Bush's 'Star Wars': India's Abject Capitulation
Praful Bidwai
Tehelka.com, 3 May 2001
New Delhi has made a historic blunder by warmly welcoming President George W. Bush's "missile defence"-based strategic plan outlined in his National Defence University speech on Tuesday.
The statement by the Indian Foreign Office, which describes Bush's proposal as "a significant and far-reaching" effort, is the only official reaction from any part of the world which unreservedly backs Bush's controversial proposal which has otherwise found no takers.
Russia and China strongly oppose missile defence. Even the US' closest, super-loyal, allies such as Britain have expressed reservations about the plan; none of them has endorsed it. Most NATO allies have warned that it could jeopardise global security.
Countries like France and Germany have expressed great wariness and Sweden has offered sharp criticism of missile defences, also popularly called "Son of Star Wars".
India's extraordinary-and thoroughly condemnable-endorsement of Bush's strategic plan marks an abject capitulation on New Delhi's part to aggressive militarism and to preserving, not eliminating, the global nuclear danger. It closes the chapter on India's role as an advocate of nuclear weapons abolition for half a century.
Bush's proposal involves building a so-called defensive "shield"-itself based on missiles, satellites, early warning systems and technologies of interception-which will, theoretically, offer protection from "enemy" missiles. Bush has committed himself to National Missile Defence (NMD)-meant to protect the whole of the US-, and Theatre Missile Defence (TMD)-such as the system the US is planning to build jointly with Japan in East Asia.
He also wants to destroy the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972, which is a cornerstone of the existing global "security balance". The treaty forbids anti-missile "defences" and many kinds of preparation for them.
The technology of intercepting "enemy" missiles with "killer" missiles is still at a primitive stage of development. Many scientists believe it is a techno-fantasy with deep and numerous flaws such as relying on a bullet travelling at 24,000 km an hour hitting another bullet travelling at the same speed.
Past tests on such systems have largely failed. That's why they have been called "madcap" missile defences.
However flawed, missile defence involves a completely new "security" paradigm. The earlier (Cold War) concept of security was based on deterrence or on balance of nuclear terror, in which neither side could survive, leave alone "win", a nuclear exchange.
Missile defence will produce a new form of nuclear anarchy in which the US hopes to have a decisive edge through its superior offensive forces, backed by the Star Wars shield which is meant to neutralise the "other" side's offensive capabilities.
The "natural" response of these "other" states would be to build more and more offensive forces so as to retain a vestige of their capability to inflict "unacceptable" damage upon the US to achieve "security" for themselves. Some, like Russia and China, may also respond to missile defence in kind.
This could spark an altogether new nuclear arms race, as well as inaugurate anarchy.
The "rogue states"-cited as the apparent rationale for NMD/TMD-would also feel encouraged to develop new weapons, including missiles.
If the US abrogates the ABM treaty, as Bush has threatened to do, there is every likelihood that Russia will retaliate by scrapping existing arms control agreements such as the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty and the subsequent START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty)-I and -II agreements.
China feels especially threatened by the US's "limited" NMD/TMD, which can intercept only about 20 missiles. That's the precise strength of China's ICBMs which can reach the US mainland.
China too has threatened to open up all existing arms control measures and review its own (largely defensive) strategic doctrine in case the US goes ahead with NMD/TMD.
Bush has deliberately couched his call for a disastrously adventurist security posture and a "multi-layered" plan in reasonable-sounding "pro-peace" terms. For instance, he said: "We must seek security based on more than the grim premise that we can destroy those who seek to destroy us" and "move beyond the Cold War legacy".
He also promised unilateral cuts in the US nuclear arsenal which consists of 7,200 nuclear weapons. However, he did not put a number on this. Even if these cuts are deeper than those promised under START-II (3,000 to 3,500 warheads), they won't reverse the damage caused by missile defences.
