After the CTBT... India's Intentions

After the CTBT... India's Intentions
Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik s
The Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 53, No. 2, March-April 1997

More than six months after it was adopted in the UN General Assembly,the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB) remains a victim of narrowly perceived national security interests.

Three sour ironies marked the way agreement was reached. First, India, which pioneered the proposal in 1954, became its bitterest opponent, alone vetoing it at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, thus denying the CTB universality.

Second, for all the hard bargaining over 33 months, the CTB may well remain a paper treaty with an entry-into-force clause (Article XIV) that makes it uniquely vulnerable to the specific perceptions of any of the 44 states that must ratify it. Among them is India, which declared last
September that it would not sign it then-or later.

Third, the CTB is no longer comprehensive in the way it would have been in the 1950s and 1960s. It permits non-explosive weapons-related tests. While the value of these tests in weapons development is debatable-indeed, virtually nonexistent according to many scientists-such tests will keep weapons labs running, bomb designers employed, and delusions about weapons efficacy alive. This will surely hamper ratification by many states.

The CTB debacle occurred because key governments have been unwilling to harmonize their national interests with the universal stake in nuclear restraint. Russia, China, and Britain, for instance, were not enthusiastic about a zero-yield CTB that did not include India. Hence, their
heavy-handed insistence on Article XIV, which so offended India.

Meanwhile, the United States, with claims to leadership, failed to dissuade them in the summer of 1996, partly because of domestic preoccupations with the impending presidential election.

India, of course, was deeply suspicious of any measure that might constrain its weapons option.

France vitiated the early negotiating climate by conducting a nuclear test series. And Pakistan, not unexpectedly, remained India-obsessed, refusing to sign if India didn't sign.

Because of such myopia, key states wasted an opportunity to negotiate a truly consensual treaty that would have had the explicit purpose of ending the nuclear arms race by banning all nuclear-related tests, not just tests producing a fission yield.

Nonetheless, the CTB is worthy of support. Weak as it is in some respects, it provides a foundation for moving toward the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Like any measure designed to restrain weapons development, the CTB's greatest value is normative. It expresses a political commitment to declare nuclear weapons undesirable as a currency of power.

The CTB is the first significant nuclear restraint measure multilaterally negotiated in a quarter-century. It is part of a new, uncertain-yet real-post­Cold War momentum favoring nuclear disarmament.

Equally important is the psychological impact of the CTB, which will reduce fear and uncertainty about an adversary's plans to develop new weapons.

The CTB will create more stability and confidence as well as enormously complicating weapons development.

Why, then, the Indian opposition to the CTB, and why the muted criticism of it in some circles?

India's incoherence

First, the deviousness of the nuclear powers and the weakening of the CTB gave some credibility to India's mistakenly one-sided claim that the treaty was only a nonproliferation measure. Second, India traded on its historically accumulated prestige as a sincere pro-disarmament
country, leading many outsiders to give it some benefit of the doubt and to misread the purposes and effects of its behavior.

There were three positions on display. The nuclear powers wanted a CTB that reflected their own reservations about abandoning testing, their own wishes to continue some level of qualitative weapons development, and their own concerns about arms restraint and nuclear disarmament. The net result was to weaken the context of disarmament in which the CTB had been historically situated.

In contrast, most of the non-nuclear weapon states wanted to strengthen the disarmament context. They wanted stronger assurances from the nuclear powers-a commitment to nuclear disarmament in the preamble, possibly incorporating the principle of time-bound disarmament, even if no precise schedule was specified.

The non-nuclear states also wanted a commitment by the nuclear powers to set up-for the first time ever-an ad hoc committee on global nuclear disarmament in the Conference on Disarmament. These perspectives were never seriously entertained by New Delhi.

India's position was unique: It insisted on a time-bound specification- not in the preamble but in the entry-into-force article, where it
would have been truly binding. This insistence on a currently unrealistic condition was to prepare a justification in advance for rejecting the treaty.

India's spoiler role would have been more strongly condemned but for the British, Russian, and Chinese machinations behind Article XIV, which required that all nuclear-capable states who were members of the Conference on Disarmament sign and ratify the treaty before it could enter into force.

That get-India thrust was unfair to both India and the treaty. The unwarranted pressure pushed India into shifting its diplomatic strategy from merely disassociating itself from the treaty to actively obstructing it.

India prevented treaty consensus in Geneva not because this would force desired changes in Article XIV, but because it wanted a less credible CTB. In turn, that would undermine the credibility of the Conference on Disarmament, which, in India's view, too often reflects the interests of the nuclear powers.

An intention to undermine the Conference on Disarmament also explains India's seemingly petty obstruction of consensual passage to the United Nations of a merely factual report (that no consensus had been reached). After all, the Conference is mandated to negotiate a fissile material cutoff treaty, which India now opposes except on its own intransigent terms.

What else explains India's unique stand? Certainly not the self-image it wishes to propagate: of an India standing alone in defiance of the nuclear powers; of an India alone remaining true to the goal of rapid nuclear disarmament.

Of the three "nuclear-capable" nations-Pakistan and Israel being the other two-India's posture of nuclear ambiguity has been the most incoherent. Both Pakistan and Israel have a clear strategic perspective and are prepared to give up the nuclear option-provided, in one case, that there is a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, and in the other, that India gives up its weapons.

India has no such clarity. It cites the Pakistani nuclear threat-which can be eradicated by both countries agreeing to denuclearize. And it cites the Chinese threat for rejecting this course. But merely keeping the option open is, even for deterrence believers, an increasingly unconvincing counter.

For India, the CTB represented a Day of Judgment, in which its incoherence was most starkly revealed. If it had supported the CTB, thus capping Indian and Pakistani capabilities, pressure would have built to denuclearize South Asia.

But in rejecting the treaty, India laid the groundwork for seriously considering enhancing its nuclear capability-or even exercising it,
perhaps by conducting tests. What, after all, is the point of India not signing the CTB but then remaining where it would have been if it had signed?

The second logic is now operating in India. There is now more internal pressure than ever before to carry out tests. This is solely the
result of a domestic debate that has created distorted self-perceptions justifying such belligerency. In fact, there has been no qualitative shift in Chinese and Pakistani nuclear behavior.

Demonstrable changes needed

Today's India is the not the pro-disarmament India of the past. Rather, it is a nation more determined than ever before to subordinate global disarmament interests to narrower so-called national security interests.

However, if genuine progress can be made in the post-CTB context toward strengthening the general global climate of nuclear restraint and disarmament, this may help persuade India to forgo further weaponization. Early ratification of the CTB by the nuclear powers will be helpful. But early ratification is neither certain nor-perhaps-enough.

There also has to be substantive arms reduction-a series of STARTs, class-by-class elimination of munitions, multilateral agreements among the nuclear powers to end deployments and dismantle warheads. More nuclear-weapons-free zones will also help, especially if actual missile dismantlement is involved.

Such substantial and visible progress by the nuclear powers is not just desirable but necessary, if public perceptions in India and Pakistan are to change. The power elites of these two countries have convinced large numbers at home that the nuclear powers are not serious about
disarmament, that nuclear weapons are here to stay, and that Indians and Pakistanis must not be left "defenseless."

Generalized calls for nuclear disarmament, such as the report of the Canberra Commission last August, have little impact on the
Subcontinent. What is needed is rapid arms reduction and demonstrable changes in nuclear doctrines to generate confidence that total nuclear disarmament is feasible. Achieving and sustaining a universalized CTB needs a commitment to achieving more than the treaty. That is where the real political challenge lies.

Copyright 1997 Bulletin for the Atomic Scientists