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Going beyond separation

By making public the Government's plan for separating the civilian and military components of the India's nuclear energy programme, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has allayed many of the fears expressed inside and outside Parliament about the implementation of the July 2005 nuclear agreement with the United States. In both qualitative and quantitative terms, the plan has struck a judicious balance between India's long-term energy and security interests and the international community's expectation that a substantial segment of Indian nuclear capabilities would be firewalled from any potential military application. Thus, 14 of the 22 nuclear power reactors will be placed in the civilian list, as will be a number of heavy water plants and research institutions. Since the whole deal is supply-related — `no supply, no safeguards' — there will be nothing problematical or even new about placing these segregated civilian nuclear facilities under perpetual safeguards. As strategic hubs where key strategic or high-end nuclear research facilities are located, Trombay and Kalpakkam will be completely off-limits for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. (So will the third and fourth 540 MWe heavy water power reactors at Tarapur.) This means the fast breeder developmental programme as well as the research work needed on the country's three-stage civilian nuclear power strategy can proceed unhindered.

Prime Minister Singh, who is conversant with India's nuclear energy history and programme, must be commended for achieving this constructive breakthrough. In fact, a close study of the separation plan he tabled in Parliament reveals that the trade-off in the nuclear field is very much to India's advantage. It must be recognised, of course, that had it not been for the scientists and others who vigorously argued in favour of protecting indigenous R&D in the civilian nuclear field, the outcome might have been different. The external pressure on the breeder was tremendous and there was no shortage of `experts' within the Government and outside, especially in the strategic affairs community, who favoured settling the issue on Washington's terms. This is an important point to bear in mind since there is one last battle to be fought. Aside from securing the approval of the U.S. Congress and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the agreement must cross a final hurdle: a watertight safeguards agreement and additional protocol that will protect India from excessively intrusive inspections based on the principle of presumptive suspicion.

What is clear is that the July 2005 agreement and the separation plan settled in March 2006 do not `cap' the Indian strategic programme in any unreasonable way, except in the Strangelovian imagination of ultra-hawkish sections of the strategic and political community. In effecting the separation, the Government has been obliged to move towards quantifying `credible minimum deterrence.' This will of course be nowhere close to the arsenal levels of major nuclear weapon states, but the 1998 official stance that the `minimum' was to be understood not as a definite number, to be pinned down, but as something `flexible' is no longer sustainable. This will be all to the good. In this newspaper's editorial view, nuclear weaponisation in May 1998 (picking up from Pokhran-I of May 1974) was a huge, strategic mistake for a number of reasons. Deterrence theory is a completely discredited doctrine. Why? In any civilised world view, weapons of mass destruction are indefensible as instruments of state policy. This applies above all to nuclear weapons, the ultimate means of genocide. How then to justify the unjustifiable? It was to perform this task that the doctrine of deterrence made its appearance as the mainstay of arguments in favour of nuclear weapons. Often camouflaged by the trappings of science, deterrence theory rests on a number of assumptions that are either questionable or demonstrably false. For example, a fundamental flaw of the theory is the assumption that when both sides build up their nuclear arsenals to a threshold level, matters will stabilise. Continued acquisition of new technological capabilities puts paid to the idea. Until Pokhran-II, official and popular India ranged itself firmly and eloquently against the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, characterising it (in a memorial submitted to the International Court of Justice in 1995) as "abhorrent to human sentiment." But with Pokhran-II, the official position changed drastically. "The nuclear weapon," Prime Minister Vajpayee told the Rajya Sabha on March 15, 1999, "is not an offensive weapon. It is a weapon of self-defence. It is the kind of weapon that helps in preserving the peace. If in the days of the Cold War there was no use of force, it was because of the balance of terror."

There is no denying that the separation plan will, in the long run, raise the financial cost of maintaining or augmenting the country's nuclear arsenal. The voluntary retirement of CIRUS, the controversial research reactor supplied by Canada half a century ago, is a case in point. Building a replacement will cost money, not to speak of additional reactors that can produce fissile material above and beyond the breeder's `laundered' output or the dirty plutonium that can be cranked out of unsafeguarded pressurised heavy water reactors. Perhaps for the first time, the Indian political class will be obliged to confront the true cost of the country's nuclear weapons programme since it will no longer be embedded within the civilian power programme. If getting a better sense of this cost can lead to a more prudent strategic posture, this will not at all be a bad thing. India's, and Pakistan's, nuclear weaponisation may be a process hard to reverse but much can be done to lower the risks and prevent a nuclear arms race in South Asia. It is quite possible that the act of making explicit the approximate size of the country's military nuclear programme will generate insecurities across the border. It becomes all the more important for New Delhi to prioritise the need to develop nuclear and conventional confidence-building measures with Islamabad. A bilateral understanding not to induct or deploy nuclear weapons, at any rate not to keep them on alert status, will be the responsible way to go. Finally, at the international level, India needs to dispel the impression that its nuclear weaponisation and impending incorporation at the nuclear high table has compromised its support for the cause of nuclear disarmament and arms control measures such as a ban on the weaponisation of space.

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