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Friday, May 06, 2005

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A peep into history

Amit Baruah

Nine years before Pokhran-I, the Americans believed that India would go nuclear.

IN OCTOBER 1965, American intelligence had concluded that India probably will detonate a "nuclear device and proceed to develop nuclear weapons." Archival material posted on the U.S. State Department website shows that the American foreign policy establishment concurred with this view.

The U.S. establishment, at the time, it would appear from the documents, adopted a deliberately vague posture towards the Indian nuclear programme, obsessed as it was with the threat from what are repeatedly referred to in the documents as "Chicoms" or Chinese communists.

A "special national intelligence estimate" dated October 21, 1965, which had the consent of the entire American intelligence establishment, stated, "India has the capability to develop nuclear weapons. It probably already has sufficient plutonium for a first device, and could explode it about a year after a decision to develop one."

"The proponents of a nuclear weapons program have been strengthened by the Indo-Pakistani war, but the main political result has been a strengthening of Prime Minister Shastri's position. We believe that he does not now wish to start a program and that he is capable of making this decision stick for the time being," it said.

"However, we do not believe that India will hold to this policy indefinitely. All things considered, we believe that within the next few years India probably will detonate a nuclear device and proceed to develop nuclear weapons," the estimate contained in Volume XXV, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, revealed.

In the same vein, a declassified memo from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to President Lyndon Johnson said on March 16, 1966, that India, at any time, could decide to embark on a nuclear weapons programme. " ... it remains in the interests of the United States to curb nuclear proliferation, and an Indian decision to manufacture nuclear weapons would increase the probability that other countries would also decide to do so," it said.

"I believe that we should, therefore, attempt to head off an Indian decision to produce nuclear weapons. To do so, we might in time have to be more responsive to Indian security needs, preferably in some way that will minimise our own commitment. However, we must recognise that this response would almost certainly involve an increased and more specific U.S. commitment in the subcontinent and would entail important costs in terms of probable reactions of other states," Mr. Rusk said in an obvious reference to Pakistan.

"I propose that when Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi comes to Washington [she visited the same year] you let her know that we are sympathetic to her policy of using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes only ... I believe you should also say that in any case if a growing Chinese Communist nuclear capability should ever pose a serious threat to India, you hope she would frankly discuss the question with us so that we could examine together possible means to meet that threat without nuclear proliferation and without Indian assumption of the heavy economic and other burdens of a nuclear weapons program," the Secretary of State suggested.

"You might also wish to tell Mrs. Gandhi that we are prepared to make available to her periodically (as we did for Prime Minister Shastri) intelligence on the Chinese Communist nuclear capability," Mr. Rusk suggested to President Johnson.

The archives, which are full of American concerns about "Red China" and its role, also has a letter from Indira Gandhi to Lyndon Johnson, which refers to the "latest" Chinese nuclear test.

"The latest explosion in China of a nuclear device is a matter of deep concern for us. There has been a growing demand in this country for developing a nuclear device of our own. We have stood firmly against this. But each fresh report of China's activity in this regard strengthens this demand and attracts new adherents to it," she said in her letter of May 12, 1966.

On July 25, 1966, Secretary of State Rusk forwarded an official report on the "Indian nuclear weapons problem" to President Johnson, where he pointed out that this inter-departmental group did not recommend any dramatic steps to discourage India from starting a nuclear weapons' programme.

"The report recommends no dramatic steps to discourage the Indians from starting a nuclear weapons program; this is because we have been unable to devise anything dramatic which would not cost us more than any anticipated gain," Mr. Rusk wrote in language that was, obviously, up for interpretation.

"The report does, however, recommend that a number of further studies be made, as this is a developing rather than a static situation. We have all agreed that our purpose with respect to the Indians is to buy time during which, hopefully, we can move forward on broader fronts to bring under more permanent control the dangers inherent in the proliferation of nuclear weapons," the Secretary of State added.

Lyndon Johnson, himself, said in a letter to his Ambassador in India, Chester Bowles, on May 20, 1966, "I do not believe that India can become `an indigenous Asian counterweight to China' unless India regards it as part of its own responsibility to work actively towards the normalisation of its relations with Pakistan."

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