India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 15 :: No. 13 :: June 20 - July 03, 1998

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NUCLEAR ISSUES

India must say 'No' to CTBT and FMCT

Arundhati Ghose was India's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva between July 1995 and November 1997. She was an articulate and high-profile participant in the decisive stages of the negotiations that led to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In a discussion with N. Ram and Sukumar Muralidharan at her house in Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, New Delhi, she outlined her perceptions of the situation that has arisen with the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. Excerpts:

You have clearly stated your opposition to the CTBT and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) to come. In a recent newspaper article you characterised them both as corollaries to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Could you explain in the changed context, post-Pokhran II, what is the basis of this opposition?

Let me respond by going back a bit. The NPT is the foundation of the present nuclear regime. Let me go even one step further back. Having been in Geneva and having handled a variety of issues - environment, trade, human rights and disarmament - it appears to me that post-Cold War, there has been an effort to try and build a network of laws to retain the present status quo. It may be valid for a single superpower to be seeking to do that. You would have some small objections on specific issues, so it is not all going in one way. But certainly on the disarmament side things are all going their way. That is why the indefinite extension of NPT became such a major issue - because it is the foundation of a permanent status quo.

We have called it the Unequal Global Nuclear Bargain.

That's right. From that, two things followed. And someone has obviously been doing a lot of hard work, because they pick up the issues that we as India have proposed and have espoused via the Non-Aligned Movement through the years. They have left out all the other issues - anything to do with weapons they have left out - but they picked up the CTBT and the FMCT. Now basically these treaties are not relevant to those who are already signatories to the NPT. They are therefore significant only to the eight - that is the P-5 and the three who are not signatories to the NPT, that is, India, Pakistan and Israel. Certainly during the CTBT negotiations they said that. It is the same thing for the FMCT. What this means is that this is targeted, because the others in any case cannot produce fissile material.

So basically they are dummy signatures - all but eight of those 44 who are required to sign for Entry Into Force of the CTBT?

That was only to get India in. This is one of probably 20 alternative drafts they tried - a variety of formulations were tried for that particular article (on Entry Into Force). So I said I would not accept India's name on it (the list of signatures required for Entry Into Force). So they said all members of the CD (Conference on Disarmament) should sign. I said you are pushing me to a position where I will walk out of the CD.

The CTBT was intended basically to capture the three. Of the three, Israel in any case cannot test, because its territory is too small. The U.S. Defence Department gets a major part of its software from Israel. Therefore, it is very easy and logical to believe that any data acquired by Israel would come from the special relationship with the U.S.

N. SRINIVASAN

The second is Pakistan and what we always suspected now turns out to be true - that in order to keep India engaged below the Himalayas, the Chinese have been helping Pakistan. I think they overplayed that strategy of theirs by giving nuclear material and missile knowhow. We had said this during the CTBT in very oblique terms. But it was quite clear - we said we have a nuclear weapon state on our borders, and a clandestine one also. Therefore, our security situation is such that we cannot accept any restraints, unless there is elimination of nuclear weapons altogether.

Now from that, anybody who took us seriously - and clearly they did not - would have known that the tests were coming. Now I am very sorry that the Government made this into a BJP thing. No tests in my very limited information can be prepared in two months. It takes months, if not years, of actual preparation. So several governments - in that short period, I think we had four governments - all four, the entire political spectrum, would have known that the tests were in the offing.

The tests were implicitly written into our bargaining posture on the CTBT?

No, not implicitly. We said that we would accept no restraints.

But the understanding was that we had a global perspective on the nuclear disarmament question - that national security concerns were derivative in a sense.

In the CTBT we made it clear that we could not be expected not to look after our security concerns. What we were projecting was that our security lay in a world without nuclear weapons. But should there be nuclear weapons, we cannot be outside. Not because we felt they would be used against us, though they could, but because we felt they could be used for coercion. Again, the people in government may not admit this, but I believe - I was there in Calcutta in 1971, tracking the USS Enterprise coming into the Bay of Bengal - if that was not nuclear coercion then I do not know what is.

So we have our security concerns and our commitment to disarmament, except - and this is what my experience of dealing with the nuclear weapon states for three years tells me - they have no intention to give up their nuclear weapons. What they do want, though, is to try and freeze the present status quo, and draw everyone into a particular kind of architecture they are building. The difficulty arises in the minds of the U.S. not only with regard to India, but also to Russia and China. So they made compromises with Russia and China to get them into this architecture. But they did not imagine that India would ever challenge their hegemony, which is why they are so angry - especially the U.S. and China.

What explains the co-sponsoring of the U.N. resolution for some kind of a CTBT by the Narasimha Rao Government? Were they on a different track then?

I do not know. I couldn't comment on that.

Was there an implicit calculation that the U.S. would never come around to accepting a comprehensive test ban?

I would not comment on that.

It looks like the BJP Government has swung all the way from the sovereign right of exercising this option to an idea that we may be willing to sign the CTBT in some form.

This thinking is a lot of rubbish. You cannot amend the CTBT unless you are a member. You therefore have to join an unamended CTBT. If you want an amendment, you will have to call an amendment conference for which you have to get the consent of a majority of the membership. Quite apart from that, we castigated the P-5 quite correctly, saying that you are negotiating something which you can live with - because you can do sub-critical testing and simulation and all that. And therefore, this is a charade - this is what I.K. Gujral called it. And now, are we going to join this same charade? Are we such hypocrites? We would let down not only the people in India who were led to believe something, we would let down a lot of countries who shared our position.

