Nuking the nukes

A world with no nuclear weapons is highly desirable but is it feasible?

Nuclear weapons and their safety has been an issue of global concern in recent weeks, triggered by the anxiety about the status of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal in the light of the jihadi turbulence that has engulfed that country. While Islamabad has gone out of its way to assuage this concern by convening an unprecedented press conference on January 26 wherein the chief of the Pakistani nuclear command and control division, Lt Gen (retd) Khalid Kidwai explained the functioning of Pak nuclear weapons, the anxiety remains.

Nuclear weapons and their husbanding is an opaque domain; world over, governments that possess this apocalyptic capability are secretive and reluctant to shed any useful light on the matter.

It is against this backdrop that four of the USA’s most respected names in the nuclear business have reiterated their call for a world free of nuclear weapons. In a signed article about moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn re-advocated what they had first said in January 2007 — in the same forum — namely, that the time had come for the global community to enounce nuclear weapons.

This is music to Indian ears, for New Delhi has been at the forefront of the global campaign for universal nuclear weapon disarmament since the days of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, going back to the late 1950s. Most recently, his grandson and former PM Rajiv Gandhi had unveiled an ambitious plan at the UN General Assembly in late 1988 called the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan with a similar objective — a world free of nukes.
 
But this idealistic and highly desirable objective was unveiled at the height of the second phase of the Cold War, when the former Soviet Union was intact  and nuclear deterrence was an article of faith. Predictably, it fell on deaf ears; India was said to be living in cuckoo-land!

Since that time, there have been momentous events in the global nuclear domain. The Cold War ended — mercifully with no nuclear weapon being fired in anger — and the USSR disintegrated. The nuclear arsenal of the Soviet empire was brought under Russian control and the splintered republics that were born, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, that had nuclear weapons on their soil, renounced the capability. The global nuke club remained at the same number: five.

However, by May 1998, India and later Pakistan declared themselves as states with nuclear weapons (SNW) though outside the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) — this jolted the nuclear regime. In 2001, the enormity of September 11 created even greater anxiety about the deviant regime (Iraq, North Korea and Iran) and the non-state entity and the possibility that they may acquire nuclear weapons. The revelation about the existence of the AQ Khan clandestine nuclear network — referred to as the ‘global nuclear Wal-Mart’ — only confirmed what experts and analysts had been warning about for years.

The Kissinger letter thus comes when the global concern about the safety of nuclear weapons and related material is very real, but it is unlikely that this highly desirable objective will be realised in a hurry. The major states led by the USA and Russia — which have 95 per cent of the global nuke arsenal — have indicated that their national security is inexorably linked to their possession of the nuke and consequently the down-stream effect is for the medium powers to cling to their weapons. This includes France, UK, China and now India and Pakistan.

In a disturbing development, both the US and Russia have also been working on the so-called mini nuke and sub-strategic nuclear weapon — signalling thereby that far from renouncing the dreaded weapon, they are investing in the latest technology to introduce utilitarian nukes. This is a far cry from the accepted belief that the nuclear weapon in the arsenal of the   major powers is unusable and only a political tool.

The Kissinger initiative is to be followed by a global conference of non-governmental experts to be held in Oslo in February and many of these proposals will be discussed. India, which was long associated with the disarmament effort, has been relatively muted in recent years at the global level. While Delhi does make the mandatory reference at the UN annually, there is sense that after May 1998, India has diluted its universal disarmament commitment. This perception must be redressed.

It took the global community almost 71 years to renounce chemical weapons — a campaign that began in 1925 with the Geneva Convention. The long haul to ban nukes may have just begun.

The author is a defence analyst