Nuclear ’status’ and security
Shamshad Ahmad
Last week, our electronic media overzealously played up US media reports about the Obama administration implicitly accepting Pakistan’s status as a “declared nuclear-weapons state” and dispelling theories that the United States was secretly plotting to seize the country’s nuclear assets. The story was apparently based on a Washington Post report by its associate editor David Ignatius on the Obama administration’s recent “steps to address Pakistani security concerns.”
Pakistan’s status as a declared nuclear-weapons state is already a globally recognised fact. The US itself recognised this status immediately after our nuclear tests on May 28 and 30, 1998, following India’s on May 11 and 13. This recognition was manifest in the eight-round dialogue the US had with India and Pakistan on equal terms to seek their cooperation on certain security benchmarks.
I remember US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott once formally assuring me that “from US perspective, Pakistan had succeeded in achieving the central objective it has long set for itself, acquiring a deterrent capability with respect to India.”
The fact that the US has entered into a nuclear deal with India is further confirmation of the reality of the two countries being nuclear-weapons states. It is another matter that Pakistan remains the victim of double standards and has been deprived of the treatment accorded to India through a country-specific waiver for supply of nuclear fuel and technology. If Washington is genuinely seeking to address Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns, it must end its discriminatory approach in our region by negotiating a similar nuclear deal with Pakistan.
Last month, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, C Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, backed this demand. “More so than conventional weapons or large sums of cash, a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal may be able to diminish Pakistani fears of US intentions while allowing Washington to leverage these gains for greater Pakistani cooperation on nuclear proliferation and terrorism,” she wrote.
To our friends in the Western world, the nuclear question has traditionally been uni-dimensional. The symptoms, not the disease, are their problem. Their undivided focus has been on non-proliferation only as a concept which they have adapted to their own intents and purposes. The current multilateral system is being used only to legitimise the strategic and security setup suited only to the few, which India’s former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh has rightly described as “nuclear apartheid.”
Pakistan’s status as a nuclear-weapons state cannot be erased simply by America’s discriminatory arrangement with India. Irrespective of who inducted the nuclear dimension into the volatile security environment of South Asia, it is a reality now. Nuclear weapons constitute an essential element of our security in the form of credible minimum deterrence (CMD) and a nuclear deterrent against India.
Since then, we have pursued, as a responsible nuclear-weapons state, CMD as a policy. In the context of the composite dialogue, we even finalised a number of nuclear and conventional confidence-building measures with India. I signed an MoU on Feb 21, 1999, with my Indian counterpart on nuclear-risk reduction measures, which has since been formalised into an agreement between the two governments.
We are opposed to a nuclear and conventional arms race in South Asia and continue to pursue the establishment of a strategic restraint regime with India involving three interlocking elements: conflict resolution, nuclear and missile restraint, and conventional balance. On its part, India is now seeking to get out of the composite dialogue mechanism because it wants to “unequate” itself from Pakistan in its further nuclear deals with its Western friends.
In the interest of durable peace and stability in the region, the international community, especially the US, should now understand the gravity of the damage the West is doing to the cause of peace and stability in this region through country-specific nuclear waivers. The Western countries should instead be promoting comprehensive and non-discriminatory approaches in South Asia and avoiding policies that create and widen nuclear disparities between Pakistan and India, which at the same time disrupt the two countries’ ongoing dialogue processes.
In the interest of this region’s stability, the US must revisit its special “strategic partnership” with India, including the discriminatory nuclear deal which is part of it. Unless it is matched with a similar deal with Pakistan, the Indo-US nuclear nexus will not only have serious implications for the regional strategic balance but will also undermine the cause of global non-proliferation. If the turbulent political history of this region has any lessons, Washington’s future engagement in this region must be aimed at promoting strategic balance rather than disturbing it.
A stable nuclear security order is what we need in South Asia. In a larger perspective, the cause of non-proliferation will also not be served without addressing the underlying causes of conflict in this region. It is time the world focused its attention on conflict resolution by addressing longstanding issues in our region. The issues of nuclear and strategic stability in our region must also be predicated on the principle of indivisible security.
It is essential to eschew discriminatory regimes, whether in the area of non-proliferation, disarmament or nuclear security. Only criteria-based approaches on the basis of equality and non-discrimination will be sustainable. As an immediate step, the three non-NPT states with a declared or known status of nuclear-weapon states–namely, India, Israel and Pakistan–should be brought into the nuclear mainstream through requisite adjustments in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This will only strengthen President Obama’s initiative for an effective global strategy against nuclear terrorism that he now proposes to develop at the nuclear security summit he is hosting in Washington on April 12-13. The stated purpose of the summit is to discuss steps that can collectively be taken “to secure vulnerable nuclear materials and prevent acts of nuclear terrorism.”
In a major policy speech in Prague last April, President Obama had said that nuclear terrorism was the most immediate and extreme threat to global security. Later, at the G-8’s last summit at L’Aquila, Italy, in July, he announced his decision to hold the nuclear summit in Washington next month, which will be attended by 44 countries. Obama expects the conference to result in a global strategy “to secure vulnerable nuclear materials within four years, break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt illicit trade in nuclear materials.”
Indeed, nuclear dangers abound on many fronts. Some quick snapshots: All told, there are currently nuclear-weapons materials in more than 40 countries, some “secured by nothing more than a chain-link fence.” In the US itself, nuclear materials were reported missing from 15 US licensed locations, and there have been incidents such as the one where nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto an aircraft and not reported missing for many hours. In Russia, weapons- and reactor-grade nuclear materials disappeared from the country’s atomic facilities.
In India, numerous cases were reported in recent years of stolen uranium and discovery of an active uranium smuggling racket in West Bengal. The IAEA also reported that Indian police had seized three uranium rods and arrested eight persons on charges of illicit trafficking of nuclear material in November 2000. On its part, Pakistan also has had its list of alleged lapses, but it has now tightened its security controls in line with IAEA safeguards to prevent any unauthorised transfer of nuclear materials.
The security of nuclear materials, including prevention of illicit trade and transfers, is a global problem that needs a global cooperative response which hopefully the forthcoming Washington summit will bring about with the participation of all relevant stakeholders.
The list of those who now possess nuclear weapons includes more than the traditional nuclear-weapons states: the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and France. We now have India, Pakistan and North Korea as countries which have conducted nuclear tests–as well as Israel, which is known to have nuclear weapons. There are others with more recent local, regional or even international nuclear ambitions that must also be taken on board in any global nuclear security mechanism.
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Email: shamshad1941@ yahoo.com
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