CTBT sailing close to Indian, Chinese rocks

By Jonathan Power

GENEVA, Switzerland (JP): The diplomatic wrangling here over the long-awaited Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has become dangerously prolonged. All along the goal has been to have the text wound up by next month, so that it can be passed to the UN General Assembly in September for world-wide approval and a formal signing. Now it is obvious there are serious doubts about this timetable.

The test ban treaty, long before President Jacques Chirac of France painted the issue into dramatic relief with a series of French nuclear tests last year, was considered by both Washington and Moscow as a very important item on their mutual agenda. Ever since the two principal nuclear powers throw their joint weight behind the indefinite renewal of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) last year it was accepted that a major part of the quid pro quo arrangement with the non-nuclear powers was deliverance of a test ban treaty.

Banning nuclear tests was seen, rightly, by the non-nuclear powers, as a way of capping the arms race. And it was seen along with SALT 2 and the yet-to-happen SALT 3 (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties) as a very important step along the way in honoring the fundamental compact of the NPT--that the non-nuclear powers would forego ever going nuclear themselves if the nuclear powers moved fairly rapidly towards nuclear disarmament.

According to news reports, what is holding up the negotiations here is China. This is partly true, but casting an ever- lengthening shadow are the results of the recent Indian general election when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist, pro-bomb party, won the largest number of seats. It is now attempting to form the government.

China is holding out for the right to mount what it calls "peaceful nuclear explosions." Its argument is that these may be needed to divert rivers, even to stop a rogue meteor hitting the earth one day. The other nuclear powers have all told Beijing that the case for civilian use is overdrawn and, more important, it would ride a coach and horses through the treaty as telling apart a civilian nuclear explosion from a military one is most of the time impossible. Many of the diplomats here feel that China in the end will come round, even if with the caveat that they must complete the outstanding four tests due in the present series, a necessary step, China says, if they are to modernize their arsenal.

"Modernizing" the arsenal is, in fact, what the real dispute is going to be about. Not with China, hopefully, but certainly with India, and that means Pakistan too.

India, indeed, has already thrown a wrench in the works. It did that in January when it said it would only go along with the treaty if the big powers committed themselves to a timetable for total nuclear disarmament. You can say that the Indians made a fair point, given the way Washington and Moscow between them have politically botched the dual ratification of SALT 2 and the lack of drive and commitment by either the Russian or the American president to push their bureaucracies towards further major disarmament treaties (which even from a narrow military perspective would make good sense, since no responsible political authority would actually dare use nuclear weapons when more effective conventional means are so obviously at hand).

But India plays the virtuous card on the one hand and the Machiavellian one on the other. The truth is a Test Ban Treaty would stymie the Indian--and the Pakistani--bomb more than anyone else's. Testing is not necessary for making an elementary device, which both countries have long possessed but testing is necessary for a light-weight bomb, one that can be fitted on the nose cone of a rocket. India is now developing sophisticated rocketry, which it considers useful vis-a-vis Pakistan but an absolute necessity in balancing China. Where India goes Pakistan is never too far behind.

Why should India, then, at this present time forego its nuclear possibilities? Why should it accept a brake on its own development when the big powers have already done the testing they need to build a sophisticated missile fleet and, to boot, don't seem interested in serious nuclear disarmament? A Congress government led by the recently defeated prime minister, Narasimha Rao, might have said it would if the reward were significantly attractive, like a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. (But then the bargain in my opinion should include India agreeing to a nuclear-free zone with Pakistan and a free vote in disputed Kashmir.) However, now that the BJP can translate its electoral advantage into political muscle such a deal becomes much more difficult, though as long as the wise and worldly Atal Bihari Vajpayee remains leader not impossible.

Of course, the "Big Five" might well decide to proceed with a Test Ban Treaty without India and Pakistan. Yet the Indian sub- continent remains the place where nuclear war is most likely. It is not a problem to be skirted around or shunted on one side. It must be faced head on.