An answer
to the enmity-mongers (
As the title suggests, the book sets out to expose the Indian and Pakistani elites’ mindless preoccupation with the nuclear bomb. This might appear to be an over-exploited ‘area’ of discussion and debate—for issues of nuclearisation, disarmament and deterrence, have adorned the banners of many conferences and seminars. But the book makes the study particularly interesting in that it uses Game Theory and especially the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) to enunciate the reasons for actors (ie politicians) to behave in the manner they do, something that, seemingly, fails the test of rationality for the gentry. The actors are clearly prisoners—but quite different from the ordinary ones. In Ramana and Reddy’s study, they imprison themselves in the illusory nuclear weapon-based security thinking and throw away the key that could open up a non-nuclear future. Ironically enough, these prisoners earnestly think and believe that they are in the prison because of somebody else’s mistakes.
A brief digression on PD would perhaps put things in perspective. The Game got its name from the following hypothetical situation: two criminals are arrested under the suspicion of having committed a crime together. However, the police do not have sufficient proof in order to have them convicted. The two prisoners are isolated from each other, and the police visit each of them separately and offer a deal: the one who squeals (turns informer)—will be freed. They cannot communicate with each other during the whole process of interrogation. If none of them accepts the offer, and both decide to deny either persons’ involvement in the crime, both of them will get only a small punishment—because of lack of proof, in which case, they both gain. However, if one of them squeals, by confessing to the police, the defector will gain more, since he is freed and the one who remained silent, on the other hand, will receive the full punishment, since he did not help the police, and there is sufficient proof. If both squeal, they will both be punished, but less severely than if they had refused to talk.
The dilemma resides in the fact that each prisoner has a choice between only two options—to squeal and save oneself or to deny that either did it—but cannot make a good decision without knowing what the other one will do. This is where the problem comes up. In very short/finite trials, the Game has shown that prisoners have mutual distrust for the other, and they would squeal. Infinitely iterated games, however, produce co-operative behaviour because the person knows that his squealing, would be punished by more defective behaviour in the next round and hence it is better to co-operate, in the long run. But, long term cooperation results only after the series of short term trials prove to the prisoners that it is safe to cooperate.
The PDG that Ramana and Reddy envisage in their neatly planned and well-argued book, with the help of the other contributors, is a brand by itself and deserves closer scrutiny for the profit of the whole discipline of political science. In their dreamy delirium, these two prisoners constantly see the other coming to get them or busy preparing to get them at a future date. So they keep devising strategies to counter the other party’s present threat and/or future danger. Deploying the nuclear weapon is the penultimate insurance against such an eventuality. Again, two ‘prisoners’ trusting each other is unlikely in the short-run, hence either one loses and the other gains by defecting or both lose by blaming the other—the trust is not there and it becomes a Zero-Sum Game (ZSG). Iterated games would show co-operation, which would mean they deny either persons’
involvement and end up with positive gains—Non Zero-Sum Game (NZSG). In Nuclear Dream, although these two prisoners see their nuclear rivalry as part of their larger ZSG military calculations (with a victor and a vanquished), they are uneasily aware that their nuclear game plan indeed makes their gamble a NZSG where both would be vanquished.
Understandably, these prisoners do not own up any responsibility for their predicament. They reason that their professed ‘good’ self is all for freedom and liberty but it is the evil ‘other’ that necessitates the present imprisonment. Any possible end to this imprisonment, according to this reasoning, depends solely on what the ‘other’ does. One’s own omissions and commissions matter little. When this kind of self-abnegation is the rule of the game, the prisoners play their roles faithfully and the imprisonment continues forever. Theirs is a “non-cooperative” game played “cooperatively” with tacit understanding through inferred communication.
Another crucial difference between the conventional PDG and the present case is that the accused are isolated from the society in the former case, but in the latter case the prisoners hold entire societies hostages. The former is a physical prison and the imprisoned have little power, whereas the latter is both a physical and psychological prison and the prisoners are rather powerful. Since the imprisonment in the nuclear case is not the consequence of a past crime but the effect of a future vision and program, the ethical and moral considerations of the prisoners become even more relevant.
One of the most significant manifestations of this self-imprisonment is, of course, readjusting the prisoner’s socioeconomic-political values and interests to the prison reality that they have seriously internalised. Militarism, nationalistic jingoism, increased faith in violence, misplaced developmental notions and skewed priorities are just a few of these values and interests. Inevitably, these factors have a telling effect on the well-being of all and the overall health of the environment.
