India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 15 :: No. 20 :: Sep. 26 - Oct. 09, 1998

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NUCLEAR AFFAIRS

Getting off the tiger

An analysis of why signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and capitulation to the Unequal Global Nuclear Bargain, cannot be the way out of the present mess.

N. RAM

THE Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government's nuclear policy has swung, within four months, from hawkishness and jingoism to near surrender to the terms laid down by the enforcers of the Unequal Global Nuclear Bargain (UGNB), principally the United States. The adventure of conducting five nuclear explosions and rushing to declare India a full-fledged nuclear weapon state, which had managed to "vacate" any nuclear threat to itself, has turned out to be an akratic misadventure, a sort of riding the tiger.

How does one get off?

An objective assessment of what has happened since May 11, 1998 points clearly to what needs to be done. The BJP-led Government's attempted nuclear weaponisation must be rolled back through concerted peace-oriented and democratic political opposition, which also means determined public pressure and action. The Pokhran and Chagai nuclear explosions cannot be undone, but nuclear weaponisation in India and Pakistan can be.

Deployment, fitting nuclear weapons on to ballistic missiles or other delivery systems, can be prevented. Putting in place the various elements actual nuclear weaponisation takes, and which neither India nor Pakistan seems to have acquired, can be averted. These would include a Nuclear Doctrine and a Nuclear Strategy; an efficient Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence System; an elaborate system to operate the Nuclear Trigger; Permissive Action Links (PAL) technologies; warning systems through satellite reconnaissance, air borne early warning systems, interception with sophisticated electronic systems, agents and so on; Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems; extremely sensitive radar systems; nuclear shelters and civil defence training, protective clothing and the like; equipping the armed forces for nuclear warfare; and so on.

Profligate, socially disastrous spending on such a dangerous path can be ruled out. The provocative linkage sought to be established between the Kashmir issue and nuclear weapon status (first proposed by Union Home Minister L.K. Advani and picked up as a political gift by the Nawaz Sharif Government in Pakistan) can, through an appropriate political process and confidence building measures, be given a decent burial.

Giving up nuclear weaponisation and deployment

Fortunately, giving up the path of nuclear weaponisation and deployment will be a verifiable process, especially in a country like India. Whether the Indian Government goes along, or gives up, such a path cannot be kept a secret for more than a few weeks.

Alongside these internal policy steps, India's commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world and its longstanding moral and political opposition to the UNGB - that is, to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and all its corollaries, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) to come - must be brought to the fore. The country's nuclear policy must be brought back to a principled, responsible and peace-oriented track.

The policy has long had two elements: (1) the pursuit of independence and the refusal to accept any external controls instituted in a discriminatory way, and (2) a commitment to the peaceful, non-military uses of nuclear energy and, therefore, self-restraint in not exercising the sovereign option of making nuclear weapons and deploying them.

What the BJP-led Government has achieved through its adventurism is the subversion, and mockery, of this policy. The idea of going over to the side of the discriminators as a minor partner, a sort of sidekick of the United States, through the 'modus vivendi' of joining the CTBT and the FMCT while retaining an unacknowledged, minor league 'de facto' nuclear weapon status goes against the grain of what is required from a progressive, democratic standpoint.

The principal issue before the people of India now is not the CTBT, it is the political and moral unacceptability of nuclear weaponisation - and its abhorrent accompaniment, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, in the Indian case, the tragi-comic doctrine of the "minimum, credible nuclear deterrent."

Getting off the tiger is, understandably, the Vajpayee Government's desperate concern. For political and ideological reasons, it cannot take the steps outlined above, which will amount to a virtual confession that Pokhran-II was a colossal blunder. But the BJP-led Government also lacks the heart and the stamina for a protracted struggle to uphold the logic of its nuclear actions, lacks, one might say, the courage of its wrong convictions. Hence the present dishonourable course.

Agenda of the Jaswant-Talbott talks

It is an open secret that the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks, all five rounds of them, have been essentially about crafting and dressing up the terms of capitulation to the UGNB so that economic sanctions, the political pressures, and the arm-twisting can be off. The crux of the deal will be acceding to the CTBT and the far more demanding FMCT to come while maintaining the pretence - for home consumption - that the Government's claimed nuclear weapon status has some kind of unstated acceptance, if not legitimisation, by the United States and the UGNB.

Left to itself, the Vajpayee Government will sign the CTBT tomorrow as the first big step towards meeting the terms of capitulation. The next major step is likely to be (U.S.-assisted) manipulation and propagandistic presentation of the Indian Government's role in the FMCT negotiations in Geneva so that it can eventually claim to have obtained an FMCT of the kind India can live with.

