India crosses world's nuclear fence in style

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): For almost a quarter century since conducting its first nuclear test, India straddled the nuclear fence, unable to make up its mind whether to go overtly nuclear. Now, it has lifted its ambivalence with a vengeance, carrying out five nuclear detonations in two days and demonstrating its capability to build a range of sophisticated warheads.

Indians were as much as stunned as the rest of the world when Prime Minister Atal B. Vajpayee announced on May 11 that India had tested within minutes of each other a hydrogen bomb, a boosted-fission warhead and a low-yield device. The nation was told the tests would help design "nuclear weapons of different yields for different applications and for different delivery systems."

No country previously had demonstrated such a range of nuclear-weapons capabilities in one go.

Before the world could recover from the shock of the triple bang, Vajpayee's government unleashed another surprise less than 48 hours later, testing two more nuclear devices designed to release less than one kiloton of fission energy. These very-low- yield tests demonstrated India's expertise to build mini-nukes and micro-nukes and carry out high-tech hydronuclear experiments at subcritical or slightly supercritical levels.

India, flanked by China on the northeast and Pakistan and Iran on the west, has gate-crashed the nuclear club. "India is now a nuclear-weapons state," Vajpayee has declared.

He has also gone one step further to say that India not only has a nuclear-weapons arsenal but also the necessary command-and- control structure to sustain it. "We have a big bomb for which the necessary command-and-control system is in place," Vajpayee said in a published interview.

His statement indicates that the tests were intended to certify the reliability of some of the warheads that India already possesses. Such an arsenal with command and control could have been built only over a period of many years.

While the explosions were received with unprecedented jubilation and outpouring of national pride at home, Indians were as surprised as the rest of the world because they did not believe the Vajpayee government would deliver on its promise to go overtly nuclear less than two months after assuming office.

The bangs, breaking up the rising pessimism engulfing India in recent years, did instant wonders to the national psyche. A comment made by many citizens was, "Now every Indian can walk taller."

India's proverbial nuclear indecision had come to symbolize national timidity and vacillation. The indecision had gradually turned its revered nuclear-weapons option into a holy cow for national worship, not national security. There was a growing feeling that the country was bearing the liabilities of the option but not reaping its benefits.

Vajpayee, 71, will go down in Indian history as the man who released his country from its self-imposed fetters.

A strong incentive for India to go overtly nuclear was the growing military asymmetry with China and the latter's continuing covert nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan.

These concerns were outlined in Vajpayee's letter to U.S. President Bill Clinton after the first round of tests. "We have an overt nuclear-weapons state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962," Vajpayee wrote. "To add to the distrust, that country has materially helped another neighbor of ours to become a covert nuclear- weapons state."

Indians have been peeved that the Clinton administration has been rewarding the world's largest autocracy, China, with supercomputers and space and missile technology, while penalizing the world's largest democracy, India, through a rising tide of U.S.-inspired national and multinational technology sanctions. This despite the fact that India was exercising nuclear restraint and China was continuing to modernize its nuclear and missile arsenals and aiding Pakistan's weapons of mass destruction.

Indian concerns about China have been reinforced by Beijing's angry, threatening reaction to the Indian tests. Beijing has gone out of the way to demand concerted international action to "stop" India from developing weapons. This comes from a country which is still expanding its nuclear and missile arsenals and aiding Pakistan's weapons of mass destruction.

India will be closely watching China's further moves. If Pakistan conducts a nuclear test, there could be a Chinese hand guiding it.

The U.S. threat of economic sanctions failed to stop India from ending its 24-year-old test moratorium because New Delhi came to believe that the costs of continued inaction outweighed the costs of action.

India has not been surprised by the new sanctions slapped against it in response to its nuclear tests. It is ironical, however, that the very countries seeking to penalize India for building nuclear defenses are basking under their own nuclear arsenals or under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

The sanctions cannot force India to change course. They will certainly hurt India but they cannot cripple or disrupt its largely agrarian economy. Foreign investment and aid make up barely 2 percent of its Gross Domestic Product.

When the dust kicked up by the new sanctions settles, the United States would have to seek Indian cooperation to salvage the nuclear test ban treaty. Unless India accepts it, the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) cannot come into force.

Also, without India's cooperation, nonproliferation cannot remain a global norm. India's new overt nuclear-weapons status casts a shadow over the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), whose primary goal has been to keep the nuclear club's membership at five.

New Delhi has indicated that it may sign the CTBT if some of the loopholes in the treaty are plugged and it is accepted as a nuclear-weapons state.

The writer is a professor of security studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.