Sunday, May 17, 1998

India uncorks nuclear genie on the world

The dirty secret of nuclear weapons is that almost any country with an industrial base and enough money can build one. The United Nations says there are 44 such nations, and now, thanks to India, some of them may be inclined to try.

There are five "declared" nations with nuclear weapons, the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France. Last week, India became the sixth, its declaration coming in the form of underground nuclear explosions provocatively close to its border with Pakistan.

In doing so, India insolently flouted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty overwhelmingly approved in the United Nations in 1996 and since signed by 149 nations, including the five original nuclear powers. Pending final ratification, the world had obeyed a semi-formal moratorium on nuclear testing. The United States has not conducted a test since 1992.

India would not sign the treaty, and Pakistan, also nuclear-capable, would not sign if India did not. Now India may have ignited a mini-arms race with Pakistan, which immediately began making noises about a test of its own, and perhaps China, which grudgingly stopped testing in 1996. The threat is serious. In the last 50 years, India has fought three wars with Pakistan and one with China. All four wars involved territorial disputes that are still unresolved.

While the instant case took the world by surprise -- yet another reason for a thorough-going review of U.S. intelligence capabilities -- India did set off a nuclear device in 1974. India then insisted the device was "peaceful"; the current government pointedly made no such claim.

Getting 'respect'

The most optimistic view of the tests is that they were done for domestic political reasons by the newly elected and virulently nationalistic government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. India, which has a bottomless capacity for sanctimony, does not feel it gets the respect it deserves, and perhaps these tests were done to show Vajpayee's Hindu supporters that India was elbowing its way into the circle of first-class powers.

If so, the first-class powers should make clear that Vajpayee miscalculated. Condemnation has been almost universal, with several nations, including the United States, recalling their ambassadors, and others, like Japan, suspending economic aid.

United States law leaves the White House little fudge room: After 30 days, it requires the United States to cut off aid, military assistance and loans and credits through private and international lending agencies. The United States might have a little better moral standing on this issue if the Senate would ratify the test ban treaty, but a timely vote on that now seems a casualty of India's nuclear test. Another casualty is international confidence that the chance of another Hiroshima was growing more remote.

In a certain terrible irony, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, awed by the first atom bomb explosion in 1945, quoted the Indian god Vishnu from the Hindu epic, Bhavagad Gita, who said, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."