An
Opportunity to Get Rid of
the Indian and Pakistani Bombs
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- The only surprise is why Bill Clinton was
surprised. People, even non-expert journalists like myself
have seen the Indo/Pakistani bombs coming for a long time.
(see columns of April 8th and April 15th). John Kennedy
would not be surprised. He foresaw 20 to 30 nuclear bomb
powers by the year 2000. Nevertheless, it will go down as
one of the great shocks of the twentieth century. It is
going to consume the minds and the political energies of the
best and the brightest of the twentyfirst century how to
avoid a cataclysmic nuclear war between these two
antagonistic neighbours who rub elbow to elbow 365 days a
year in one of the most densely populated parts of the world
and how to avoid a struggle for power and hegemony between
the two giants that are going to dominate the world in the
future, India and China.
Clinton, to my knowledge, has said the only thing that
has hit the nail on the head, yet the import of that is
apparently clearer to the listener than to him. "I cannot
believe," he said last Thursday, "that we are about to start
the twentyfirst century by having the subcontinent repeat
the worst mistakes of the twentieth, when we know it is not
necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national
greatness or national fulfillment".
"Not necessary to peace" what a perceptive, mind-blowing
riposte to all those presidents from Truman to Bush who
believed it was. So why now does the U.S. on Clinton's watch
maintain such a massive nuclear arsenal, years after its
confrontation with the Soviet Union is over?
It has long been argued by some quite hard nosed types
such as Paul Nitze, the Reagan arms advisor and General
George Lee Butler, the ex-chief of U.S. Strategic Command,
responsible for all airforce and navy nuclear weapons, that
there would be no way of stopping India's relentless
progression to being a fully-armed, nuclear-missile power,
capable like all the others of destroying half the world in
half an hour, unless the U.S. itself took a lead in slashing
its own nuclear stockpile. Either the sauce that is good for
the goose is good for the gander or it is not.
Endlessly these experts have touted one good idea after
another. The most elementary is to speed up the
Reagan-created Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)
process, which means, as compensation for Senator Jesse
Helms' derailing it three years ago and thus giving the
backwoodsmen in the Russian Duma time to mobilise against
ratification of the latest treaty, a new deal is proposed by
Washington that, unlike the past ones, is weighted in
Russia's favour. This would be no great disadvantage to the
U.S., if one factors in that at least 25% of Russian
missiles are now inoperable for lack of maintenance.
The stumbling block with these ideas is less the military
and more the politicians with their uninformed posturing,
playing to a populist gallery, undereducated by a
superficial media. Those who simplistically blame the
military should recall the charged moment during the
preparations for the Gulf War when Defence Secretary Dick
Cheney asked the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
to ready plans for the possible use of tactical nuclear
weapons. Colin Powell shot back, "we're not going to let
that genie loose."
A growing proportion of senior military officers in the
West, and in Russia too, are confident that the real
deterrent in today's world is modern conventional weapons
that actually can be used. Indeed, the greatest irony of the
Indian explosion is that, as long as there were no nuclear
weapons on the Indian subcontinent, India had the advantage
in men and machines. But a Pakistani nuclear bomb
effectively neutralises an Indian armoured punch across the
plains. The Indian government has shot India in both feet.
As for winding up its confrontational rhetoric with China it
has taken the dangerous step of opening its mouth ten years
too early. India's present generation of nuclear tipped
rockets can only reach Tibet and a part of southwestern
China that is industrially inconsequential. Whereas China
can move its rockets to the Tibetan plateau overlooking
India and take out nearly every important Indian city with
the flick of a switch.
At this late hour the way out--a reversal of the Indian
and Pakistani decision--points in the same direction as it
did a month ago not sanctions, disapprobation and isolation.
But the promotion, long overdue, of India to the Security
Council and the Group of Eight and, in return, a demand from
the UN that India honour the UN's 1948 request to hold a
plebicite in Kashmir to determine whether it stay part of
India or be handed over to Pakistan. At the same time a move
to rapid nuclear disarmament by the present nuclear powers
as proposed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their
summit in 1986, until they were undermined and effectively
overruled by their experts.
If Clinton wants to avoid a nuclear catastrophe for the
world and the dustbin of history for himself he has no other
choice. His reward would be just as tangible he'll be
remembered as the greatest American president of the
twentieth century.
June 3, 1998,
LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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