US SHOULD INITIATE A
‘HELSINKI’ PROCESS FOR ASIA
By
M.L. Sondhi
Times of India, New Delhi, July 9, 1998
The resumption of nuclear
explosives testing by India and its initiation by Pakistan
have likely brought an end to the non-proliferation regime
that the NPT initiated and the CTBT was intended to secure.
As with all qualitatively new developments, it has generated
a great deal of confusion. This is true of India despite
its authorship of the current developments, and of the
United States which remains the guarantor of last resort of
all international regimes. Leaving aside the level of
clarity prevailing in New Delhi, it is to the perceptions
and policies of Washington that I wish to address myself.
First three background
facts, commonly misunderstood:
If Pakistan were India’s
only threat, India would have every incentive to keep South
Asia free of nuclear weapons, leaving it free to use its
conventional dominance to secure its interests vis-à-vis
Pakistan. Indeed the Indian nuclear weapons program began
as a response to the defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian war
being followed by the 1964 testing of a nuclear weapon by
China; the 1974 test by India took place after the formation
of Bangladesh when Pakistan had ceased to be a credible
threat to Indian interests. That this is rarely said in
public is testimony to the Indian elite’s hypersensitivity
to Chinese reactions, which is characteristically displaced
to obsessive verbal exchange with Pakistan or to complaints
that the US is unwilling to restrain China. This
appeasement of China by India, starting with the latter’s
entry into Tibet is now extracting a terrible price from
India’s nuclear diplomacy for the country seems to be in the
position of arguing that it developed a hydrogen bomb in
order to make the case for universal disarmament!
The entire point of the
CTBT, summarized for instance in Richard Garwin’s 1997
article in Arms Control Today, is to prevent vertical
proliferation, i.e. development of plutonium-based implosion
devices, boosted fission devices and hydrogen bombs in the
Indian case, by casting doubt on their reliability in the
absence of testing. To the extent that India is unwilling
to give up on a nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis China, it simply
had to test before the political costs of testing were made
prohibitive by the incipient CTBT regime. Indeed the BJP is
more assertive on national security matters, but the
pacifist P.V. Narasimha Rao was barely dissuaded from
testing in 1995, and as rumour has it, intended to do so in
1996 had he returned to power. The imperatives of the
Indian state were not invented by the BJP and will survive
the BJP.
It seems to me that the
policy implications of these assertions are twofold. First,
it is hopeless to try to resurrect the old nuclear cartel by
scolding India and Pakistan at meetings with China in the
chair – this simply does not carry conviction. Second, it
is hopeless to define this as a sub-continental issue when
its genesis and sustenance are as much from without; the
unit of analysis needs to be Asia.
In order to
move beyond this impasse, I would like to propose a
three-track policy for the United States. The first track
would focus on minimizing the risk of accidental nuclear
exchanges between India and Pakistan or India and China as
the range of Indian missiles grows. If this is done, I
foresee much more stable relationships, as John Mearsheimer
has argued in a recent article in The New York Times.
The second
track would be the analogue of a Helsinki process for Asia.
Such a process in Asia could start with a US initiative for
“transparency, predictability and limitation” of armed
forces applicable to all of Asia. The US should focus not
only on Beijing or Tokyo but start thinking in terms of
concentric circles of security cooperation with all major
powers in Asia inclusive of India. The US Congress could
immediately legislate to set up a working group to design CSCE-type institutions for Asia and more generally, the
entire array of “peace tools” developed in the context of
the Cold War could be very fruitfully applied to keep the
peace in Asia. In the case of India, such a development
could lead to it involving itself in a constructive role for
nuclear arms control.
The third track would
indeed focus on the subcontinent but with a view to
realizing the vast potential for cooperation between India
and Pakistan as well as the other states in the region. It
is essential to realize that these states share a common
culture in every detail, and their long term destiny is
surely to coexist with open borders much as Austria and
Germany and the US and Canada do today. Once this happens,
the nuclear threat in the subcontinent will take care of
itself.