Quite interestingly, the Ramana and Reddy volume deals with all these four aspects of the nuclear PDG. The highly effective essays of eminent authors on the issues of strategy and external relations, science and ethics, politics and economics of nuclear weapons, and environment and health follow the scheme that has been delineated here. Kanti Bajpai elucidates clearly how “the image of a powerful, hostile and nuclear China has pushed India towards weaponisation”, how that accelerated Pakistan’s quest for nuclear bomb and how that intensified India’s nuclear weapons programme. While Admiral Ramdas sees a lack of “political understanding” behind this paranoia, Zia Mian brings the inter-play of military fears and subcontinental history to our attention.
An amalgamation of this kind of fears and phobias expresses itself in the guise of nationalism (“for 2,500 years India has never invaded anybody”), scientism (“a triumph of Indian science and technology”) or developmentalism (“it was a beautiful sight”) as Amartya Sen points out, with the help of the statements that Abdul Kalam made after India’s May 1998 tests. The technology that this mindset creates would inevitably be “mass murder technology” that is “completely decoupled from values” as illustrated by Amulya Reddy. Switching from ‘cheap’ power promises to greater national security assertions, the nuclear establishment, as Ramana contends, has ensured continued funding. Since the strategic enclave, as much as the scientific community, in India seeks power through their claims of knowledge and expertise, they cannot escape responsibility for the impact of their actions on Indians, one-sixth of humanity.
When the paranoid mindset reigns supreme without any ethical and moral considerations, the resultant socioeconomic-political values and interests would turn dreadful as well. While Jean Dreze establishes, in general terms, that militarism is the foremost obstacle to development and democracy in contemporary world, Krishna Ananth locates India’s nuclear weaponisation in the “denominational nationalism, jingoism and majoritarianism”, which has permeated the Indian political landscape quite pervasively. He resents the fact that contemporary Indian nationalism is not built on the democratic traditions that marked the anti-colonial struggle. Just as Ananth discusses the democratic deficit of weaponisation, Rammanohar Reddy points out the impact of weaponisation on development of the Indian society. He puts the full and total future costs of India’s nuclear weapon programme at INR 70,000 to 80,000 crore (1998-99 prices) and compares this with the government allocations for specific social and economic sectors to paint a depressing picture.
An inevitable result of this kind of lopsided socioeconomic-political arrangement would be the disastrous impact on public health and the overall environment. MV Ramana and Surendra Gadekar rightly point out that that the health of the people and environment would be affected not just by the explosion of nuclear bombs but also by the very processes of manufacturing them and their testing. Nuclear power production is equally harmful. People who are worst affected by nuclearisation are the disempowered. The very planet earth and all life on it are also poised to be destroyed by nuclear weapons and power.
In May 2002, all the defence bodies were put on alert in India and it was announced that an integrated battlefield shelter had been developed, for the armed forces, to provide protection from nuclear as well as biological and chemical agents and to ensure retaliatory attacks. On 25 May, an Indian Defence Secretary, Yogendra Narain said that India would use nuclear weapons if Pakistan used them. On 31 May, the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in turn held out the nuclear threat. He said that they would use nuclear weapons even if India stuck to conventional weapons. As the “leaders” were playing so thoughtlessly with the lives and futures of some 1.4 billion people in the region taken as a whole, many Americans, Australians, Germans, French, British, and United Nations workers were leaving India and Pakistan in a hurry. On 28 May, American intelligence announced that some l2 million Indians and Pakistanis would be killed and up to seven million could be injured in a nuclear war between the two countries. These would just be the immediate casualties, and subsequent casualties could not even be assessed. The “ordinary” Indians and Pakistanis were reading the newspapers every morning to see what our fate was going to be.
Ramana and Reddy rightly point out that the battle between the weapon-supporters and weapon-opponents is a battle for the soul of India [and Pakistan] and the final choice that Indians and Pakistanis face is one “between education and catastrophe”. The task of “ordinary” Indians and Pakistanis then is to educate the powerful “prisoners” in our respective national societies and release them from their prisons. The Ramana-Reddy volume is most definitely an important ‘textbook’ in such an educational and political endeavour. As the authors conclude, “the major casualty of the nuclear dream shared by India and Pakistan is peace”. Nuclear weapons freeze the problems between the two countries, entrench the enmity-mongers on both sides, and prevent the possibilities for normalisation of relations. It would be befitting to leave it there.
Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream, edited by M.V. Ramana and C. Rammanohar Reddy, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2003, hardback, p.502, Rs. 575.