India and Pakistan in nuclear
harmony By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - Finally, India and Pakistan are beginning to get
a grip on the nightmare scenario of accidental nuclear
war that has haunted the sub-continent since May 1998,
when the two countries went overtly nuclear. Among the
important first steps taken during the weekend talks
between the experts of both nations are: a dedicated and
secure hotline between foreign secretaries to avoid a
nuclear confrontation through misunderstanding, and a
reaffirmation of the ban on nuclear tests. A slew of
other measures that would amount to a full-fledged joint
India-Pakistan nuclear doctrine are being contemplated.
While continuing to work on fleshing out the
emerging doctrine to reduce the risks of accidental and
unauthorized nuclear war, the two countries have now
also started focusing on averting the possibility of a
conventional war that may eventually take on nuclear
dimensions. The emerging joint doctrine would itself
encourage and help both countries to move more quickly
toward normalization and better bilateral relations as
well as to engage in consultations on security and
non-proliferation issues that are so vital to regional
stability.
Already, progress is being made on
several fronts. In their meetings on Monday and Tuesday
in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao on the sidelines
of the Asian Cooperation Dialogue, External Affairs
Minister Natwar Singh and his Pakistani counterpart
Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri agreed in principle to reopen
their consulates in Karachi and Mumbai. These consulates
have remained closed since the early 1990s and their
re-opening is set to provide major relief to
visa-seekers in both countries. At the moment, people
have to travel to New Delhi and Islamabad for a visa.
A solution to the contentious Baglihar hydro
project in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is also in sight,
with India and Pakistan reporting a breakthrough in
discussions on the issue on Tuesday. The two sides said
they were close to resolution of the issue. The
controversial project on the Chenab River will now be
referred to the political leadership for a final
decision.
Exuding confidence, Kasuri after his
first face-to-face meeting with his counterpart, said
that a solution to even the J&K issue is "easy"
given the political will on the part of both countries.
Pakistan, he said, does have the necessary political
will. Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has
already virtually set aside United Nations resolutions
on Kashmir that India has been saying have become
outdated and which cannot become the basis for any
resolution of the issue.
Significantly, India
and Pakistan have mutually accepted and confirmed that
their nuclear capability is based on the logic of a
"national security imperative" and constituted a "factor
for stability". Barring the semantics, this approach is
not vastly different from the principle of "mutual and
equal security" enshrined in India-China agreements. The
possibility of a trilateral nuclear doctrine emerging
with China as a later participant has thus heightened.
It may turn out that Natwar Singh's ideas were not quite
as "fantastic" as the main opposition Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) and several strategic analysts made it out
to be. Natwar himself, a career diplomat who retired 15
years ago as foreign secretary, was perhaps being
needlessly diffident about his bold proposal at his
first press conference following his appointment as
minister.
Based on national security imperatives
as it would be, the greatest virtue of the trilateral
India-China-Pakistan nuclear doctrine would be that it
would eliminate attempts by one side to try and push for
unilateral disarmament by the other side and make it
possible for them to work together for improving
strategic stability in the region.
With the
nuclear talks between experts of India and Pakistan
having ended successfully, the foreign ministers of both
countries met on Monday face-to-face for the first time
and are reported to have developed "good chemistry".
Long, complicated, tortuous negotiations lie ahead. What
Pakistan considers the core issue of Kashmir is going to
prove particularly tricky, despite Kasuri's optimism.
All the more so for the Congress Party, which during its
long 45-year rule following independence in 1947
exacerbated this problem through a series of colossal
mistakes. But at least the two countries appear to have
made a good beginning. They have also taken care not to
focus on areas of divergence in concepts like no-first
use, no-war pact, strategic restraint, etc.
The
new agreements have received a wide and universal
welcome in India and abroad. Clearly, analysts point out
there is now a recognition that the two nuclear-armed
neighbors have to work on nuclear stability and risk
reduction for their own sake and not merely to please
the international community. Peace activists, however,
think that they could have gone much further. For
instance, they could have agreed on moratoriums for
tests without conditions and for non-deployment of
nuclear weapons for a number of years. That would have
been a much bigger step towards peace and nuclear risk
reduction.
