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India's Muscle Flexing Is Over. Let the Bargaining Begin. India's Muscle Flexing Is Over
Let the Bargaining Begin
By Selig S. Harrison
Washington Post May 17, 1998 Despite India's five nuclear tests last week, there is still a way for the Clinton administration to stop New Delhi from embarking on a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race with China and Pakistan.
The sanctions imposed by President Clinton will only make India more intransigent unless they are accompanied by realistic diplomatic trade-offs. Indian leaders have made clear that they are ready to end testing and cut off stockpiling of plutonium for nuclear weapons if the Clinton administration will end sanctions and give India, as it has given China, access to US civilian nuclear technology to help satisfy the burgeoning energy demands of an exploding population, now nearing 1 billion.
China conducted a much-criticized series of six nuclear tests from 1994 to 1996 before announcing its readiness to sign the nuclear test ban treaty. Less than two years later, the administration has just reversed a US ban on the sale of US civilian nuclear technology to Beijing in return for Chinese commitments not to export nuclear and missile components and know-how. Unlike China, Indians point out, India has never exported nuclear and missile technology despite multibillion-dollar offers from Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi.
Productive negotiations with New Delhi are still possible. Although India last week declared itself a "nuclear weapons state," it has not yet decided whether to deploy nuclear weapons in its armed forces and, if so, how extensively. The purpose of testing, Indian leaders say, was to demonstrate a capability to make sophisticated nuclear weapons and to deploy them on short notice, especially a nuclear warhead for its Agni intermediate-range ballistic missile.
The decision to test last week was in large part a response to domestic political pressures that are now likely to subside. Six weeks ago, when Pakistan tested a new missile capable of reaching deep into Indian territory, the new Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee felt compelled to respond strongly. American warnings that testing would bring sanctions fanned nationalist sentiment, and Indian public opinion has overwhelmingly welcomed the tests as a reminder to the world that India can become a nuclear superpower if it feels provoked or threatened.
I have lived in India for six years at various times as a foreign correspondent, and I visit there frequently. Every politically conscious Indian I know deeply resents the American attitude that the United States and the four other nuclear powers are entitled to have nuclear weapons while India and other aspiring powers are not. This feeling is a more important factor driving Indian nuclear ambitions than fear of Chinese and Pakistani military strength.
Many Indians have what might be called a post-dated self-image. Since India is one of the world's oldest and largest civilizations, its people take its great-power status for granted and expect others to do the same. Successive American administrations have either patronized or ignored India while lecturing it about non-proliferation, fueling sentiment in New Delhi that only nuclear muscle-flexing would get American attention.
Until two years ago, the United States repeatedly pressed India and Pakistan to give up their nuclear options. But in January 1995, then-Defense Secretary William Perry announced an important, little-noticed reversal of policy. He acknowledged that "the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan flow from a dynamic that we are unlikely to be able to influence in the near term. Rather than seeking to roll back - which we have concluded is unattainable in these two countries - we have decided, instead, to seek to cap their nuclear capabilities."
Nevertheless, Washington has failed to give New Delhi and Islamabad concrete incentives to cap their nuclear weapons potential at present levels. The technology transfer agreement with China has made it urgently necessary for the Clinton administration to explore precisely what India would be prepared to do in return for access to US civilian nuclear technology and US cooperation in nuclear safety. Until an accommodation is reached with India, no agreement with Pakistan is possible.
As a beginning, the administration should offer to seek congressional approval for civilian nuclear technology transfers to India, now barred by the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, in return for three major concessions by India.
First, India would agree to extend the application of international inspections, now limited to one US-supplied reactor near Bombay, to all seven of its civilian nuclear power reactors and any new power and medical research reactors supplied by US or other foreign companies. This would prevent the diversion to military purposes of fissile material produced with US cooperation. In accordance with Perry's acceptance of India as a nuclear-capable power, the research reactors and reprocessing facilities where India's militarily applicable nuclear stockpiles are produced would remain exempt from inspections until the conclusion of a pending international accord capping such stockpiles.
Second, India would make some form of binding de jure commitment not to export nuclear technology, formalizing its present de facto policy. This would place India in accord with a key provision of the non-proliferation treaty.
Third, India would have to reach a compromise with the United States on the issue of a nuclear test ban. New Delhi has refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that initiated in 1996, insisting that it be linked with a timetable for the reduction of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear powers. But India might agree to sign the treaty, or to make some other form of international commitment not to test without formally signing it, now that it has conducted the tests it regarded as essential to make its nuclear option credible.
Such an agreement would set the stage for broader negotiations in which the United States would seek commitments by India and Pakistan to cap the further accumulation of weapons-grade fissile material and to continue refraining from the deployment of nuclear weapons. India said last week that it is ready to join negotiations on the pending global fissile material cutoff agreement, which would commit signatories to freeze their stockpiles of weapons grade nuclear material and submit to international inspection. But Indian and Pakistani commitments not to deploy nuclear weapons or limit the level and nature of deployments would be unlikely unless the United States and Russia moved much more rapidly to reduce their own nuclear weapons as the prelude to multilateral reductions embracing China, Britain and France.
The United States would benefit politically and economically from a compromise with India that would open up the transfer of civilian nuclear technology India in return for a cessation of testing and a cutoff of fissile material stockpiling. Apart from improving relations with a rising power, the United States would acquire significant influence in one of the most sensitive sectors of the Indian economy and would offset the role of Russia and other powers now negotiating nuclear reactor deals with India.
It is also in America's interest to facilitate a diversification of energy sources in India and China alike, thus curbing a reliance on petroleum imports that will increasingly deplete world supplies and drive prices up. Moreover, the US nuclear industry needs foreign contracts to keep its technical work force intact and to survive in the face of competition. India's quest for $50 billion in foreign investment to build nuclear reactors could mean enormous profits.
President Clinton should go ahead with his projected autumn mission to South Asia not only to carry forward negotiations on nuclear issues but to demonstrate a new American interest in a long-neglected part of the world. This would be the first visit of an American president since Jimmy Carter's in 1978. It would come at a hopeful moment when American investment commitments in India exceed $8 billion and cultural links between the world's two largest democracies are growing.
But in the absence of a nuclear bargain, tensions over non-proliferation will increasingly poison all aspects of Indo-American relations.
Selig S. Harrison, a former South Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post, is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow of the Twentieth Century Fund.
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