Overlooking India's Nuclear Reality

Author: K Subrahmanyam
Publication: The Times of India
Date: March 1, 2004
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/527223.cms

A Q Khan's confession, the disclosures of CIA director George Tenet and president George Bush and media reports have revealed how insincere the five nuclear weapon powers were in their commitment to their obligations under Article 1 of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
 
Under it, they were not to permit proliferation to non-nuclear weapon states. The treaty was virtually dead when the NPT community decided to legitimise the nuclear weapons in the possession of the five nuclear weapon powers through its indefinite and unconditional extension in 1995.
 
This indifference to proliferation by the NPT community is reflected in the muted responses of the governments and academia to the developments of the last few months ending with Khan's public disclosure of his extensive two-decade-long proliferation activities involving Pakistan ,  China , western European countries, North Korea , Iran and Libya .
 
This is the fifth time the NPT community has demonstrated its blatant cynicism on non-proliferation.
 
The first time was in the eighties when Pakistan assembled its nuclear weapon and Khan boasted about western European companies falling over each other to contribute to Pakistan 's nuclear weapons programme through the supply of plant, machinery, materials and engineering services.
 
The US carried out a national intelligence estimate in 1983 which recor- ded that China had supplied Pakistan with the bomb design.
 
The second time was in the aftermath of the Gulf War when a complete list of companies which supplied plant, equipment, materials and engineering services to Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programme was available. It was decided then not to disclose this.
 
That should have encouraged and reassured the European companies and their coordinator A Q Khan that there would be no penalties for proliferation.
 
The third time was when China supplied ring magnets to Pakistan 's centrifuges in 1995. The matter never came up before the NPT community.
 
Then in April 1998, Pakistan , encouraged by the permissiveness of the NPT commu-nity, launched its North Korean Nodsong missile obtained in exchange for its nuclear proliferation to Pyongyang .
 
That was the fourth time. The real issue of proliferation by nuclear weapon countries is now being sought to be obfuscated by focusing attention on the transit of proliferation-related machinery and materials (proliferation strategic initiative), radioactive materials (extension of Nunn-Lugar Act) and modi- fication of the nuclear suppliers' group (NSG) guidelines.
 
There is no attempt to examine in detail the failure in the implementation of the so-called export control and technology denial regimes of industrial countries over the last two decades.
 
There was a high-cost counter-proliferation programme in the US over the years. In retrospect, it does not appear to have been a very effective one.
 
The intelligence panel set up under the chairmanship of governor Charles Robb on February 6, 2004 , is expected to go into the cases of the WMD programmes of Iraq , Libya and the Taliban.
 
Its terms of reference also include formulation of measures to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
 
The panel could use the terms of reference to examine why the vast proliferation activity centred on Pakistan and involving China , western European countries, North Korea and Iran besides Iraq , Libya and  Afghanistan over two decades did not engage the attention of the US  administration and Congress.
 
But one cannot rule out the possibility that the proliferation activities of  China and western European countries may either be overlooked by the panel or that sections dealing with it in the report may not be disclosed as happened in respect of Saudi Arabia in the joint congressional report on intelligence failure on 9/11.
 
Prima facie, it would appear that the US concerns on Khan's proliferation activity were generated some time before 2001 but perhaps well after the 1998 Indian nuclear tests.
 
If the US administration had intelligence on this vast proliferation network which involved China at the time of the Shakti tests, it is difficult to explain the pronouncements of president Clinton, Strobe Talbott and others at that time.
 
With two allied proliferating nations, China and Pakistan , on either side and after the Ghauri missile test which highlighted the Pakistan-North Korea proliferation links, the justification for the Indian tests should have been self-evident.
 
If Washington had the intelligence and still preached to India , it would appear that it did not care very much about Indian security concerns at that stage. If that were the case then perhaps the Indian nuclear tests changed its mind and that led to better relations between the US and  India .
 
The recent disclosures also bring out that Islamabad 's weapons programme was not merely a response to India 's efforts but had a larger Islamic dimension to it.
 
General Musharraf's resentment over Iran and Libya disclosing Islamabad's proliferation to IAEA without alerting Pakistan first at the cost of Islamic solidarity along with the widespread feeling in Pakistan that Khan did nothing wrong in proliferating to Islamic countries highlight this dimension.
 
When the Indian government, irrespective of the party in power, fails to educate our political class, media and academia on nuclear realities, it becomes easy even today for American academics and former diplomats to come to India and wax eloquent on what India should and should not do in respect of its nuclear security.
 
And this when they ignored the massive nuclear proliferation for well over 20 years.
 

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