A NEW NUCLEAR DEBATE IN INDIA
COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 24 Sep 2009
As an anti-nuclear-weapon activist of India, I am abashed to admit this. But the main nuclear debate in the major South Asian country has not been the one between nuclear militarists and their opponents. It has been the one between two schools of nuclear militarism. The debate has acquired a new dimension, with the hawks of all these years suddenly made to appear doves.
The US has figured in the debate all through. If George W. Bush initiated the earlier polemics by presenting a nuclear deal to India, the current controversy has a Barack Obama connection.
India’s nuclear-weapon tests of May 1998 in the desert site of Pokharan did provoke some serious protests from sections that saw what these presaged for South Asia. These, however, led to no national debate. The voice of the anti-nuke agitators was drowned in the high-decibel celebrations of Pokharan II (as the test series was named, Pokharan I was given as the title of the "peaceful nuclear explosion" conducted at the same site in 1974).
The nation witnessed its first major nuclear debate after former President Bush and India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met in Washington in July 2005 and announced their decision to go for a "US-India nuclear deal." Right from then, a loud and lacerating political controversy raged in India over the deal, until July 2008 when the Singh government won a parliamentary confidence vote on the issue.
Yes, we in the anti-nuke camp declared war on the deal, too. We did so because the deal gave India the dubiously high status of a nuclear-weapon state, with which Washington and its allies were willing to do nuclear business. The "civilian nuclear cooperation agreement," signed in March 2006, clearly helped and did not hamper India’s strategic nuclear program.
Under the deal, New Delhi could keep specified strategic nuclear reactors out of the purview of the inspectors of he International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And the nuclear commerce, for which the deal opened the doors, freed up India’s indigenous nuclear fuel resources for use in its weapon program.
Our case was a cry in the wilderness, only faintly heard in the mainstream media with headlines reserved for the war of militarists. The main discourse was dominated by opposition to the deal from a point of view diametrically opposite to ours. The far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was in power 11 years ago and presided over Pokharan II, decried the deal as an attempt to derail the weapon program.
A tokenistic Washington position about future Indian testing (which was to be allowed anyway if a changed strategic situation was deemed to demand it) was presented as proof that the deal sought to "cap" New Delhi’s strategic nuclear schemes. Even sections of the left joined this lopsided opposition to the deal by seeing it as an attack on India’s "sovereignty" in relation to its strategic nuclear program.
It is over the issue of testing again that the current, second major Indian nuclear debate has erupted. The sides, however, are not he same.
On the deal, pitted against each other were the BJP and its fiends on the one hand and Singh’s Congress Party and its allies on the other. The BJP and the Congress are now on the same aide of the barricades.
Some prominent individuals, too, have switched sides, most notably former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. The BJP first hailed Kalam, scientist operationally in charge of Pokharan II, as the father of the Indian bomb and helped him into the presidential palace in New Delhi. It, however, condemned him as a compromiser of India’s sovereignty when he upheld the deal as the answer to the country’s need for uranium. But the party and Kalam are making common cause in the current controversy.
No mystery shrouds their motive. Both of them share a stake in preserving Pokharan II as a symbol of Indian pride. And the controversy has put that avowed achievement in question.
It all began when K. Santhanam, a scientist who worked under Kalam in 1998, was reported on August 27 as trashing the test series. He was quoted as alleging, in effect, that the leaders of the then BJP-headed government and the nuclear establishment had lied to the nation about the tests. According to him, as many foreign experts had said at the time, the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb tests had ended in a "fizzle."
A "fizzle" occurs when the testing of a nuclear bomb fails to meet its expected yield or falls short by 30 percent or more. The yield is the amount of energy discharged when a nuclear weapon is detonated, with the amount being expressed in kilotons (thousands of tons) or megatons (millions of tons) of trinitrotoluene (TNT).
A hydrogen bomb can produce far greater destructive power than an atom bomb. The biggest bomb tested by the Soviet Union is said to have produced 50 megatons of explosive power – nearly 3,000 times more destructive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which killed 80,000 people instantly, according to the most conservative estimate. This is the weapon India has, the BJP and its band claim. It is what India has yet to acquire, Santhanam and others wail.
Santhanam put the yield at 15 to 20 kilotons, or less than half the officially claimed 45 kilotons. The pride-puncturing estimate has the predicted reactions from everyone with a reputation resting on Pokharan II. It has also been rejected by the reigning nuclear establishment.
Past heads of the establishment, however, have condemned official claims on Pokjaran II almost in a chorus. One of them, former chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) P. K. Iyengar, has also added a political dimension to the debate that is bound to embarrass the Pakistan-obsessed BJP.
According to Iyengar, the tests were done in haste at the bidding of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government of the day in order to beat Pakistan to it. He says that, in March 1998, two months before Pokharan II, India’s intelligence probably found out that the Pakistanis were about to test. "If Pakistan fired an explosion before India," asks Iyengar ironically, "what would a common man in India have thought?"
A more intriguing question is: why are Santhanam and others raising the issue over a decade after the event? Writes Ramesh Thakur, director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Waterloo, Canada: "The reason for Santhanam’s revelation may be to put pressure on the government to conduct further tests for validating the design of India’s hydrogen bomb, before the window is closed if the Obama administration ratifies the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and pressures remaining hold-outs to follow."
The demand by Santhanam and others for more tests, despite India’s voluntary moratorium on testing, reinforces Thakur’s reasoning.
Added to this, perhaps, is an anti-China angle. The controversy has broken out around the same time as India is witnessing a media-powered campaign to create new tensions between New Delhi and Beijing. Santhanam has strengthened this suspicion by calling for "a series of thermonuclear bomb tests" in order to "protect the nation’s security" from China. "We are totally naked vis-à-vis China" and its nuclear might, he adds.
The best answer to this bogey comes, ironically, from a security analyst long associated with the bomb lobby. K. Subrahmanyam, in a newspaper article co-authored with scientist V. S. Arunachalam, points out: "… even with 25-kiloton fission bombs, the damages are going to be far more extensive than what Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered, given the higher population densities in the cities of China and South Asia and the urban development of recent years. Therefore, the Indian deterrent posture will not lose its credibility if India is compelled to rely on fission weapons only."
The article goes on to say what Indian and Pakistani militarists can do to the people of South Asia with the nuclear arsenals they already have. "In a nuclear war, once the missiles are launched, entire countries on both sides become battlefields. It is difficult to control or regulate the firing of the missiles since both sides are under compulsion to use the missiles before they are eliminated by the enemy strike. As soon as the first city is hit, populations of all cities would attempt to empty out into the countryside since there will be panic that their own city will be the next target in the next few minutes."
The article adds: "Think of the entire urban population of a country becoming internally displaced persons in a matter of hours." The authors, however, do not argue against strategic programs that can bring no security to the region and its people.
Participants in India’s main nuclear debate think pretty little about this and other possible fallouts of their folly. The anti-nuclear-weapon activists, meanwhile, can only hope at the most to have their say in the alternative media.
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