As Americans shift their Asian focus from India's (and Pakistan's) nuclear
              tests to President Clinton's coming trip to China, an awkward contradiction
              arises. Why are we tougher in important ways on democratic India than on
              undemocratic China? The question was at the heart of a pungent brief for
              India that Sen. Connie Mack, a Florida Republican and admirer of India,
              presented on the Senate floor.

              With the economic sanctions it imposed for the Indian tests, Mack said,
              "the United States is helping the largest single-party authoritarian
              government in the world suppress the development of the largest
              democracy in the world. I submit that China's behavior against students in
              Tiananmen Square, its resistance to freedom and democratic reforms, its
              abysmal human rights record and its dangerous and irresponsible
              proliferation activities deserve America's scorn more than India's legal
              actions [its tests] taken in defense of its own national interests."

              Mack zeroed in on the rationale the United States offers for its policy of
              engagement with China. He cited China's immense population, its trade
              and market potential, its place among the Permanent Five at the U.N.
              Security Council and its role as a nuclear power with a modernizing
              military. With these qualifications, Mack said, China has been able to win
              "top priority and attention from U.S. government and business leaders . . .
              in spite of posing a potential threat to the United States and being among
              the world's worst human rights violators. . . . 

              "The only attribute India lacks when compared with its
              sometimes-aggressive neighbor in this administration's definition of
              importance is acceptance into the 'nuclear club,' " he went on. "The
              message sent by the Clinton foreign policy team has encouraged India to
              conclude that the most effective way to ensure that its interests are
              protected from an increasingly powerful Asian superpower, and to garner
              greater diplomatic and commercial attention from the West, is to remind
              the world of its nuclear deterrent capability."

              Mack goes too far. It is wrong, for instance, to load the blame for India's
              tests upon the United States. The Indians do not deserve to be spared
              responsibility for a decision arising first from their own domestic political
              choices.

              The senator's criticism of the Clinton policy would be received with more
              satisfaction, furthermore, if he had not himself easily gone along, in the
              name of discouraging proliferation, with the very sanctions that he now
              deplores.

              He sure speaks for me, however, when he outlines his basic discomfort:
              The United States is pummeling a friendly democratic country, India, which
              is not known ever to have committed the cardinal nuclear-club sin of
              helping another country enter the magic circle. At the same time it is
              cultivating an ambiguously situated, unambiguously undemocratic country,
              China, even offering it privileged access to nuclear technologies barred to
              the Indians. It is making this opening to a Chinese leadership that helped
              Pakistan go nuclear and that at best has an improving but still problematic
              attitude to nonproliferation.

              You can say that if bombs are to spread, it is better that they spread to our
              friends, and especially to our democratic and therefore presumably more
              responsible friends. You can say that the combination of available
              technology and global instability makes the raising of new nuclear umbrellas
              attractive, feasible and in some cases virtually unavoidable.

              The trouble is, this is a recipe for further proliferation. The United States is
              far from being itself entirely innocent in this regard. In the spell of World
              War II cooperation, we aided the British and French to go nuclear. To this
              day we shield the undeclared nuclear status of an exceptional case, Israel,
              with the gain that comes with fidelity to a threatened friend but at a cost in
              the credibility of our general nonproliferation rule.

              The fact is that nonproliferation is the most important thing in international
              relations except for other things that inevitably come along to intrude in the
              real-life affairs of nations. One of those things is national defense or
              national survival; another is the desire to engage in high politics, to be
              recognized as a player in a large game. The wonder is not that a few
              countries have slipped the nonproliferation leash but that so few have. The
              common policy must be to draw the new members of the club into its
              internal disciplines -- limits on weaponization, deployment, ground rules
              and proliferation -- and to keep a sharp eye out for others trying to get in.