[PAKISTAN
- INDIA]
TALKING PEACE, MAKING WAR
Zia Mian, A H Nayyar,
M V Ramana
The News
International
January 08, 2005
Albert Einstein famously observed that, “You cannot
simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” This straightforward piece of
common sense wisdom is lost to leaders in Pakistan
and India. They seem intent on talking about trying to prevent
war and yet insist on pushing ahead as hard and fast as they can on getting
ready for the next war. They continue to make and buy weapons, even as peace
falls by the wayside.
Hardly a day goes by without a report of Pakistani
and Indian officials, foreign secretaries or foreign
ministers meeting and talking. This a welcome respite from the past several
years of tension interrupted by crises and threats of war. But if the current
round of nuclear talks is to amount to more than talks and agreements that formalise the status quo, leaders and the public in India
and Pakistan
will need to talk about and agree to concrete measures that help slow the
momentum towards ever larger and more destructive nuclear arsenals.
A large part of the problem facing nuclear talks is
that leaders and people in Pakistan
and India are
of two minds when it comes to their nuclear arsenals. On the one hand, they recognise that these weapons cast a dark, potentially fatal
shadow over the future of both countries. India’s
foreign minister Natwar Singh declared “To me personally,
the most important thing on our agenda should be the nuclear dimension”.
General Musharraf claimed that “we have been saying
let’s make south Asia a nuclear-free zone” and added that
“If mutually there is an agreement of reduction of nuclear assets, Pakistan
would be willing”.
At the same time, officials and leaders on both sides
seem bewitched by the power of the bomb. They each believe that the threat of massive destruction
represented by their nuclear weapons is a form of protection, and so a force
for good. Lost in this nuclear logic,
they are forced to concede that the possession of nuclear weapons by the other
state serves the same purpose. The joint statements released after both the expert-level
talks on nuclear confidence building measures in New Delhi
in June and when the Foreign Secretaries met in Delhi
affirmed the two sides see the nuclear capabilities of each other as a “factor
for stability.”
The idea that nuclear weapons are a ‘factor for stability’
flies in the face of both reason and experience. The incredible destructive
power of nuclear weapons is meant to spawn fear in adversary states. But this
fear also incites these states to seek the same weapons and produces a widening
spiral of instability and escalation. The decades of superpower cold war are a
history of hostility, crises and ever growing conventional and nuclear
arsenals. However, nuclear weapons did
serve to create stability in one area. They have ensured and protected a vast
nuclear weapons complex, one persists even now,
fifteen years after the Cold war ended.
There is abundant evidence since the May 1998 nuclear
tests that there is no stability to be found in the shadow of the bomb. Crisis
has followed crisis. First there was the Kargil war. Then India
and Pakistan
were enmeshed in another military confrontation involving an estimated half a
million troops, about two-thirds of them Indian, facing off across the border.
An Indian army officer spoke of plans for a quick attack that would set back “Pakistan’s
military capability by at least 30 years, pushing it into the military ‘dark
ages’,” adding that “casualties in men and machines in such an operation will
be high and the military has firmly told the politicians to prepare the nation for
losses and delayed results, as fighting will be fierce.” The Indian Army chief
has since confirmed details of the plans.
So what have the two sides talked in the nuclear talks.
The only ‘new’ measure that has been trumpeted is another hotline, this time
linking the two foreign secretaries, through their respective foreign offices, “to
prevent misunderstandings and reduce risks relevant to nuclear issues”. J. N. Dixit, India’s
national security adviser wrote in November 1990 that prime
ministers Chandrashekhar and Nawaz
Sharif decided to establish a direct hotline and to activate
the hotline between the offices of the foreign secretaries and the directors of
military operations. In Dixit’s judgment “hotline conversations
between the director-generals of military operations remain routine and the
prime ministerial hotline has seldom been used, as has the hotline between the
two foreign secretaries”. So much for hotlines.
The other agreed measure that has been highlighted
is the agreement to notify each other of upcoming missile tests. This was in
fact agreed to in Lahore in 1999
and was part of the Memorandum of Understanding signed there. Since then, the
two states have been informing each other about missile tests, of which there
have been many. Now, five years later, they have simply agreed again that they
will conclude such a notification agreement.
