Times
India’s Nuclear Blasts: Lasting Impacts Not Lasting Damage
Lavlesh Lamba
Key Points
There is a silver lining to the dust clouds raised by India’s five nuclear weapons tests ). These underground blasts should promote, rather than damage, regional stability.In the short-term, though, markets have suffered. These tests - and the imposition of economic sanctions by the US and Japan - depressed the Bombay stock market index by 5.9%, over two sessions. Interest rates spiked: the weighted average call money rate rose by 100 basis points, to 7.2%, following the tests. However, the longer-term impacts are likely to be good. Here’s why: India’s new Hindu nationalist-dominated cabinet has used the blasts to signal:
India needs faster economic growth. A conflict with Pakistan - or anyone else - would be a costly distraction. Pakistan’s recent missile test perhaps made Indian leaders feel it was urgent to head-off a regional arms race. Pakistan’s history of political instability - soldiers have repeatedly ousted elected governments, and generals have ruled for long periods - poses the peril that a wobbly Pakistani regime might be tempted to rally support by inflaming relations with India. Thus, India has always disliked China’s help for Pakistani development of strategic (i.e., long-range) weapons. India fears that such weapons could encourage an insecure Pakistani leader to seek a confrontation, mostly likely over Kashmir, a hotly-disputed territory on the Indo-Pakistani frontier. Such fear is warranted. In 1982, a discredited Argentine military regime tried to rally public support by starting what seemed to be an easy-to-win war with Britain over the British-held the Falkland Islands, long-claimed by Argentina. In 1974, a Greek military junta tried to win public support by incorporating Cyprus into Greece, through a coup d’état on Cyprus. To block this, Turkey invaded Cyprus, which remains divided. Through these blasts, India has signalled to China that Pakistan cannot hope to surpass India in a strategic arms race, and that China’s help is futile. India and China are not going to war. They have a frontier dispute, but in a region where the altitude (16-20,000 feet) prohibits big or lasting military operations; altitude sickness and frost-bite, not bullets, cause most casualties.
India wants to signal Pakistan that its new medium-range missile offers no strategic advantage. If Pakistan gets this message, then these blasts will have served a useful purpose. That may be a good thing: the history of this century is full of examples of politicians who felt that a new class of weapons provided a temporarily decisive strategic advantage, which had to be exploited before it was offset by an adversary. Thus, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought that Russia’s supposed advantage in medium-range missiles would enable him to force the US to submit to his demands. The result: the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962), which brought both powers to the brink of a nuclear exchange. A Pakistani miscalculation of this sort could lead to a major war, which neither country needs. The second point - the domestic political dimension - is crucial for foreign investors. India’s cabinet needs to reinforce its nationalist credentials if it is to pursue economic internationalization by continuing its predecessors’ reforms. De- regulation and expanded foreign investment are the keys to India’s efforts to match China’s rapid economic growth. Those policies - which could do short-term harm to some nationalist voters’ pocketbooks - can only be pursued by the current cabinet if it can prove it is truly "die-hard, hard-line nationalist". When it further opens the economy, the cabinet will use its defiance of world opinion - however brief -over these nuclear tests to deflect charges of "selling-out" to foreigners. India likely will offer to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty very soon. India will sign once Beijing signals it will phase-out support for Pakistan’s strategic missile development program. Beijing wants to avoid conflict on its southern flank. Beijing is worried about its western frontier - Muslim unrest in Xinjiang -and its maritime boundaries, e.g., the Spratly islands in the South China Sea(see my note on China’s re-armament of 22 May 1997). India has no claims in these areas, but could incite further unrest in Xinjiang, to discomfit China. So soon as India offers to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the sanctions imposed should be reduced or ended. To the extent that these tests are properly understood by Pakistan and China, they will contribute to regional stability and to India’s further economic modernization and integration into the global economy. Summary When China acknowledges receipt of India’s message - sent via these nuclear weapons tests - to stop helping Pakistan to develop strategic weapons, India will sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. These tests will have a long-term domestic benefit for India’s Hindu nationalist against charges it has "sold out to foreigners", when it continues internationalizing the economy.
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