But acceding to the CTBT will involve a considerable - probably a huge - political risk for the BJP. Its political opponents, the Congress(I), the Left parties and the rest, influential sections of the media, and various circles involved in the nuclear policy debate of 1995-96 will very properly call a 'sell-out' when they see one. In addition, a section of nuclear hawks, especially those in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who want India to proceed defiantly along the path of weaponisation by conducting more tests and refusing to accept any restraints on fissile material production will be displeased.

The CTBT debate

After all, there has been a major political debate in India on the CTBT issue, an unusual example of a many-sided, comprehensive public debate on an issue of major importance. After all, in 1995-96, the BJP along with the Janata Dal, the Congress(I) and the Left parties took a strong stand against the CTBT, making for a rare national consensus in policy-making. After all, the objections to the treaty were discussed in depth and sold aggressively to the country. (So much so that in a recently written paper, "Returning To Our Own Agenda: Why India Should Sign The CTBT," two unilateralists, Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, have alleged that the outcome of the debate was a "terrible distortion of the very terms of discourse on the CTBT issue." Indeed Bidwai and Vanaik denounce the 1995-96 public debate as "one of the most shameful, deceitful, ignorant...on any issue in the last 50 years in India.")

V. SUDERSHAN
Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh during the third round of talks in New Delhi in July.

The CTBT was, as strategic affairs analyst Dr. C. Raja Mohan put it in an article in The Hindu of July 12, 1996, "designed to preserve the hegemony of the nuclear weapon powers... put a cap on India's nuclear capability," override "India's disarmament and security concerns," and subject it to the "worst form of political blackmail." Or, as he summed up in another article titled, "CTBT: playing the end-game," published in The Hindu of June 13, 1996: "India must be reconciled to three central facts. Even with a little more disarmament embroidery, the CTBT will not take the world even one step closer towards nuclear abolition. Second, the treaty is, in essence, a non-proliferation arrangement and one of its principal effects is to place a qualitative cap on the nuclear potential of India. Third, even if India agrees to join the CTBT, the effort of the West to denuclearise India will not stop. It will move from the CTBT to a fissile material cut-off treaty that imposes a quantitative cap on India's nuclear programme. If India succumbs to that, the next step is to roll back and eliminate India's nuclear and missile capabilities. It will be wise for India to draw the line now rather than get on to the slippery slope of denuclearisation."

Official characterisations

Nor were punches pulled at the official level. At a press conference in New York on August 30, 1996, Ambassador Prakash Shah, India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, characterised the treaty as "a flawed document that not only does not meet India's concerns, but even fails to meet the terms of the mandate given to the CTBT." He explained that the treaty failed to win a consensus at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, did not place the banning of nuclear tests within a nuclear disarmament framework, and remained "merely an extension of the exercise to limit horizontal nuclear proliferation." It failed to "stop development of nuclear weapons or their qualitative improvement by the nuclear weapon countries."

Ambassador Shah also set out India's vision of a genuine test ban treaty in rather elegant terms: "(a) such a treaty should be securely anchored in a global disarmament contract and linked through treaty language to the elimination of weapons in a time-bound framework; (b) it should end all nuclear weapon development be it explosive-based or non-explosive-based; and (c) it should not provide a licence, such as was provided by the indefinitely extended Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to proliferate nuclear weapons."

What conditions?

In the delusional mental haze that was a byproduct of the Pokhran explosions, the first official statements of the Vajpayee Government gave the impression that, with the magic weapons in hand, it was going to try to rewrite and rework the CTBT, if not the NPT regime itself. This posture then declined to fuzzy rhetoric claiming that there was no question of signing the CTBT "unconditionally." Prime Minister Vajpayee has repeatedly - confusedly as well as confusingly - asserted that his Government would not sign the CTBT "unconditionally" or "in its present form." This has naturally made everyone wonder what sort of conditions or concessions might be wrested from a multilateral treaty that has been signed by 150 countries, or what alternative 'form' of the treaty will be open for India to sign in the conceivable future.

But the recent explication by Prime Minister Vajpayee, his advisers and some strategic affairs apologists (who have now suddenly, reversing or rather obscuring their old arguments, decided that India must join the CTBT and also the FMCT to come) makes it clear that the 'conditions', or rather concessions, supposedly being negotiated have nothing to do with the CTBT. They are, in fact, irrelevant to the CTBT issue. A great deal of hot air has been invested in the suggestion that India will somehow win, after it signs the CTBT, an end to the 'international technological blockade', access to 'dual use' and even nuclear technology, 'eventual' acceptance of India's 'new nuclear position', and so forth.