The missile test notification agreement, when it comes,
will do nothing about limiting either state from continuing to test missiles
with ever longer range, greater accuracy, and more destructive power. General Musharraf announced proudly “We are conducting a missile
test every second day” and India’s defence minister Pranab Mukherjee made clear that
missiles would be tested ‘as and when required’.
A little common sense shows there are some obvious
things that Pakistan
and India could
do, if they want to do more than just build ‘confidence’ while their nuclear
arsenals keep growing and becoming ever more deadly.
Both India
and Pakistan
have emphasised repeatedly that they seek only a ‘minimum’
nuclear arsenal. General Musharraf’s
remarks about Pakistan’s willingness to consider a ‘reduction of nuclear assets’ makes
clear that this threshold has already been crossed. This should be no
surprise. Pakistan
and India have been
making the fissile material (the nuclear explosive) for their weapons as fast
as they can for decades. They already have enough for several dozen nuclear
weapons each.
If they each used only five of their weapons against
the other’s cities (one bomb per city), it is estimated that there would a
total of about three million deaths and an additional 1.5 million severely
injured. The experience of death and destruction on this scale would be beyond imagination
for either country.
Given that India
and Pakistan
can inflict this much devastation using only a fraction of their nuclear
weapons stockpile, it is beyond any understanding why they continue to produce
more fissile material for more nuclear weapons. The two countries should stop
making more fissile material. And, no more of the existing fissile material
stockpile should be turned into nuclear weapons. Each additional weapon could
destroy yet another city.
Despite the destructive capacity they have already
created, nuclear weapons establishments in India
and Pakistan,
as in similar establishments in other countries with nuclear weapons, pursue
research and development activities to make their nuclear weapons both more
destructive and more compact. If the future is to offer something other than
the paranoid logic of racing to build more and more lethal weapons, the two
governments should call a halt to such activities.
One step towards curtailing new weapons development
is a ban on testing nuclear weapons. India
and Pakistan
have repeated their unilateral declarations to conduct no further nuclear weapons
tests. But, neither seems willing to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty (CTBT), the 1996 international agreement banning explosive nuclear
weapons tests - which has been signed by all the other nuclear weapons states (US,
Russia, Britain,
France and China,
as well as Israel),
and by 166 other countries. A natural corollary to the ban on nuclear weapons
testing is a ban on flight testing of ballistic missiles. Such a ban would inhibit the development of longer
range and more accurate, thereby more destructive, missiles. The furious pace
of missile development in south Asia and the tit-for-tat
testing programmes makes such a ban all the more
urgent.
There is another area of possible agreement. In the Lahore
agreement, the two governments committed to “reducing the risks of accidental
or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons”. These risks are
directly linked to the deployment of nuclear weapons; deployment might involve,
for example, putting the weapons on ballistic missiles or keeping the weapons
at military airbases close to planes that may carry them. If nuclear weapons are
not given over to military forces and not kept ready to use, there is much less
danger of them being used by whoever happens to have charge of them at that
moment, or of them being involved in an accident.
As part of the Lahore
agreements, India
and Pakistan
committed “to notify each other immediately in the event of any accidental, unauthorised or unexplained incident that could create the
risk of a fallout with adverse consequences for both sides, or of an outbreak
of a nuclear war between the two countries, as well as to adopt measures aimed
at diminishing the possibility of such actions or incidents being misinterpreted
by the other.” The two states should agree to draw up together a list of all the
possible “accidental, unauthorised or unexplained”
incidents that they would like the other side to tell them about. This would
lay the basis for sharing descriptions of what measures each has taken to
reduce the risks of possible accidents and unauthorised
incidents.
There are many other ideas that can emerge if there
is a will for peace. The obstacles to substantive negotiations are the nuclear
weapons complex, the military and the foreign ministries, and the mindless,
violent nationalism of the political parties that have embraced the bomb. It is
these that have brought us to the point of having to worry about the risk of a
nuclear war that might kill millions and the now ever present risk of nuclear
accidents.
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The writers are physicists; Dr Mian and Dr Nayyar are from Pakistan,
Dr Ramana is from India