INDIA IN DANGER ESSAY IN ENGLISH
Every time scientists succeed in launching a new missile or exploding a bigger, more lethal, bomb, Indians suffer a rush of blood to the head that makes any sane discussion of the action well nigh impossible.
It happened when India exploded its nuclear bombs last May. It has happened again after the launch of the Agni-II. The few doubts that have been expressed have centred on the BJP government's motives for sanctioning the launch at a time when it was fighting to survive.
Almost no one has questioned the advisability of the launch itself. On the contrary, most reports and analyses contain a distinct note of satisfaction, that India has stood up to pressure from the US yet again in pursuit of its national security.
This reaction is adolescent. The sole guide to decision-making in a field fraught with international repercussions must be the national interest. This could as easily dictate a course of action that meets with the US approval as the opposite.
In the present case it is hard to think of a single national interest that has been served by the test firing of Agni-II. On the contrary, there is hardly a single interest that has not been harmed by it.
The fault lies not so much with the test itself as with its timing. It is not my case that India should never test the Agni, and therefore never aspire to IRBM and ICBM capability. It is simply that the Vajpayee government could not have chosen a worse moment to do so.
India's defence experts are justifying the launch on the grounds that the country's nuclear concerns extend beyond Pakistan, i.e. to the need to avoid nuclear blackmail by China. But the mere fact that it is China and not Pakistan, which is India's point of reference, robs the test of their urgency.
For whatever else China may have in store for India, nuclear blackmail, i.e. forcing India to concede a demand by threatening to launch nuclcar tipped missiles at New Delhi, is not even remotely on Bcijing's agenda.
That being so, there was no pressing reason not to defer the testing of Agni-II till India had other elements of its foreign and defence policies securely in place. Defcncc analysts also believe that by informing the US and Pakistan in advance about the test, and the purposes for which it was being conducted, the government had minimised its adverse impact on relations with these countries.
This too is wishful thinking, for it wilfully ignores the impact that India's test will have on the domestic politics of the two countries, and the way that will force their respective governments to react. It also, again wilfully, ignores the posssible Chinses reaction to India's development of a missile that is capable of hitting is not Beijing, then a large number of other urban centres in the country.
If one takes all these into account, it becomes clear that, coming at this precise moment, the launch of the Agni-II launch has not made India safer. On the contrary, it has put the country in considerable danger.
To understand precisely how Agni-II has increased the danger to India instead of reducing it one needs to go back to the very fundamentals of India's nuclear weapons policy, and ask the most basic question of all: How does the possession of nuclear weapons increase the country's security?
The answer does not take long to find, the possession of nuclear weapons is an insurance against madness- no more and no less. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not a weapon of blackmail that can be used by a rational country in a calibrated increase of pressure designed to achieve a rationally defined objective.
Not only is it impossible to biackmail another nuclear power but, as Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Yugoslavia, have shown, it is impossible even for a nuclear power that is losing a war to a non nuclear power, to use nuclear blackmail to turn back the tide of defeat.
In vietnam, even the extreme frustration generated by the prospect of defeat after a 12-year war that cost 58,000 American lives did not quite suffice to push America over the brink. In Afghanistan the Russians were equally unable to deploy even theatre nuclear weapons against the Mujahideen.
And NATO cannot even think of threatening to use nuclear weapons in Yugoslavia, despite the fact that its illthought out military action has rendered over 8,00,000 Kosovars homeless and pushed half a million out of their homeland.
The only circumstances in which a nuclear threat becomes real is when a country or regime is unable to secure what it wants, and is unable to face the consequences of its failure at home. Such a regime can take the decision to stake everything on a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
Thus only the threat of mutually assured destruction can hold it back. These preconditions had come into being in Pakistan, after 1994 when it became apparent that Kashmiri militancy was fizzling out. At the same time, the Indian nuclear capability had been degraded by the passage of time, whereas Pakistan's had been upgraded through increasingly wholehearted chinese support.
This did not mean that Pakistan's military establishment would necessarily contemplate a nuclear attack. But the temptation was bound to grow over time. India was therefore right to send an unambiguous warning of mutually assured destruction to Pakistan.
That warning served its purpose. Not only did it put paid to any adventurism that might have existed in the Pakistani military establishment, but it also propelled the two countries in to the most meaningful discussions they have had since well before the Afghan war. But that was all the more
reason for not testing Afghan war. But that was all the more reason for not testing the Agni-II now. Indeed Mr Vajpayee had sent out a strong positive signal to Pakistan when he postponed the test firing of the missile.
This played no small part in helping Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to dispel the initial fears of the Pakistanis and bring the armed forces around to supporting the Lahore declaration and the detente that followed. Today, all this has gone into reverse gear in Pakistan.
It has tested the Ghauri-II (Ghaznavi); Indian public opinion have been suitably disturbed, and another chance to begin a genuine detente with Pakistan that could end both countries' bondage to the West has been lost.
If with Pakistan the Agni-II test has meant another lost opportunity, with the US and the West, it spells a tangible increase in danger. To understand why it is necessary to look closely at the outlines of UN and US policy after Pokhran.
The one thing that the P-5/G-8 oligarchy is not prepared to do is abandon the global non-proliferation regime. Its settled goal is to bring India and Pakistan back into the regime on new, mutually acceptable terms. If it fails, it will be forced to switch to the alternative to eliminate the nuclear threat the two countries pose. So far the reason why threats have not been deployed is that negotiations have proved highly fruitful. But the Vajpayee
capacity of this, and for that matter any other precariously perched Indian government to conclude negotiations on this issue and stick to its tacit and explicit commitments. America's frustration with India is not hard to understand; till the other day. Pakistan was asking India to set a date when the two countries could jointly sign the CTBT.
Now India has not only enraged China and opened the US to renewed attacks from it and Japan for not adhering to UN resolution 1172 and insisting on signature of the NPT, but forced Pakistan to launch its own missile.
Together the two countries have made it infinitely more difficult to contain the ambitions of countries like North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya. This frustration will only grow if India tests more missiles such as Agni-III, the solid fuel Prithvi and the Sagarika.
Yet all these tests are essential for acquiring a credible minimum nuclear deterrent. The moral of the story is that India cannot afford any more mistakes. India must spontaneously assure both the US and Pakistan that it will carry out no more missile tests till it has signed the CTBT and completed the ongoing negotiations on the definition of a minimum nuclear deterrent.