India's Nuclear Tests and the Failure of Non-Proliferation and Arms Control

M. V. Ramana

November 6, 1998

Fuller Lodge

Panel Discussion Organized by the Los Alamos Study Group and Our Common Future

If one assumes that as is often stated the purpose of these arms control treaties is ridding the world of nuclear weapons, there is little doubt that Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests point to a profound failure of the traditional arms control process. In this talk, I will go through the parallel histories of the arms control and the Indian nuclear program.

During the early years, the US suggested treaty after treaty that tried to allow the US to maintain its lead in the arms race while the Soviet Union would respond with treaties that would annul the difference. All along, of course, they both laid claim to moral high ground. It was of course clear to most people that this process was unlikely to lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons. India's leaders were among them. While that did not lead them to immediately start on a crash nuclear weapons program, they did invest in an ambitious nuclear program. Over the years, apart from nuclear reactors, India also developed facilities for mining Uranium, fabricating fuel, manufacturing heavy water, reprocessing spent fuel to extract Plutonium and, more recently, enriching Uranium. Though only a part of the infrastructure needed to manufacture nuclear weapons was in place, as would be expected in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the program never lost sight of the possibility that the facilities constructed and expertise gained could be used for military purposes.

The strategy used, perhaps not intentionally, was remarkably close to something that Robert Oppenheimer said in 1946 while responding to a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons. "We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: We would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the production of atomic weapons saying, this is just in case somebody two-times us; we would stockpile uranium; we would keep as many of our developments secret as possible; we would locate our plants, not where they would do the most good for the production of power, but where they would do the most good for protection against enemy attack."

One of the first serious treaties that was proposed by India was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in April 1954. The reactions to this proposal from the two superpowers of the day are worth recalling. The Soviet Union said that the proposal made sense only in the context of general and complete disarmament, a linkage that is even more ambitious than the one that India gave when it rejected the treaty in 1996. The United States first said that the proposal was worth of "respectful attention." But Eisenhower, the president at that time, was soon persuaded by Lewis Strauss that a ban on nuclear explosions was not in the US interest.

Nevertheless, the proposal did lead to something. When combined with public concern worldwide over the dangers posed by radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing – as we know now from the National Cancer Institute study somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 people, just in the United States, have been (or will be) victims of thyroid cancer – this proposal led to the Partial Test Ban Treaty. This was certainly welcome but as far as the primary purpose of the Test Ban Treaty was concerned, i.e. a measure that would inhibit the development of qualitatively new weapons designs, it did nothing since simultaneously the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed facilities for underground nuclear weapons testing.

The next major treaty was the NPT. The preamble to the Treaty cites a desire among its signatories to "further the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery." In the Treaty, the elimination of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is to be brought about by the non-nuclear weapon-states abjuring nuclear weapons in exchange for the nuclear-weapon agreeing to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

This was clearly discriminatory since it involves different obligations and rights for the different states. India rejected the treaty on these grounds and continued its build-up of its nuclear infrastructure. Indeed, the very existence of such a treaty has been pointed to repeatedly by elites in India to justify India's nuclear program.

It is worth emphasizing that the non-nuclear weapons states have almost without exception kept their end of the bargain. On the other hand, the nuclear weapon-states conducted innumerable nuclear weapons tests and increased the size and destructive power of their arsenals - it is estimated that in 1968 there were some 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and that this number increased to 70,000 in 1987, before falling back to around 36,000 in 1998. It is clear that the NPT was not sufficient to prevent increases in nuclear arsenals. This only ended with the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the numbers of warheads still in existence nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War, despite the complete disappearance of the justification offered for these nuclear arsenals for the last fifty years, are not suggestive that the nuclear weapon states will keep their side of the bargain by eliminating their nuclear arsenals.

In response to calls for a multilateral treaty on nuclear disarmament, the NWS, especially the US and Russia, have stressed bilateral negotiations aimed at limiting and reducing strategic armaments — the START treaties.

It is important to be clear what has and has not been achieved by the START process. The numbers usually quoted as the levels of warheads left after implementation of these START agreements are misleading; these numbers only refer to active operational weapons. In all, the US stockpile with the Department of Defense contains three categories of warheads: active operational warheads, along with spares kept at the bases where nuclear weapons are deployed; augmentation or "hedge" warheads not necessarily associated with active nuclear delivery systems; and reliability replacements kept in storage. Beyond these categories, the Energy Department has custody of retired warheads and the "strategic reserve." Russia also keeps several thousand warheads on reserve.

If all these categories are included, it has been estimated that the US and Russia still have over 30,000 weapons. In all, the five nuclear weapon states hold, between them, over 36,000 weapons.

