Tit-for-Tat missile Race, Instability in South Asia
Praful Bidwai
InterPress Service, 15 April 1999
NEW DELHI, Apr 15 (IPS) - Pakistan Thursday tested a new medium-range missile, 'Shaheen,' raising the level of the all-too-
familiar harsh rhetoric of hostility and war mongering exchanged by India and Pakistan.
Again, India was the first to add a dangerous, new edge to the military rivalry between the two nuclearised South Asian nations
by test-firing the intermediate-range 'Agni' missile on Apr. 11 that was followed Wednesday by a retaliatory missile test by Pakistan.
The missile rivalry has the potential to completely derail the tentative and weak process of mutual conciliation launched barely
two months ago at Lahore.
It once again highlights the fragility of the deterrent equation between the two rivals after they crossed the nuclear threshold last year in May.
The immediate effect of the test-launches is to end the phase of nuclear-military restraint that India and Pakistan practised
largely under international, especially US pressure since late last year.
The neighbours had eight rounds of talks with the US during which they promised to limit and slow down their nuclear and missile preparations, and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
India had little immediate strategic rationale for conducting the Agni test. The real reason was largely political - a desperate attempt by the beleaguered, coalition government led by the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, which may be counting its last days, to gain popularity and cling to power.
The Agni programme is not Pakistan-specific. The aim of the Indian test was to extend the range of Indian missiles so they
eventually hit Chinese population centres. Indeed, government supporters have called for more such tests with the aim of developing missiles with a range of 3,000 to 5,000 kms.
But the Agni has strong implications for Pakistan too. The missile can be stationed and launched from southern Indian sites
that Pakistani aircraft or short-range missiles cannot easily or reliably reach.
There was little surprise, then, in the hostile reaction the test invoked from Pakistan's officials. Its Army chief called the Agni launch 'indirect aggression' by India.
China has deplored India's missile test. It is likely to respond with vigorous nuclear-missile preparations targeted at India. In particular, it may re-launch its programme to develop the Dong-Feng 25, a missile with the range to hit peninsular India. China suspended this programme when relations with India improved with two major tension-defusing pacts in the mid-1990s.
India's Agni development programme was launched in 1983. Of its three tests until 1994, only one was fully successful. India has already assured the US that it is not about to deploy nuclear weapons. The Agni will need a series of tests before it can fly as a missile.
The timing of the test was not defence related. It was determined by the political crisis in which the government finds itself - it has to prove its majority in Parliament before Apr. 17 - and by pressure from the nuclear and defence establishments.
Hardliners there know that the ultra-nationalist BJP is the only party with a long-standing obsession with making India a nuclear and missile superpower.
A missile race will not enhance India's security, but create new insecurities. In strategic terms, it makes sense for India to reduce and eliminate, not foment and aggravate, nuclear and missile rivalry with its neighbours.
In a nuclear arms race, like in nuclear wars, there are no winners. That is precisely what the nuclear arms race during the Cold War taught Indian leaders. They argued for long years that nuclear weapons do not provide security; they are not weapons of defence or resistance, but instruments of mass annihilation.
India also insisted that the use, even the threat of use, of nuclear weapons, is illegitimate, strategically unworkable and morally unacceptable: so-called nuclear deterrence leads not to security, but to insecurity through an ever-escalating arms race.
India's present rulers first erased that lesson - and their own memory - last May. Last week, they destroyed it a second time. In the bargain, they have not only jeopardised India's security, but imposed huge costs upon society.
Developing a relatively crude intermediate missile costs anything between one and three billion dollars. The Agni is a fairly primitive prototype - it will take scores of flights and other experiments before it can be inducted into the army.
With the money India spends on each such missile, it can build 10,000 primary schools or 500 hospitals. For each of the solid-fuel engines of the missile, it can provide safe drinking water to 30,000 people.
This is not all. Missile development will probably jeopardise the gains made at the India-Pakistan summit at Lahore in February - the first thawing of icy relations after the May tests.
The missile tests, far from improving the regional climate, will sanction threat escalation and war-mongering. This can only be detrimental to South Asia's security.
Copyright 1999 InterPress Service
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