After all, the agreed phone link
between the top civil servants in their foreign
ministries, they say, is nothing more than an upgrade of
the existing hotline between the directors general of
military operations (DGMOs) in both countries. But
actually, this is a new hotline being set up and the
existing hotline between the DGMOs would also be
upgraded, dedicated and secured.
India and
Pakistan also seem to realize the similarity of their
interests as new nuclear powers vis-a-vis the existing
big five nuclear powers who wield vetoes in the UN
Security Council. They faced similar sanctions after
their nuclear tests and the sanctions were also removed
more or less at the same time and in similar
circumstances. They seem acutely aware of the fact that
they remain outside the exclusive nuclear club of the
permanent five members of the UN Security Council -
China, France, the Russian Federation, the United
Kingdom and the United States.
For the first
time, seeking a dialogue with the permanent five on
issues of common concern, they have thus reiterated
their joint desire to be accepted as nuclear weapons
states at par with the big five, whose status is
recognized by the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. They
have called for regular working-level meetings to be
held among all the nuclear powers to discuss issues of
common concern. They also said they would continue to
engage in bilateral consultations on security and
non-proliferation issues within the context of
multilateral negotiations.
Indicating that the
two-day, expert-level talks were not going to be a
one-off affair, a statement said India and Pakistan
would continue their discussions and hold further talks
on implementing the Lahore Memorandum of Understanding
of February 1999. "Both countries will continue to
engage in bilateral consultations on security and
non-proliferation issues within the context of
negotiations on these issues in multilateral fora. Both
sides agreed to report the progress of the talks to the
respective foreign secretaries who would meet on June
27-28, 2004."
Engaged in contemplating further
nuclear risk reduction programs as it is, India is
receiving some very sane advice from its scientists and
academicians. Well-known physicists M V Ramana and R
Rajaraman, for instance, made two eminently sensible
recommendations that they believe "do not compromise
national security in any real sense". The first is that
the Indian government should offer not to deploy nuclear
weapons. The second is that it should stop installing
early warning systems that clearly, in the specific
South Asian context where the response time is just a
few minutes, increase the risk of accidental or
unauthorized nuclear war.
Deployment means
keeping the warheads armed with nuclear explosives on
delivery vehicles (ballistic missiles or aircraft) and
keeping them ready for attacking a designated target.
The inexorably short flying times for Indian and
Pakistani missiles and airplanes to each other's
territory constitute the greatest risk factor in the
South Asian scenario. The complexities involved in
preparing for all contingencies would naturally involve
situations, the physicists explain, where military
personnel would have to be given the authority to launch
a nuclear attack without explicit orders from the
highest levels of political authority. This possibility
is ruled out by not deploying nuclear weapons.
The second risk resulting from deployment, over
and above the risk of nuclear war from unauthorized use,
is of serious accidents involving nuclear weapons
themselves or their delivery vehicles, such as missiles
and aircraft. Such accidents might be initiated by an
explosion or fire involving the delivery vehicles,
especially missiles. Ramana and Rajaraman cite a recent
example of a serious accident involving a missile on
February 23 at the Sriharikota High Altitude Range.
Engineers were testing a motor for the Agni missile when
it caught fire and exploded, killing at least six
people. If such an accident were to occur in an Agni
missile loaded with a nuclear warhead, it could well
lead to the dispersal of fissile material (plutonium or
enriched uranium) into the atmosphere, potentially
causing thousands of fatal cancers among the nearby
population.
The above estimate of casualties,
they explain, is not for a nuclear explosion, but only
for the detonation of the chemical explosives in the
weapon. This chemical explosion could well trigger a
nuclear explosion. An accidental nuclear explosion with
a yield of 15 kilotons, the same as the weapon detonated
over Hiroshima at the end of World War II, would destroy
over five square kilometers from the combined effects of
blast and firestorms. Over 24 square kilometers would be
subject to radioactive fallout at such levels, so half
the healthy adult population would die of radiation
sickness. If this were to happen in the vicinity of a
large South Asian city, several hundreds of thousands of
people would die. In addition, such an explosion,
especially in times of crises, might be assumed to be a
nuclear attack and lead to a nuclear response. Thus an
accidental nuclear explosion may even initiate a nuclear
war, which could cause millions of casualties.