The START process is, moreover, not designed to lead to nuclear disarmament. This follows from the nature of the reductions - the START process only counts the numbers of delivery vehicles and not the fundamental core of the nuclear weapons—the pits made of fissile material. Article II of START I reads: "Each Party shall reduce and limit its ICBMs and ICBM launchers, SLBMs and SLBM launchers, heavy bombers, ICBM warheads, SLBM warheads, and heavy bomber armaments, so that seven years after entry into force of this Treaty and thereafter, the aggregate numbers, as counted in accordance with Article III of this Treaty, do not exceed......." There is no mention of pits being reduced. Indeed, the pits recovered from dismantled warheads are stored and not disposed off in any fashion. This retention leads one to suspect that the US and Russia are not in a hurry to give up the potential to build up their arsenals, even if they are unlikely, at the present, to do so.

To make matters worse, the START process is now stalled. The Russian Duma is refusing to ratify START II. Since the US refuses to move forward unilaterally on START III, it seems highly unlikely that START will go much further in leading to lower numbers of nuclear weapons, let alone their complete elimination, at any time in the near future.

In the case of the US, there are other indicators that the US intends to hold on to its nuclear weapons for the indefinite future: the Stockpile Stewardship and modernization programs, the plans to resume tritium production, and in particular, the recent Presidential Guidelines for retargeting nuclear weapons which affirms that the US will continue to rely on nuclear arms as a cornerstone of its national security for the "indefinite future". Likewise, partly in response to NATO expansion, Russia is reportedly considering increasing its reliance on nuclear weapons.

All these indicate that the two superpowers intend to hold on to their nuclear weapons and the START process is extremely unlikely to lead to even low numbers of nuclear weapons, let alone zero, in the foreseeable future.

All through the period from the early sixties to the nineties, the Indian nuclear program kept growing at a slow rate with essentially two important developments. In 1974, India conducted a nuclear test. And, in the eighties, India began a determined missile program that led to the induction of ballistic missiles into the Indian armed forces in the early nineties. After the 1974 test, India maintained that it had demonstrated its capacity to build nuclear weapons should the need arise, but had chosen not to manufacture or deploy them. There were calls within the domestic debate, by the "bomb lobby" to proceed with these activities but they were not particularly successful in their efforts. It is only in the mid-nineties that we see the first shifts within the debate. This happened on the occasion of the question of what to do with the NPT when it came to the end of its 25 year life in 1995. Despite opposition by the Non Nuclear Weapon-States (for reasons mentioned earlier), the Nuclear Weapon-States, led by the US, forced through an indefinite extension of the NPT.

This provided grounds for a renewed campaign for nuclear weapons by the Indian bomb lobby who argued that the indefinite extension signaled that nuclear weapons were going to be around forever. The NPT has value only as long as there are some nuclear weapon states and some states that don't have nuclear weapons. Therefore, India should either develop nuclear weapons or settle for permanent second-class status. To develop militarily useable nuclear weapons India had to test. Hence it had to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

In international forums, as well as official circles, two main arguments were used against the CTBT. First, the CTBT was no longer a step towards disarmament as had always been envisioned. Indeed, the Nuclear Weapon-States viewed it as merely a measure that would, in the words of the head of the erstwhile Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the USA, "freeze countries on the nuclear learning curve." The U.S. ambassador to the CTBT negotiations explained the difference in expectation and intention: "It is important to recognize that the motivation of the 38 countries that joined together in this negotiation is not the same. The majority believes, as I understand it, that the banning forever of all nuclear tests in all environments will bring about, and bring about rapidly, the deterioration and decay of all existing nuclear weapons stockpiles. As I understand it, all five nuclear weapons states believe that without testing we can nevertheless maintain for the foreseeable future the viability, the safety and the reliability of our nuclear stockpiles."

Second, the CTBT did not really constrain the weapons development programs of the Nuclear Weapon-States, especially the U.S. The U. S. had started a multi-billion dollar Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program involving the construction of several facilities that could develop new weapons designs. Further, the rationale for the Stockpile Stewardship Program was to ensure the US nuclear arsenal would remain functional for the foreseeable future, thus making it clear that the U.S. was not interested in nuclear disarmament. India demanded that the CTBT be coupled to a time-bound program for nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Weapon-States were completely opposed to this. Quoting these reasons, India voted against the CTBT. And in May 1998, it conducted a series of tests; Pakistan followed suit.

Given this history, it is not surprising more and more of the non-nuclear states see the step by step process of arms control as both unreliable and slow. They now press for nuclear disarmament as the immediate goal. This new sensibility is reflected in the extensive support for resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly. The resolution tabled by Malaysia at the UN's First Committee (dealing with disarmament and international security) in 1996 called for negotiations leading to "an early conclusion of a nuclear weapon convention prohibiting the development, production, testing, deployment, stockpiling, transfer, threat or use of nuclear weapons and providing for their elimination." This resolution was supported by 115 states, including China, and opposed by the U.S. Britain and France, with Russia abstaining.

This resolution followed the historic decision of the World Court which held that "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law." Further, the Court went on to state, unanimously, that "there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control."

The law is therefore clear. It is time for the nuclear weapon states to obey it and commence negotiations on abolishing nuclear weapons.