Mohan:
dawn.com
highlights from Pakistan's premier newspaper
With respect to its Chinese neighbour, whose future is distinctly unpredictable, India has a more plausible rationale for a nuclear deterrent.
India's programme was made public in response to a request from the US government, which for years has tried to prevent nuclear proliferation. The problem has been that the United States exempts itself from the nonproliferation it presses upon others.
Non-proliferation remains a dream
By William Pfaff & Lawrence Korb
INDIA has officially published its nuclear strategy which it describes as that of minimum credible deterrence. The details of the policy, as set forth by India's National Security Council on August 17, merit the opposition Congress Party's criticism that India is inviting escalation of the nuclear arms race with Pakistan.
Neither country can afford this, and neither needs it. The communal and territorial quarrels between them are unworthy of two intelligent nations.
With respect to its Chinese neighbour, whose future is distinctly unpredictable, India has a more plausible rationale for a nuclear deterrent.
India's nuclear force will consist of submarine-launched missiles, air-launched missiles from low-level-penetration aircraft, and mobile ground-launched ballistic missiles.
Such a force sets India's threshold of "minimum credible" deterrence pretty high. This sea-land-air deterrent sounds like the US nuclear triad.
America's nuclear force, however, was not developed for minimum deterrence but for second-strike deterrence, a vastly different thing. ("We can strike you, but you will be
afraid to strike back at us because of the further horrors we can commit against you.")
India's programme was made public in response to a request from the US government, which for years has tried to prevent nuclear proliferation. The problem has been that the
United States exempts itself from the nonproliferation it presses upon others.
The United States continues to modernize its nuclear forces, as permitted under strategic arms reduction treaties with Russia. Last year the Clinton administration programmed
more money for modernization and simulated testing than, on annual average, the United States spent during the cold war to create America's nuclear force.
Today, at any given moment, the United States has on alert some 2,300 warheads, with explosive power equivalent to 44,000 Hiroshimas. In these circumstances, US pressure
upon newly nuclear nations to give up their weapons has neither a generally accepted rationale nor logical weight.
The US position is that the United States is entitled to possess and continually improve nuclear forces beyond all rational connection to existing or foreseeable threats. But others should not have them at all.
Grudging exception has been made for countries that are already nuclear powers, since there is nothing to be done about Britain, France, Russia, China and (unofficially) Israel.
Until recent months, India and Pakistan officially possessed only nuclear "devices," not weapons. Everyone else is expected to renounce nuclear weapons.
So long as the post-cold war world seemed reasonably risk-free, and the United States seemed a law-abiding status quo power, this case could be made with some success,
whatever the grumbling in other capitals.
NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia undermined the US position. The demonstration made there of the sophistication (if not always the performance) of advanced US weapons, and
of the unparalleled overall capability of American forces, made a great impression on both allies and others.
The NATO intervention ignored United Nations authority, and Russian and Chinese objections were overridden. That rather frightened countries which still think of the United
Nations as a shield against arbitrary actions by the great powers.
The affair provided a lesson in the utility of nuclear deterrence. Had Slobodan Milosevic possessed a nuclear deterrent, NATO would not have bombed his country.
There will be no general halt to nuclear proliferation until the United States and the other nuclear powers take the lead in cutting their arsenals toward at least the level of minimum credible deterrence, and then open the debate on eventually going beyond that.
A second debate worth opening concerns multilateral deterrence of "first use" - an agreement among existing nuclear powers that any first use of nuclear weapons would
bring multilateral retaliation, which would not have to be, but could be, nuclear. That would provide a much more convincing rebuttal to nuclear proliferation than Washington's calls for the disarmament of everyone except the United States (and its friends).
Without radical rethinking of the nuclear problem, the post-Kosovo world is on its way toward proliferation on a scale not yet seen.
Dwight Eisenhower ended his presidency with a warning to Americans about the danger that exists in the alliance between industry and a military establishment whose professional inclination is toward paranoia. Ronald Reagan, in his second term, went to Reykjavik as a nuclear disarmer. What if Bill Clinton were to end his second term with a decisive cut in
America's nuclear array? What a dream!
The cold war is over. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are no more. America continues to face dangers in this world, but there is no country today that poses anywhere
near the threat that it faced just 10 years ago. So why does the Pentagon keep acting as if nothing has changed and continues spending at near Cold War levels?
Fighting the cold war was very expensive. It cost the United States trillions of dollars to maintain a huge worldwide force ready to repel an enormous invading army with weapons
nearly equal to its own. Military strategists were faced with a real fear that any land lost might be lost for good. To prevail, America needed to keep hundreds of thousands of
troops stationed overseas, ready to fight at a moment's notice - and always with a new generation of weapons.
Since the end of the cold war, the Russians have cut their military spending from more than $250 billion a year to less than $65 billion, and no other potential enemy has picked up the slack. Yet the United States has continued to keep hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the world, often on bases that formerly bordered enemies but are
now surrounded by allies. These troops remain ready to fight a major war at a moment's notice.
The Pentagon's weapons procurement policies also seem little affected by the changed world around us. The wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia showed that $40-million-a-copy F-15
fighters can chase any other aircraft out of the skies. Now the Pentagon wants to replace them with $188-million-a-copy F-22s, even though there are no new fighters rolling off
any assembly lines in potential adversaries' countries.
The same flawed pattern can be seen across all branches of the armed forces. Somehow Pentagon strategists become convinced that complete military dominance plus static or
diminished threats equals a need to throw out the current weapons and replace them with far more expensive ones.
This thinking permeates a myriad of decisions. The Russians have dry-docked most of their submarines, and nobody else has a credible fleet. Still, the Pentagon has decided to
scrap, before the end of their useful life, much to the current U.S. fleet of attack subs and replace them with 30 new ones at a cost of $64 billion. American fighter aircraft are the best in the world, so let's replace them with three new systems costing more than $329 billion. U.S. carrier battle groups no longer face any blue-water threat, so let's build two new carriers at a cost of more than $10 billion.-Dawn |
