Out of the Nuclear Shadow

The debate following the nuclear weapons tests of 1998 continues. Out of the Nuclear Shadow, a collection of essays by scholars and activists from India and Pakistan, attempts to understand and question the nuclearisation of South Asia. Extracts from the Introduction to the book by SMITU KOTHARI and ZIA MIAN.

NOTHING that has happened in India and Pakistan in the last fifty or so years has potentially graver consequences for the future of the people of the two countries than the nuclear weapons tests of May 1998. The explosions and the determination of the respective governments to have a nuclear deterrent means that the capability and willingness to wage nuclear war have been established beyond question. There must be no illusions about what this means. From now on, the spectre of nuclear war shall cast its terrible shadow over South Asia.

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It is important, however, not to forget that the May 1998 nuclear tests were not the first to have taken place here. Indira Gandhi took the first decision in 1972 to test nuclear weapons. This led to the 1974 nuclear explosion. She and subsequent Prime Ministers continued to fund the nuclear weapons programme and some of them have admitted to thinking about ordering tests. Prodded by the nuclear weapon scientists, few hesitated out of principle, most lacked any sense of restraint other than simple uncertainty about whether the nuclear calculus was in their favour at that particular moment or whether to wait for a more opportune one.

It is ironic given how nationalistic India's elite has been, how committed to a kind of independence at any cost, that it has followed so blindly. One is reminded of Lord Macaulay's famous 1835 Minute on Education. Writing about British rule in India, he said the aim should be to create "a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and opinions, in morals and intellect." The British succeeded to the extent that a hundred or so years later it was anglicised Indians like Nehru and Jinnah who took over from them. American strategic thinkers, who preside like demented priests over their own nuclear weapons, can now boast they have had the same effect in even less time. Despite all their differences, within fifty years of inventing nuclear weapons, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and claiming that nuclear weapons were for defence, the U.S. has successfully created enclaves of Indians, and Pakistanis who share their "opinions," "morals" and "intellect."

In the case of Pakistan, the story started later. From the setting up of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, as part of the U.S. inspired Atoms for Peace Programme, it was a small step for Pakistan's nuclear scientists and politicians like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to begin making comparisons with the directions India's nuclear programme was taking and demanding Pakistan follow suit. As the late Eqbal Ahmad argued, India's obsession became Pakistan's choice.

None of this explains why the tests were conducted. Many reasons have been offered. None of them matter. A reason is after all a justification offered on the basis that it makes sense within some shared system of values where cause and effect and linkages between them are already agreed upon. If it is accepted that testing nuclear weapons is nothing but a demonstration of a capability and a preparedness to use them (if one is not prepared to use nuclear weapons, why test them?) then there can be no justification possible for testing nuclear weapons, not for India, Pakistan, or anyone else, not now, not previously, nor at any other time. To accept even the possibility of a reason for testing is to accept that there may be a reason for using nuclear weapons.

The horror that is nuclear war is little known and little understood in South Asia. In part this is because the invention and subsequent use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. against Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred just as independence finally came within sight. There were few who could or did get a sense of how within seconds of the atom bomb's going off tens of thousands of people were burnt and blasted and poisoned, and how the immediate survivors suffered and died from the injuries and the radiation they received. There were even fewer who realised that death from nuclear weapons could take decades.

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The nuclear weapons states, U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China, have accepted the fait accompli of a nuclear South Asia. The U.S. has sought to strengthen economic, political and strategic ties with India. It seeks only to limit the possible threat outside South Asia, which India's government assures them of, for now. How far India has come was evident in President Clinton's visit to South Asia in the spring of 2000. India's elite greeted the U.S. Commander in Chief of several thousand deployed nuclear weapons with adulation. The streets were swept clean, the poor pushed out of sight. After his speech he was mobbed by the members of parliament, who according to reports climbed over their desks in their urge to shake his hand.

While the U.S. thinks of its global interests, and the British tag along, France and Russia compete to sell arms to India, everything from aircraft that can deliver nuclear weapons, to attack submarines, submarine launched cruise missiles, and even help with India's nuclear submarine project. Pakistan for its part is struggling to keep its economy afloat, and is bailed out with one carefully timed International Monetary Fund loan after another. The fears of Pakistan's disintegration into nuclear- armed anarchy and of the increasingly militant Islamist groups that stalk the land seem to be enough to make the world look away from the overthrow of its elected government by yet another military coup, in October 1999. The people of South Asia are alone in the shadow of the bomb.

In their new role as citizens of nuclear states, the people of India and Pakistan would do well to learn some of the lessons from the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and Cold War. The first of these is that terror does not last. People get used to it and new and greater sources of terror are devised. This is clear from the arsenals of all five of the established nuclear weapons states, who claim like India and Pakistan to deter enemies with nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons states have all increased their arsenals from a few nuclear weapons to hundreds of weapons, and for the U.S. and USSR thousands, and they all rely on thermonuclear weapons that are tens if not hundreds or thousands of times more destructive than the "simple" nuclear weapons they started with. There will always be pressure for more and bigger bombs, and for smaller bombs, tactical bombs, neutron bombs. And as bomb begets bomb, missiles spawn offspring with longer-range and greater accuracy, adding lethality with every generation.

The second lesson is that arms racing is destructive even if there is no war because of the cold and calculated planning and costly preparations for such war that underlie the declared strategy, on both sides, of nuclear deterrence. The enmity, fear, and resources needed to sustain a cold war themselves need to be maintained and in the process society becomes poisoned, the economy deformed and the space for democracy and tolerance shrivels. This has started to happen already, with efforts by the governments in both India and Pakistan to instill a siege mentality in their respective citizens. Fearful people are further battered by the diversion of scarce economic resources into military technology and military preparedness at the cost of critical social needs.

The third and final lesson is that nuclear weapons, and the system that creates them and gives them purpose, take on a life of their own. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union claimed that their nuclear weapons were part of what was required to confront an implacable and unremitting ideological enemy. The Cold War ended a decade ago and yet there remain tens of thousand of nuclear weapons. In the same way, while it is vital to find a just resolution to the disputes that afflict India-Pakistan relations, especially that of Kashmir, unless nuclear disarmament is frontally addressed, the weapons will not go away. As long as they remain, the danger that they will be used exists.

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The tasks that confront the peace movements in India and Pakistan are unprecedented. Not only must they educate their fellow citizens in what it means to live with nuclear weapons in their midst, they must do so without immobilising people with fear. They must organise to abolish nuclear weapons but canot concentrate simply on the technology, politics, economics and culture of nuclear weapons because nuclear weapons cannot be abolished from South Asia or globally while leaving everything else unchanged. The solution to the bomb does not lie only in the area of nuclear weapons, the bomb is not its own answer. To abolish nuclear weapons will require confronting and transforming the fundamental structures of injustice within and between states that are the causes of insecurity, conflict, and war...

Out of the Nuclear Shadow, edited by Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian, Lokayan and Rainbow publishers (Delhi) and Zed Books (London), p.525, price not mentioned.

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