves and they had to call in international help. Eventually
the problem was removed by Westinghouse of the USA (which) discovered that
the problem had arisen as a result of a faulty design.'' ''That makes, in
our view, complete reliance on the Chinese design and technology - as the
PAEC is doing - rather worrisome,'' he adds. Environmentalists claim that
the nuclear plant will increase the risk of earthquakes in the seismic
region. A quake can damage the nearby Chashma barrage on the Indus river
that supports tens of thousands of farms in the mainly rural nation. A
former chief of the government's Geological Survey, Muhammad Ali Mirza, has
also independently advised the PAEC to carry out a fresh geological survey
of the plant site as this falls in a moderate earthquake zone. The PAEC
had allowed Nayyar and two other experts to study its safety analysis
report for Chashma. But the objections raised by them after going through
the report have not been addressed so far by the commission, says Nayyar.
According to an environment ministry official, the ministry had carried out
the mandatory environmental impact assessment for the nuclear power plant.
But this has not been made public under instruction from authorities, the
official, who did not want to be identified, told IPS. The green groups
say their request for a safety review is in keeping with the right given to
citizens by the Environmental Protection Act. Under the law, enacted in
1997, the national Environmental Protection Council can, ''on the request
of any person or organization,'' ask government authorities ''to prepare,
submit, promote or implement projects for the protection, conservation,
rehabilitation and improvement of the environment''. (Inter Press Service)