Disarmament and Restraint: A View from India

Disarmament and Restraint: A View from India
Achin Vanaik
The Hindu, 8 October 1998

What will now be India's role in the future pursuit of
global disarmament and restraint? Certainly, we can expect to
be repeatedly told by pro-nuclear nationalists of all stripes
that India going nuclear is the best way to promote global
restraint and disarmament. To start with, this claim should
be discarded on grounds of basic intelligence and commitment
to simple honesty. This is what all nuclear weapons states
(NWSs) have always said to justify the retention of the
weapons. The more significant point is that after the end of
the Cold War, for the first time since the nuclear age began,
we saw the emergence of a new and genuine momentum (howsoever
hesitant and uneven) of actual disarmament reductions and
real restraint instead of what took place for decades, namely
efforts to manage the pace and character of an ongoing arms
race. This was, and is, a precious gain indeed, even if still
far from enough.

Its reality was reflected in numerous ways - treaty
related and non-treaty related reductions and the elimination
of whole classes of nuclear weapons including tactical
weapons, a dramatic lowering of alert levels, the
renunciation of nuclear weapons status and capabilities by
certain states, the emergence of new nuclear weapon-free
zones, stronger efforts to press for a CTBT, an international
registry of plutonium stocks, production cutoffs and stock
reductions of fissile materials, etc. What made India's
decision to go nuclear particularly shocking to the
overwhelming majority of the non-nuclear weapons states
(NNWSs) was that it not only badly damaged this momentum but
also showed utter disregard and contempt for its very
existence.

This is a major reason why Indian criticism of the NNWSs
for not similarly criticising other countries for being NWSs
is so out of place. Not only did 34 years elapse before any
new country joined the nuclear club but over the last decade
there has been a genuine progress on this front and there
have been justifiable reasons for believing that things could
improve even further despite the hesitations and
manipulations of the NWSs. India went nuclear because of
particular perceptions of what its so-called national
interest demanded, not because of any concern to promote
restraint and disarmament. But true to the manner of all
NWSs, it hypocritically seeks to claim that in so defending
its national interest it is simultaneously making a positive
contribution to worldwide disarmament efforts, hence the
common trope that the best way to nuclearly disarm is to
arm!

This is as silly as it sounds. It assumes that India can
now or soon enough, frighten, awe or worry the US into
further disarming, when it can never do any of these things.
In fact, hawkish behaviour by India only strengthens the
hawks in other NWSs, be they in Pakistan, China or the US
Nuclear arming expresses and reinforces hostilities that have
prior political foundations; it does not ease the hostility
or eliminate its political causes. Thus any attempt to claim
that nuclear arming caused the Cold War to end or its
tensions to decline is simply an inversion of logic. It is
because Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev was first determined to
eliminate the Cold War tensions that it became possible to
have reductions in nuclear arms. But then deterrence thinking
is inherently illogical and always gives rise to outrageous
and flawed claims by its advocates because of the desperate
need to defend its supposed value.

Let us look at the likely shape of things to come. India
is a de facto member of the nuclear club. New Delhi wants
recognition of this and at least an informal ''acceptance.'
But membership is graded according to the number and
sophistication of the nuclear weapons systems. There is the
first class status - the US and Russia; and second class
status - the middle nuclear powers, the UK, France and China.
In the second rank, the first two do not have adequate second
strike capacities against Russia, and China does not have it
against the US These variations and relative imbalances mean
that there are differences between the first and second ranks
concerning issues of restraint and disarmament. India and
Pakistan, incidentally, are third-class members and will
never have a higher status.

Thus even after acceptance into the club, there will be
tensions between these different classes of members and
within them. As long as actual reductions were not feasible,
e.g., during the Cold War era, the second rank said it would
join disarmament negotiations if the superpowers reduced
their arsenals by 50 per cent. When, after the end of the
Cold War, this became not only feasible but certain, they
changed their position and said they would join only when the
Russian and US arsenals shrank by 95 per cent. If the current
momentum falters and if, say the US rightwing plans to build
a paler version of Star Wars i.e., a Theatre Altitude Area
Defence succeed, followed by similar Russian preparations,
then prospects of the middle nuclear powers moving towards
disarmament will become remote. If, however, the momentum of
reductions continues, they will go along with certain
restraint measures and may be persuaded to informally, if not
formally, obey a ''no increase' position i.e., accept an
upper limit to their arsenals until such time as they might
join disarmament negotiations.

Currently, it is easier to get France and the UK than
China to consider this but the latter can, under appropriate
conditions, be brought round over time. India (followed by
Pakistan), however, will not behave in such a manner until it
first goes through the prolonged process of actually
expanding and increasing its operational arsenal. This is
bound to cause future problems and tensions with the two
grades of nuclear powers above. More so, because China will
be carefully watching what India does and will make its
preparations accordingly. These, in turn, can complicate the
prospects for further reductions or restraining behaviour by
some of the other NWSs.

In short, all these countries in the club are determined
to subordinate firmly all considerations of nuclear restraint
and disarmament to their perceived ''national interests.'
Insofar as these interests clash, or simply do not converge,
their perspectives on disarmament and restraint will clash or
differ significantly on specific issues. Thus, in regard to a
fissile materials cut-off treaty (FMCT), one should not be
surprised that even if there is agreement among all the
members of the nuclear club to negotiate this, the Indian
Government may want to delay the conclusion of negotiations
as much as possible because it may not be certain how much of
stock it needs to build before going in for full production
renunciation and therefore how much time it may need. If it
has to delay matters this way, it will, of course, try and
pose all the while as a government deeply and genuinely
concerned about moving the world towards total disarmament as
quickly as possible and will rely on a bevy of its supporters
to rationalise away its betrayal of this principle in
practice. Thus every member of this club shares a common
general attitude towards matters of restraint and disarmament
- they will all be cautious, deceptive, deceitful, uncertain
and unreliable, even periodically oppositional, in the
pursuit of such measures.

But whatever the differences within the club, what unites
them against outsiders - the NNWSs which want as rapid and
comprehensive a disarmament as possible - is more important
than what divides them. Here the two most important rules of
the game are

(a) the NNWSs must not be allowed to set the agenda of
disarmament, neither its content nor its pace. Their efforts
to do this must be resisted, outflanked or, at the least,
diluted. Here there is some scope for differences in
approach, i.e., between how different NWSs will relate to the
NNWSs. So China has often posed as more amenable to NNWSs'
concerns but never unilaterally breaking rank with the NWSs
to accept a restraint or disarmament measure.

(b) Further membership of, or entry into the club, must
be prevented.

India will scrupulously follow these rules. On the FMCT,
it will have a united front with the other five NWSs to
oppose any question of stocks reductions being brought in.
But because the five NWSs already have more than enough
stockpiles of weapons - grade fuel and have voluntarily
stopped further production, without bringing stocks in, or
achieving some other concession in regard to
multilateralising disarmament negotiations (e.g., setting up
an ad hoc committee with, to begin with, a discussion mandate
on global disarmament), the FMCT is meaningless. On the
question of maintaining the non-proliferation regime, it will
act 'responsibly' i.e., not encourage or endorse further
entry by other nuclear capable states even though this
'unfair discrimination' is cited as one reason why India was
'driven' to demand its own entry. Any Indian nauseated by
such forms of behaviour in regard to issues of disarmament
must expect to be dismissed by our so-called strategic
experts as politically naive and sentimentalising 'peaceniks'
when they are not being described anti-national.

Copyright 1998 The Hindu