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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (9217)	10/31/1999 4:35:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

'US considered arming India with nukes' Aziz Haniffa October 30, 1999, 18:15 Hrs (IST) Washington: The United States had seriously considered providing India and other friendly Asian nations with nuclear weapons during the Cold War as a bulwark against the burgeoning power of China and the erstwhile Soviet Union, says a newbook. The book, India's nuclear bomb: The impact on Global Proliferation, by South Asian affairs expert George Perkovich, slated for publication next month, is being touted as the most comprehensive story yet told of "the enigmatic 50-year nuclear policy of the world's largest democracy." The book is filled with significant revelations drawn from recently declassified US government documents as well as interviews with key Indian scientists, military leaders, diplomats and politicians and provides some startling insights into how India has grappled with the twin desires to have and to renounce the bomb. Beyond unveiling India's decision-making processes and technical achievements, the book reveals how the US vacillated between helping and stifling India's acquisition of bomb-making capabilities. One of these revelations talks of the intense high-level inter-agency debate in the United States in the mid-1960s when Washington, as part of its rationale of "nuclear sharing," considered providing New Delhi with nuclear weapons as a counterweight against the growing Communist might which was perceived here as clearly expansionist. China carried out its maiden nuclear weapons test on October 16, 1964, radically altering the balance of power in the region, and this is widely acknowledged as being the catalyst that drove New Delhi, which had border problems with Beijing, to accelerate its own nuclear programme and conduct its own nuclear test in the Pokhran desert in 1974. Perkovich, who is director of the Secure World Programme of the W Alton Jones Foundation, a Virginia-based philanthopic organisation, writes that declassified US documents and several interviews he had with senior Indian scientists and government officials clearly proves that Washington feared the Chinese threat so much so that it may have prompted India to acquire a nuclear weapons capability with promises of help. The US evidently perceived China as a far greater threat in terms of Communist expansionism than even the erstwhile Soviet Union and stood ready to help India go nuclear even though it considered New Delhi a veritable surrogate of Moscow. According to Perkovich, "The basic idea was to make arrangements for friendly Asian countries" like India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Pakistan, Thailand and South Korea "to receive and militarily deliver low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that the United States would provide to them in the event of Chinese aggression." Apparently, India was said to be number one on this list because of that country's high calibre scientific and technical establishment which could move quickly to acquire nuclear capability and also maintain any nuclear weapons that were provided to it. India was considered top priority for such a largesse because it was perceived as the country that China would think of attacking on account of the simmering border problems and one that Beijing perhaps thought the US would least be worried about. Perkovich's contention has been borne out by declassified US documents such as a 1964 Pentagon study which, for example, suggested making nuclear weapons available to countries such as India and Washington's Asian allies such as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Pakistan. This particular study was fowarded to then Secretary of State Dean Rusk on December 4, 1964, and it contained a special emphasis on India since New Delhi was considered having the wherewithal necessary for developing and testing a nuclear weapon within one year of a decision to do so. Perkovich, who is best known for coining the term "non-weaponised deterrence" vis-a-vis India and Pakistan before both countries tested in 1998, wrote that at the time Washington agonised over providing New Delhi with such assistance because it would have compromised US nonproliferation objectives and catalysed India towards becoming a nuclear weapons state. On the other hand, the United States believed that if it could exercise the option of "controlled use of nuclear weapons," provided to India and Washington's Asian allies against China, it perhaps could maintain regional stability and eschew a global conflagration. The book acknowledged that the US if it had gone ahead with this modus operandi would most likely have provided Pakistan also with some similar assistance, largely to alleviate Islamabad's concern over its traditional enemy, India, and avoid any arms race in the region and the likelihood of Pakistan angrily moving out of Washington's orbit. However, the book said, "the nuclear sharing proposal," which was being aggressively pushed by the Pentagon, had no takers in the State Department which saw it as creating more problems than would solve and was ultimately rejected. (India Abroad News Service )