A close look at the goodies - the pie in the sky - promised suggests that the process of negotiating accession to the CTBT on the basis of some major quid pro quo is a hoax that is being played on the Indian people.

The hoax in progress

To understand the nature of the hoax in progress, let us first look at the political demands the United States, backed by various other powerful countries, has publicly pressed on India in the wake of the Pokhran nuclear explosions. The three key demands are: (1) sign and ratify the CTBT quickly and without conditions; (2) participate positively and on the basis of the agreed mandate in the negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament on the FMCT; and (3) undo the nuclear weaponisation and the missile programme announced, and do not deploy nuclear weapons or missiles capable of delivering them. Post-Chagai, the same demands were pressed on Pakistan but India was identified as the principal target.

The full Western agenda was unveiled when the Foreign Ministers of the P-5, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Russian Federation, and China, met on June 4. The Geneva meeting formulated a bill of particulars that would, within days, be adopted by the United Nations Security Council in an unprecedented resolution. Six days after Security Council Resolution No. 1172 came a further escalation of the demands made on India and Pakistan. The June 12 communique of the G-8 Foreign Ministers, meeting in London, used language blunter and more peremptory than anything used against India in an international forum over the past 25 years.

After condemning the nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan, the G-8 Foreign Ministers demanded that the two countries "should immediately take" the following steps endorsed by the U.N. Security Council:

* "stop all further nuclear tests" and adhere to the CTBT "immediately and unconditionally," thereby facilitating its early entry into force.

* "refrain from weaponisation or deployment of nuclear weapons and from the testing or deployment of missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and enter into firm commitments not to weaponise or deploy nuclear weapons or missiles."

* "refrain from any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices and participate, in a positive spirit and on the basis of the agreed mandate," in negotiations with other states at the Conference on Disarmament on the FMCT "with a view to reaching early agreement."

* "confirm their policies not to export equipment, materials and technology that would contribute to weapons of mass destruction or missiles capable of delivering them, and undertake appropriate commitments in this regard."

In the process, the G-8 Foreign Ministers, building on the stand taken in the Geneva meeting of the P-5 and in the U.N. Security Council, underlined their commitment to the NPT as "the cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime." They also rubbed in the point that "notwithstanding those tests, India and Pakistan do not have the status of nuclear weapon states in accordance with the NPT."

It strains credulity for anyone to suggest that either the United States or the P-5 or the G-8 or those who subscribed to the U.N. Security Council resolution are ready to give up the core political position set out in these tough public documents.

India and the CTBT

Let us now review the precise reasons for India refusing to sign the CTBT in 1996, and see with an open mind whether these reasons have disappeared or weakened sufficiently for the CTBT to be signed today. The core objection, as spelt out in Geneva and New York by the Government of India's articulate representatives, was that the CTBT - as a corollary of the discriminatory NPT regime - failed to meet the test of both India's disarmament objectives and its security concerns.

Article I of the treaty prohibits state parties from conducting "any nuclear weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosion" and on the basis of the negotiating record, this is understood to include all nuclear explosions with yields above zero, in accordance with U.S. President Bill Clinton's August 1995 proposal. Article IV and the verification protocol provide for a tough verification regime which will rest on an International Monitoring System and on-site inspections that could, under certain circumstances (as Iraq's experience has shown even before the CTBT has entered into force), prove unacceptably intrusive. Then there is the near-coercive Article XIV which provides for Entry Into Force (EIF). What the latter means for India is that its ratification of the CTBT (along with ratification by 43 other states specified for possessing nuclear power and research reactors) has been made a specific condition for EIF. The effective deadline is September 24, 1999, that is, three years after the CTBT was opened for signature.

Discriminatory

Against such a draft treaty, the first and predictable Indian objection was that the nuclear weapon states led by the United States were bent on perpetuating the discriminatory nuclear order, the UGNB. Having exploded more than 2,000 nuclear devices and developed nuclear arsenals good enough to destroy the world many times over, they had now determined that there was no need for any more explosions. It was, in the words of Ambassador Shah, "an extension of the exercise to limit horizontal nuclear proliferation." "Designed," in the words of Raja Mohan, "to preserve the hegemony of the nuclear weapon powers," the CTBT was unacceptable to India which was resolutely opposed to discrimination in nuclear affairs. One of its "principal effects" as a non-proliferation arrangement would be to "place a qualitative cap on the nuclear potential of India."