More intriguing to a lay person is their second
recommendation that the government immediately stop
installing early warning systems. These systems are
intended to detect incoming ballistic missiles and, it
is hoped, inform decision makers that nuclear war has
begun before the warheads themselves explode. India has
already acquired in the past few years some key
components of an early warning network, including the
Green Pine radar from Israel. There have also been
reports of attempts to purchase the Arrow anti-ballistic
system. However, the two physicists point out, these
systems simply cannot offer more than a few minutes of
warning in the South Asian context. This is grossly
insufficient for decision making in any meaningful sense
of the term.
In their view, the deployment of a
hugely expensive early warning system is worse than
useless. It brings with it the danger of accidental
nuclear war due to false alarms and miscalculations. The
scientists cite numerous examples from American and
Russian experience. Over the decades, the US built an
elaborate and sophisticated system, involving a
worldwide network of satellites and radars and using
state-of-the-art technology, with layers of filters to
remove false signals. Yet from 1977 through 1984, the
only period for which official information has been
released, the early warning systems gave an average of
2,598 warnings each year of potential incoming missile
attacks. Of these, about 5% required further evaluation.
Needless to say, all of them were false.
Asia
Times Online has learnt that the government is taking
these recommendations very seriously. The first advice
is already being followed, with weapons, from all
accounts, having not been deployed by either of the two
countries, although a specific agreement along these
lines would be obviously desirable. The second
recommendation about not installing early warning
systems may affect the purchase of weapons systems from
Israel. Some top officials in the Manmohan Singh
government as well as in the Left Front, which is
supporting the government from outside, are not too keen
on continuing a very close relationship with Israel, as
was the case with the previous Atal Bihari Vajpayee
government. They will not be too unhappy if weapons
systems from Israel are not required to be purchased.
Strenuous efforts being made by the influential
pro-Israel American Jewish Council's delegation which is
in Delhi to lobby for an India-Israel "strategic"
relationship promoted by the last government may go in
vain. The peace lobby in and outside the government is
determined to see that the horrible risks of accidental
and unauthorized nuclear war are reduced without
compromising national security in any way.
By
building on the achievements of the previous government
in developing a good rapport with Islamabad, India's new
government has already proved many skeptics wrong. Many
observers had thought that, in view of ideological and
political hostility between the ruling Congress and
opposition BJP, Manmohan Sigh's government might have
found it difficult to carry on from where Vajpayee's
government left off.
Unfortunately, the BJP-led
government, too, had only made a beginning in the right
direction at the fag-end of its term and not achieved
much due to its constant flip-flops, though it had come
to power with a clean slate and could have written on it
anything it wanted. Under BJP rule the threat of nuclear
war indeed become real in the summer of 2002, when both
sides readied their nuclear arsenals as a million and a
half troops eyeballed each other for 10 months across
the Line of Control that divides the Himalayan state of
Jammu and Kashmir.
Indian observers believe that
the post-September 11 international situation has also
helped. Pakistan has been under pressure to be on good
behavior, and Pakistan was exposed as the hub of
international smuggling of nuclear material. In a world
where the sole superpower, the United States, can invade
Muslim countries on mere suspicion of possession of
programs for weapons of mass destruction, Pakistan, the
erstwhile patron of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and
exporter of terrorism, has to be very careful. It would
suit its present predicament to come to terms with its
neighbors.
The real challenge before India and
Pakistan, however, lies in creating an atmosphere of
trust so that even conventional war, not to speak of
nuclear conflict, becomes completely unthinkable. The
peace process will face its real test later this month,
when the planned composite dialogue actually begins. The
two foreign secretaries will review the progress of
various expert-level meetings and begin discussions on
Kashmir, peace and security issues. Both the governments
will need to keep the compulsions of the other in mind,
and determine to hasten slowly, as expecting overnight
results on finding solutions to decades-old disputes
will indeed be irrational.
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