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Tuesday, September 12, 2000
Armed India Can Help Stabilize Asia
By SELIG S. HARRISON
In May, 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests. More than two
years later, the United States, with a record of 949 nuclear tests during
the five decades since Hiroshima, is still enforcing punitive economic
sanctions against New Delhi, poisoning the entire relationship between
the world's two largest democracies.
President Clinton should quietly bury this self-defeating policy when
he meets with Prime Minister Atul Behari Vajpayee at the White House this
week. Pressuring India to reverse its commitment to develop nuclear
weapons merely strengthens Indian hawks who oppose closer relations with
Washington and favor an all-out nuclear buildup that would stimulate
nuclear arms races with China and Pakistan.
The United States should accept the reality of a nuclear-armed India
as part of a broader recognition of its emergence as a major economic and
military power. Such a shift would remove the last major barrier blocking
a rapid improvement in Indo-U.S. relations. President Clinton has kept up
the pressure on India to forswear nuclear weapons despite the fact that
all sections of Indian opinion strongly favor a nuclear deterrent.
Instead of persisting in a futile effort to roll back the Indian
nuclear weapons program, the United States should seek to influence the
current debate in New Delhi over the size and character of the nuclear
buildup. A more relaxed relationship with New Delhi would facilitate U.S.
cooperation with moderate elements in the Indian leadership who favor
nuclear restraint.
A U.S. policy focused on nuclear restraint rather than nuclear
rollback should not only seek to minimize the number of warheads but also
to keep them under civilian control and to limit the frequency of missile
tests. Other key U.S. goals should be to get India to sign the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and to formalize de facto Indian
restrictions on the export of nuclear technology.
Moderate elements in New Delhi are sympathetic to many of these
objectives but need U.S. quid pro quos to make them politically
attainable. For example, the continuation of sanctions makes it
impossible for the Indian government to sign the test ban without
appearing to surrender to foreign pressure. Equally important, the
sanctions have blocked $3 billion in multilateral aid credits for power
projects and other economic development priorities.
Together with the removal of sanctions, the U.S. should greatly reduce
the blanket restrictions on the transfer of dual-use technology that were
imposed after the 1998 tests. These restrictions cover many items with
little relevance to nuclear weapons.
The most important U.S. quid pro quo would be the relaxation of the
existing U.S. ban on the sale of civilian nuclear reactors badly needed
by India to help meet its growing energy needs. Indians find it galling
that China is permitted to buy U.S. reactors, while India is not.
The reason for this blatantly discriminatory policy lies in legalistic
hair-splitting in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Since
China had tested nuclear weapons in 1964, it was classified as a "nuclear
weapons state" under the treaty. As such, Beijing was eligible to sign
the NPT, along with the other powers then possessing nuclear weapons, the
United States, Russia, Britain and France.
All other states were barred in perpetuity from the nuclear club and
asked to forswear nuclear weapons formally by signing the treaty. India
branded the NPT as discriminatory and refused to sign. Now it would like
to sign as a nuclear weapon state but the U.S. will not permit it.
The NPT itself does not bar its signatories from providing nuclear
technology to non-signatories such as India, However, the U.S. Congress
went beyond the NPT with a law stipulating that non-signatories cannot
receive U.S. nuclear technology even if they accept International Atomic
Energy Agency, or IAEA, safeguards on its use, which India is willing to
do. This legislation even bars the U.S. from helping India to make its
nuclear reactors safer.
Significantly, Hans Blix, the respected former IAEA director who now
heads the U.N. arms inspection mission to Iraq, has urged that the ban on
civilian nuclear sales to both India and Pakistan be lifted if they are
willing to make two major concessions: signing the test ban and agreeing
to freeze their stockpiles of weapons-grade fissile material at present
levels.
"There is nothing in the NPT that would stand in the way of such an
arrangement," Blix noted at a Stockholm seminar, and as matters stand,
"India and Pakistan are most unlikely to discard whatever nuclear weapons
capacity they possess. There is even a clear risk of a race between them
to increase fissile material stocks."
The United States has been pushing India to join in a multilateral
moratorium on fissile material production but without offering clear
incentives. Blix has proposed a more realistic approach. U.S. policy
should be based on a tacit recognition that a multipolar Asian balance of
power in which India possesses a minimum nuclear deterrent will be more
stable than one in which China enjoys a nuclear monopoly.
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Selig S. Harrison Is a Senior Fellow of the Century Foundation and a Senior Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
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