Supporters of missile defence, including some Indian apologists, have sown further confusion by contrasting "defence" to "offence", suggesting that there is something "positive" about Star Wars-style "defences".
This is a classic instance of Doublespeak. In reality, NMD and TMD-style "defences" aim to shoot down adversary missiles either in the boost stage-soon after takeoff-or at the final stage of their trajectory. Both kinds of manoeuvre are offensive and aggressive.
NMD/TMD will promote across-the-spectrum US missile superiority. They will also militarise outer space itself. (Only last year, the Pentagon put out a blueprint for the complete domination of space).
Such "defence" will only encourage further and deadlier offence, accelerating rivalry and destabilising the global strategic balance.
India has made an unacceptable compromise with Bush's dangerous strategic doctrine by buying into "the strategic and technological inevitability" of a shift from the present world of "mutual assured destruction". But Bush is not moving away from "the adversarial legacy of the Cold War". He is in fact launching a new Cold War (minus, of course, the Eastern Bloc).
India has pathetically put a gloss upon Bush's controversial announcement. It has lavished fulsome praise upon him for "moving away" from "the hair-trigger alerts associated with prevailing nuclear orthodoxies".
However, Bush's statement was in no way meant to discard nuclear orthodoxies by radically rejecting reliance on nuclear weapons for security. Had he wanted to do that, he would have followed the straightforward logic of the 1996 World Court judgment on the illegality of nuclear weapons, and accepted the imperative of abolition underlined in last year's NPT Review Conference held under UN auspices.
On the contrary, under Bush's plan, prevailing orthodoxies will give way to new, even more dangerous, orthodoxies and doctrines.
Equally flawed is India's "appreciation" of the imaginary "US resolve to seek dialogue, consultation and cooperation with the countries concerned". Washington is merely sending out envoys to tell other states that it is determined to go ahead with missile defences, no matter what they think. So-called "consultation" and "dialogue" are mere euphemisms.
New Delhi's support for Bush marks a profound degeneration of India's security thinking. Until three years ago, and for 50 years, India rejected nuclear deterrence or reliance on nuclear weapons for security as "abhorrent". With the Pokharan-II tests, it embraced that very doctrine, but claimed that its nuclear arsenals would help it expand its room for autonomous and independent action.
Over the past two years, New Delhi has moved towards "strategic partnership" with Washington and increasingly accepted America's agenda in security, economy, trade, environment, etc.
New Delhi's uncritical endorsement of Bush's missile defence plan marks a new low in India's international vision and diplomacy. It means accepting the fraudulent argument about "rogue states" such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, "threatening" the US.
India has traditionally rejected their categorisation as "rogues" or "states of concern". It has normal diplomatic relations with all these countries and has just upgraded its ties with Iran, besides signing a long-term oil agreement with Iraq.
For Washington too, missile defences mean rejecting diplomacy and any possibility of dialogue. This spells the triumph of militarism and reliance on brute force. Besides, it is extremely doubtful if these "rogues" can seriously "threaten" the US for years, even decades, to come.
On a more long-term view, the Indian government, like the Bush administration, is attacking Cold War style nuclear deterrence-not "radically", from the Left, but from the extreme Right, by rejecting nuclear restraint, including the vital constraint placed by the ABM treaty on a runaway nuclear arms race.
Ironically, India's endorsement of missile defence will end up working against this country's own interests. Renewed competition for missile superiority, collapse of existing restraint regimes, and likely nuclear rearming by the major powers, are bound to damage global security and draw India into serious armed competition with China.
A Sino-Indian nuclear arms race will prove strategically and economically ruinous. India's military spending has doubled over the last five years-the largest such increase since Independence. The defence budget rose sharply by 28 percent last year and then again by 14 percent, even as spending on the social sector has stagnated or declined.
However, the Vajpayee government is bent on being more loyal than the King in zealously endorsing "Star Wars"-to its own detriment and disgrace.
Copyright 2001 Tehelka.com
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