Quite obviously, this basic feature of the CTBT remains; it is only the Indian Government's stand, and strategic affairs analysis, that has undergone a 180-degree turn. Now we are instructed, by both old and new apologists for the CTBT, that the treaty is not at all discriminatory because, unlike the NPT, it places the same obligations on all member signatories. As if we, and the Government of India representatives who characterised it as a corollary of the discriminatory NPT, did not know that. As if the real Indian objection was not that, in a formally equitable arrangement (which External Affairs Minister I.K. Gujral officially characterised as a "charade"), the effects of the obligations placed on nuclear weapon states and the rest, including the threshold states, would be profoundly different.

No time-bound disarmament commitment

The second official Indian objection was that the nuclear weapon states, led by the United States, were refusing to commit themselves to any time-bound disarmament schedule. Instead, they had provided themselves, in the words of Ambassador Shah, with "a licence... to proliferate nuclear weapons" through "the indefinitely extended Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." Obviously, this character flaw in the CTBT - the absence of any linkage with a time-bound global disarmament contract - remains, except that the Indian Government has now sought cover for India under the 'licence'.

Built-in loopholes

The third Indian objection to the CTBT was that the nuclear weapon states, and especially the United States, had written into the treaty loopholes which would permit them, while maintaining their active stockpiles, to continue refining and developing their nuclear arsenals at their test sites and in their laboratories. The CTBT prohibited all nuclear explosions above 'zero yield'. However, sophisticated sub critical experiments (SCEs), computer simulation and the development of frontier technologies, which were not banned, would enable the advanced nuclear weapon states to refine, develop and sharpen their nuclear arsenals.

Countering the "fantastic claims" made in India confusing the CTBT with "a disarmament measure," Raja Mohan asserted in an early 1996 article ("CTBT and nuclear hegemony", The Hindu, January 18, 1996) that for the U.S. establishment "it helps freeze the hierarchy among the nuclear weapon powers in favour of the U.S... helps limit the strategic capabilities of the only possible challenger to future American dominance, China... will be the first step in capping and eventually rolling back the nuclear potentials of emerging powers like India." The strategic affairs analyst pointed out, in this connection, that under a no-test regime, "the American lead in computer simulation helps it keep way ahead of its allies and likely adversaries among the nuclear five" and also helped the three Western nuclear weapon states, the U.S., the U.K. and France, to "deepen their cooperation in computer simulation of nuclear weapons under the leadership of America."

This differential - and discriminatory - effect of the CTBT ban on above 'zero yield' nuclear explosions is unlikely to have changed in favour of India as a result of the five Pokhran explosions, the data they have yielded, and the scientific capabilities they have established.

Coercive EIF clause

Fourthly, India strenuously objected to the near-coercive Article XIV, which provides that if the CTBT has not entered into force by September 24, 1999, the states which have ratified the treaty shall meet in a Conference that will consider the situation and "decide by consensus what measures consistent with international law may be undertaken to accelerate the ratification process in order to facilitate the early entry into force of this Treaty." It is noteworthy that even the NPT does not have this draconian provision for EIF. In effect, by throwing the entire burden of the CTBT coming into force on India's shoulders, by making India accountable for the treaty not entering into force and its consequences, and by fixing a deadline, Article XIV of the CTBT represents a direct demand on India's sovereignty and also an ultimatum.

National security concerns

The final, and important, Indian objection to the CTBT was raised from the standpoint of India's national security. In his statement of August 22, 1996 made in Geneva, External Affairs Minister Gujral mentioned, among other objections, "certain national security concerns" which "make it impossible for us to subscribe to a draft CTBT that is merely an instrument for horizontal non-proliferation rather than disarmament." India's security concerns "oblige us to maintain our nuclear option." While pointing out that the country had exercised "unparalleled restraint" in not carrying out nuclear explosions after 1974 and in refraining from "weaponising our option," Gujral declared that "we cannot accept constraints on our option as long as nuclear weapon states continue to rely on their nuclear arsenals for their security."

A week later, Ambassador Shah, pointing out that India was the only country that had since 1974 observed a voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests, asserted in New York: "Our opposition to this document has nothing to do with any change in our policy in continuing this moratorium." Ambassador Arundhati Ghose followed this up with a September 12, 1996 assertion that "India's security would best be guaranteed by the elimination of nuclear weapons."

Prime Minister Vajpayee's suo motu parliamentary statement of May 27, 1998, and the supporting policy paper, suggest that the "primary reason" for refusing to sign the CTBT was the assessment that India's national security concerns "remained unaddressed." This amounts to a rewriting of the recent historical record and airbrushing out of the policy other vital elements of what is, after all, a widely known position.

