NUCLEAR HYPOCRISY

How can we expect India and Pakistan to eschew nuclear weapons if the UK and France have them?

by Edward Mortimer

The Financial Times, Wednesday may 20, 1998

Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, otherwise the least memorable of Germany's postwar chancellors, deserves to be remembered for one great remark. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty, he said, "is like a bunch of notorious drunkards inviting everyone else to sign the pledge". I was reminded of this last week during the explosion of outrage which greeted India's nuclear tests. India has a consistent stand on this issue. It has always refused to sign the NPT, which it regards as perpetuating a gross inequality between powerful and powerless states: those that have nuclear weapons, and those that do not. It also refused, quite logically, to sign the more recent comprehensive test ban treaty. Tests are the method by which a state can confirm its status as a nuclear power - to its own satisfaction and, perhaps more important, to the rest of the world. The five nuclear-weapon states recognised by the NPT had all conducted many tests before they signed the CTBT. France and China both conducted series of tests, provoking worldw

ide indignation, immediately before announcing their agreement to sign. The French case, especially, offers some parallels to India's behaviour and might even have inspired it. Jacques Chirac announced the tests shortly after becoming president, just as India's new BJP government has acted soon after taking office. Mr Chirac thereby established his Gaullist credentials, making it easier for him to proceed to slaughter the sacred cow of conscription. Slaughtering sacred cows would not be the right metaphor for a Hindu nationalise government, but some Indian economists do expect that the nuclear tests will make it easier for the new government to push ahead with economic reforms, which would otherwise run into strong opposition from the right of the BJP. India is also hinting it may change its position on the test ban treaty, which cannot enter into force until India, along with other states that have civilian nuclear industries, has ratified it. The test ban treaty, unlike the non-proliferation treaty poses n

o issue of principle for India, because it does not discriminate between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. The NPT, by contrast freezes indefinitely an arbitrary distinction based on the status quo of the mid-1960s. The five state that had tested a nuclear weapon before 1967 are recognised as nuclear-weapon states. No one else is allowed to become one. Under the treaty, however the nuclear-weapon states did commit themselves to strive for general disarmament. And in 1995, as the price of getting the treaty extended indefinitely, they accepted that this involves the "determined pursuit by the nuclear-weapon states of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons". The question is, did they mean it? And if so, what are they doing about it? The answer to the second question is thatthey are doing little or nothing. So, in answering the first, the reasonable conclusion of most non-nuclear states is that they did not mean it. More than that

, the current nuclear five assume that the recent crisis with Iraq, by demonstrating the danger posed by "rogue" states, has showed why it is necessary for "civilised" states like themselves to retain a nuclear deterrent. It is far from clear, however, that nuclear weapons offer any solution to the problems of "rogue states". James Baker, who was US secretary of state at the time of the Gulf war, reveals in his memoirs that the coalition forces in that war decided "not to retaliate with chemical or nuclear response even if attacked with chemical munitions". Why? For reasons made clear in 1996 by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. "Use of nuclear weapons in response to use or threat of use of other weapons of mass destruction," the Commission observed, "would cross an important psychological as well as military threshold, making the management of future conflicts even more uncertain." Moreover, even the threat of such use against a non-nuclear state is contrary to the "negative sec

urity assurances" which nuclear-weapon states have given. And it is clearly illegal under the terms of a world court decision two years ago banning any threat to use nuclear weapons by a state unless "in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, In which its very survival would be at stake" Many people still find a nuclear-free world hard to imagine. At best it is only a long-term prospect, depending in the first instance on further disarmament negotiations between the US and Russia, which between them have many times more nuclear weapons as all the other nuclear powers together. Yet that does not let those smaller powers off the hook. Equality with China is the specific reason given by India for needing a nuclear deterrent of its own oust as Pakistan in turn cites equality with India). France and the UK in particular have a lot to answer for. They, after all, live in the safest part of what is now one of the safest continents, and in the world's strongest and most successful alliance, guaranteed by the only

remaining superpower. If they cling to an independent nuclear deterrent as supposedly essential to their national security or (even worse) to their international status and self-respect, how can they expect India and Pakistan to do without one?