Tucked away in one of the many paragraphs of the Joint Statement issued during the recent US visit of the Prime Minister, unnoticed almost in spite of a voluble media, is an idea that deserves a little more attention than it has got — their “shared vision of a world free of nuclear weapons”, for which US President Obama and PM Manmohan Singh “pledged to work together, as leaders of responsible states with advanced nuclear technology”.
The significance of this articulation by India and the USA can be appreciated better in the background of the international discourse on nuclear disarmament and strategic security issues. A nuclear weapon-free world has long been a cherished goal of the international community but it has remained an ideal that has never entered the realm of the feasible.
The main reason for this is that the US, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal by far was not ready to move in that direction, or even to contemplate committing itself to ever doing so. Obama is the first US President to have broken the “taboo”, as it were, and affirm “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” in his speech at Prague in April last. (More specifically, that “the US will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy”.)
Yet, more than seven months after Obama’s bold break with the past, there has been no move, internationally, to build upon it and take it forward to have the goal of abolition of nuclear weapons adopted globally, i.e. as a legally binding obligation undertaken by all nations.
No nation has thought it fit, for example, to ask the other nuclear weapon states to follow suit so that the goal of a “global zero” (of nuclear weapons) could be (re)endorsed by the UN General Assembly — the obvious thing to do in the wake of the gargantuan US shift — in order to seal agreement at the conceptual level. And, accordingly, to then task the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to finally commence negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention — the designated UN body for negotiating disarmament agreements has so far not been able to even bring nuclear disarmament on its agenda primarily because of US-led opposition. This is the way a Chemical Weapons Convention providing for elimination of chemical weapons globally in a specified time frame, with mechanisms to verify compliance to the satisfaction of all signatories, was concluded.
Even the NAM does not appear to have viewed Obama’s Prague promise (at its Sharm El Sheikh Summit in July) as an opportunity for pursuing what has been one of its foremost objectives with renewed vigour.
On the other hand, sceptics questioning the practicability of a world without nuclear weapons, on one ground or another, abound. More than the voices discrediting the “vision thing”, it is the lukewarm reception accorded to Obama’s public declaration of this conceptual breakthrough in the US position by the strategic establishments of NATO countries, including the US itself, that is disconcerting. India has its own share of hawks who tend to be dismissive about Obama’s Prague speech in a somewhat self-serving fashion.
The importance of the allusion to the “shared vision” in the India-US Joint Statement, therefore, lies in India’s grasp of the historic opportunity offered by Obama’s clearing of the cobwebs. It is the first country to tap this new congruence, potentially a weighty one, and lend its voice for (re)generating momentum behind the vision of a “nuclear weapon-free world”.
At the same time, attention must be turned to examining what India can do, by itself, to further the objective. The reason for this is that, in the long run, nuclear weapons are not an asset but a liability. Whatever the justification in 1998 for going in for them — and I am amongst those who believe there was a very good case — it does not follow that their retention in perpetuity, or even voluntary integration into the nation’s defence arsenal, is desirable. A view needs to be taken, internally within the country naturally, whether nuclear weapons are essential for safeguarding the nation’s strategic security interests for all time to come and under all circumstances. Possibly not, it is submitted.
The utility of nuclear weapons for India was, and is, political, not military — as a lever, and leveller, of sorts. But it has to be acknowledged that such is the calculus of these “weapons”, that the political advantage accrues only if they are maintained in fighting fit, full military, condition. This, in turn, means that the benefits cannot be had without incurring the risks; also that some degree of an arms race is built into the (il)logic of nuclear weapons, subjective disinclination for indulging in it notwithstanding. Hence the overall negative assessment in a “cost-benefit-risk” analysis.
If a domestic consensus can be built around the above premises, it would follow, logically, that the political leverage acquired by the nation as a result of its 1998 decision to invite itself into the “nuclear club” can, and should, be exercised (i.e. traded off) for the purpose of securing a world free of nuclear weapons (which, in the final analysis, is in India’s supreme interest), now that it is no longer an unthinkable proposition. The opening created by Obama’s fresh approach affords a golden opportunity of doing just that — namely, putting the national nuclear prowess to larger political use, in the service of the long, and widely, cherished goal of nuclear disarmament and therefore of lasting national and international security.
Thus India could unilaterally declare its readiness to reconsider the non-civilian part of its nuclear programme, provided a multilaterally negotiated (and legally binding) programme for time-bound elimination of all nuclear weapons of all countries could be agreed upon internationally — but, of course, not until then, i.e. not under any partial measures such as the UN Security Council Resolution 1887, CTBT, FMCT etc. (which should all be fitted into a nuclear weapons-free world paradigm now).
The role and function of the nuclear arsenal in the nation’s possession needs to be debated in the above perspective in order that a reasoned and pro-active approach to the changing external scenario can be evolved without becoming prisoners of the past, or of habit, by default.
The author retired recently as India’s Ambassador to the IAEA, UNIDO and the UN Offices in Vienna (on drugs, crime and outer space affairs), and to Austria. He served in various capacities in the Ministry of External Affairs and also as a strategic analyst in the Cabinet Secretariat during his term in the Foreign Service
