Sunday, May 31, 1998

A safer world calls for fewer nuclear nations

And now there are seven.

Pakistan has joined the ranks of the declared nuclear powers, setting off five underground explosions in a tit-for-tat response to India, which two weeks ago became the sixth member of the nuclear club.

India did its tests for the worst of reasons, world status and domestic political considerations, and Pakistan felt compelled to follow. The tests proved nothing because both countries have had nuclear capability since the mid-1970s.

For the rest of the world, the most disturbing aspect of the tests is how clueless the two governments were about the international consequences.

Especially guileless and unprepared is the newly elected government of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His administration angered and alarmed Beijing by citing a Chinese security threat as justification for the tests. Until those tests, India’s relations with China, once a major military backer of Pakistan, had been on the mend.

Explosive failure

And its efforts to reassure Pakistan, with which it had fought three wars since 1947, have obviously and explosively failed.

Pakistan is threatening to go a step further and mount nuclear warheads aboard missiles that can reach deep into India. And India would inevitably respond in kind. The major world powers should bend every effort to see that the two nations do not take that exceedingly dangerous next step.

American sanctions are inevitable and necessary. India is already paying the price as its currency has fallen to a record low. Unfortunately, sanctions will hit Pakistan a lot harder than the greater culprit, India.

So far, the United States has won postponement of $865 million in a pending $2 billion World Bank loan to India. The bulk of that loan was to go for a national power grid. Vajpayee seems untroubled that his government can provide the Indian people with a nuclear bomb but not electricity.

Crux of world policy

And here, along with the insistence that the two nations sign the relevant international nuclear treaties, should be the crux of world policy. Aid should be resumed only on assurance of no more testing and no nuclear-armed missiles.

And world donors must insure that the aid is not fungible, in other words, that it cannot be used to free up funds that then can be spent on nuclear weapons research.

The international consensus had been that the fewer nations that had nuclear weapons, the safer the world. It may have been an imperfect arrangement, but it worked and should be restored.