Are we not undermining our longstanding policy by moving in this direction of signing?

Absolutely. In other words, we do not mind an unequal treaty, provided we are on the side of those who are stronger, I mean, this is not India. Quite apart from the fact that this treaty is so full of loopholes and it legitimises espionage.

It allows what are known as "national technical means" to come in...

Yes, because the International Monitor-ing System cannot detect explosions below one kiloton. So who is going to do that detection? Who has the capability to do this? I was told by the Chinese that NATO has 26 monitoring stations surrounding China and a minimum of five or six satellites in permanent geostationary orbits over their territory, to monitor their nuclear testing programme.

But my feeling is that we cannot be absolutely negative. I think one of the things the Prime Minister said is that we would declare a moratorium on testing. Now I think that in Parliament we can pass a bill which makes this a de jure moratorium.

This would be binding on all future governments.

That you can take from the CTBT. You can quote article IX. Here it is: "Each state party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from this Treaty, if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardised its supreme interests." Now, mutatis mutandis, you can work this into your act, saying that if in future anything happens that jeopardises our supreme national interest, all options are open. We are in other words, accepting the principle of not testing. I am not saying never to a cessation of testing. I say never to the CTBT.

A second thing is that we should take a "no first use" position unilaterally. We need not go for a bilateral or collective bargain. And we should also make it very clear, probably as a part of this enabling legislation - that India will never attack a non-nuclear weapon state.

As China has...

China has said it as a statement. We should put it as a part of our legislation.

The Americans have put forward three demands on India - to sign the CTBT quickly without conditions, to participate positively in the negotiations for an FMCT, and to undo our weaponisation process.

How dare they even suggest this? What is it that we have been saying till as late as last year. On the FMCT, we have said we will not block you. You want to have an FMCT, so why don't the P-5 do what they did with the CTBT? We suggested, "Why don't the five of you sign, then give it to us and if we like it, we will sign."

What is the problem with the FMCT? Let us say that we stop producing fissile material by the year 2005. And if we do not have enough stocks by then, then really we do not deserve anything better. But the core of the FMCT is the verification regime - and the verification regime is tantamount to full-scope safeguards.

In that sense, it is much worse than the CTBT.

Yes. The CTBT is based on certain technologies, which have to give rise to a suspicion that an event has occurred. Here (in the FMCT) there is no such thing - it is much more intrusive. Let me add one thing more. India had taken this weird position, when we were with the P-5, in saying that stockpiles should not be touched. How then are you supporting nuclear disarmament? So, fortunately we changed that somewhere along the route. We introduced a question: Why only plutonium and highly enriched uranium? Why not tritium? And why don't we include the fissile material which is already in warheads today?

The idea is to prohibit any fissile material, however defined, for weapons purposes or outside safeguards.

Well, basically they say for weapons purposes, and therefore it means that everything will be under full-scope safeguards.

So we might as well have signed the NPT?

Exactly. But then, we should not always be seen as saying no. I think we should put forward a proposal to ban tactical nuclear weapons. It will take a long time to define what is a tactical nuclear weapon. This need not be within the CD. We can have another forum - it can be set up, that is not a problem. The idea is to have a treaty to ban tactical nuclear weapons, as a first step towards the elimination. I had another idea, which is to start working on a very stringent verification regime, so that when you eliminate nuclear weapons in the distant future, should that ever happen - then, nobody would have a bomb in the basement. So that if we start talking about a stringent verification regime, it would be a confidence building measure among the nuclear weapon states.

The FMCT, if it is what we think it is, will suffer from all the flaws of the CTBT plus the near-certainty of full-scope safeguards.

Let me also put in another point. The CTBT was pushed when the nuclear weapon states had completed their programme of explosive tests. Today they have brought up the FMCT when all five have declared moratoria on the production of these two fissile materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium). Why do you then need a treaty involving the others?

So now, after Pokhran-II and Chagai, this whole thing will get speeded up. They will bring it forward...

If they start that, then I am afraid that we will do another CTBT. And I don't think we can afford it.

We cannot afford to stand alone any more?

That we can, but the support we once had will not be there. We cannot have a repeat performance. I would say: let us take up tactical nuclear weapons, leading to a Nuclear Weapons Convention. The FMCT and the CTBT are dead - they should be given a decent burial. The old nuclear regime is in tatters. There is no way you can undo Pokhran, by patching something here and there.

The initiative need not be in the CD, you said. It could be outside.

You see, the CD has 61 members, and various groups. All the members of NATO are present. The NAM countries are already signatories of the NPT and they never turn up. So the entire thing turns out to be a kind of fight between NATO and two or three countries. I do not think we should be too dogmatic about the forum.

The U.S. position is that CD, being a multilateral forum, is not appropriate for discussing nuclear disarmament - that this issue is being dealt with bilaterally under the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) process.

But today India is saying that nuclear disarmament should be discussed at some multilateral forum, and India is a nuclear weapon state.

What would your reaction be if this scenario came about. You have declared yourself a nuclear weapon state. Now, to say that weaponisation is complete after five tests may not be accurate. Anyway the Government of India has declared India a nuclear weapon state and the U.S. and the P-5 have said "no go". And they have made these three demands - now even if we do not concede the third demand, we are very close to conceding on the CTBT and the FMCT. So post-Pokhran and post-Chagai, India's position would seem to be much weaker than it was before. And secondly, India's nuclear option would be more or less finished.

I agree. Should the Government proceed on the lines that you have spelt out, then not only is our position much weaker, but all options too would be closed.