Expert appraisals

But even from a realpolitik standpoint, can it be said that the five Pokhran explosions have basically taken care of India's security concern-oriented objection to the CTBT? The answer is clearly no. The differential, and discriminatory, likely effects of the obligations imposed by the CTBT could not have been mitigated in any significant way by just five tests. Further, independent expert appraisals make the point that doubts remain about the real yield of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear explosions; that the design of the South Asian sub-kiloton tests does not suggest that weaponisation in the artillery, tactical or field range of weapons is "currently on the agenda"; that the Indian claim of being able to carry SCEs is "an overstatement of capability"; and that a real weaponisation programme "would demand more tests not only for SCEs but even for designing high-yield weapons..." (See "Matters of Technology", Frontline, July 17, 1998).

The experts underline the point that explosive testing of nuclear weapons has played a major role in validating the design of nuclear weapons and obtaining data for their improvement and for fresh designs. The number of tests done by nuclear weapon states for a new weapon design has tended to vary, but the range is between an average of six for the United States and a reported 22 in the case of France. Further, in the absence of testing, plutonium weapons which use the implosion method are generally regarded as less reliable than uranium weapons which use the gun-barrel assembly method. As for two-stage thermonuclear weapons, the science and technology of which the Indian nuclear energy establishment claims to have mastered, there would be very little confidence in such weapons without testing.

Not that one wants any more nuclear explosions to test, establish or improve weapon designs. The point is that these expert appraisals give the lie to the claims made by Government and security analysis propaganda that India's basic national security-centred objection to a CTBT has been removed by the explosions.

What the FMCT will require

But this is by no means all. The Vajpayee Government's nuclear policy is on the slippery slope to joining the FMCT which is being negotiated in Geneva. One has only to read the research articles available on the web-site of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi to understand how strongly, and why, the Indian Government and the nuclear policy establishment have, in the past, been opposed to the idea of such a treaty. It is clear that the FMCT will prohibit all further production of fissile material - highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium - for weapons purposes, or outside safeguards, in all countries.

The pre-Pokhran official policy understanding was that such a treaty would be even worse for the Indian nuclear programme than the CTBT. In the first place, like the CTBT, it would be designed as a discriminatory non-proliferation control arrangement, not at all as an arms control or disarmament initiative. The object would especially be to cap the nuclear stocks and capabilities of threshold states like India.

On top of their nuclear arsenals, the five nuclear weapon states are sitting on huge stocks of weapons-grade fissile material. In their own determination (with the possible exception of China), there is no need for any further production of fissile material for weapons purposes and indeed the abundance of existing fissile material stocks is a subject of serious environmental concern in these countries. In fact, all the five nuclear weapon states have declared that they have stopped producing highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes.

Secondly, the FMCT would provide for a far tougher, more intrusive verification/safeguards regime than the CTBT. If it joins the FMCT, India will have to place its nuclear programme prospectively under "full-scope safeguards," that is external controls on all its nuclear installations and activities. With only existing fissile material stock exempted from this external control regime, the arrangement will virtually undermine - and make nonsense of - India's decision to stay outside the NPT regime, unless the cynical assumption is made that the only reason for keeping out of the NPT was to put away unsafeguarded fissile material for a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Although the FMCT negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament have been delayed on account of certain technical differences among the nuclear weapon states and some policy-based resistance from developing countries, it is clear that the Pokhran and Chagai explosions have kickstarted the stalled negotiations and made them a matter of higher priority for the United States and its allies.

What national policy must do

This analysis is meant to show why a nuclear policy that has turned hawkish and gone off the rails cannot bail itself out, or be allowed to do so, by sacrificing well-established principles and swinging to the other extreme of foreclosing its independence.

The real issue is weaponisation - national policy must be made to commit itself, first, to non-deployment of the nuclear warheads in hand, then to a pledge of non-weaponisation of fissile material stocks, and as soon as feasible and in tandem or cooperation with Pakistan, the dismantling of the nuclear weapons in the small armoury. If South Africa could dismantle and destroy its six bombs in the basement (for whatever reason) in anticipation of the era of Nelson Mandela, so can India and Pakistan by the sane, sovereign and concerted choice of their peoples. The voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing announced by the Prime Minister must be continued; it can be firmed up by a parliamentary resolution, perhaps even an Act, that has the support of all political parties.

Once the dangers of nuclear weaponisation and deployment, and of a South Asian nuclear arms race, are decisively ended, the issue of the CTBT and the FMCT can be examined afresh and with an open mind. Capitulating to the Unequal Global Nuclear Bargain by means of joining the CTBT cannot be entertained, or allowed, as the way out of the present mess.