Arms Race May Not Be a Numbers Game

Suddenly the world has found itself with two more overt nuclear powers: India and Pakistan. Will an arms race between the unfriendly Asian neighbors spin out of control?

While rhetoric is fierce, there also are factors that could rein in the two combative nations.

After Pakistan exploded five nuclear devices near the Afghan frontier Thursday, it issued an official statement that the country was arming its new model of missile, tested for the first time April 6 and capable of striking most cities in India.

“The long-range [930-mile] Ghauri missile is already being capped with the nuclear warheads to give a befitting reply to any misadventure by the enemy,” the statement said.

“This is saber-rattling, and I don’t think it’s desirable at all,” was the sober reaction from Uday Bhasker, an Indian navy commodore and deputy director of a New Delhi think tank on military and security affairs.

Earlier in the day, Pakistan accused India--its battlefield adversary in three wars since both gained freedom from the British in 1947--of planning a predawn strike against its nuclear facilities. India dismissed the accusation as “utterly absurd.”

With such an electric ambience, it’s obvious why so many foreign leaders were treating this month’s momentous developments on the subcontinent--five nuclear tests apiece by India and Pakistan, including one of a hydrogen bomb by India--as an unmitigated proliferation disaster. President Clinton spoke Thursday of a “dangerous arms race.”

Already among the world’s poorest and most illiterate nations, the South Asian neighbors can ill afford to spend more on defense. “We never wanted our region to develop nuclear weapons,” Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told his people in a televised address Thursday night. “But Pakistan was pushed to take the decision to test to protect its security.”

Some South Asia specialists doubt, however, that there will be anything like a full-blown arms race. They note that India and Pakistan have assumed the other was a nuclear power for years and have prepared accordingly, and that--unlike the U.S.-Soviet rivalry--they don’t feel a need to match weapon for weapon.

“This is not a numbers game,” said Savita Pandey, a New Delhi specialist on nuclear proliferation and testing. “For us, a more appropriate example may be China, which has 300 weapons to counter the 7,000 assembled and unassembled weapons of the United States.”

Clay Bowen, senior research associate at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies, says that though India and Pakistan may have removed the fig leaf from their nuclear ambitions by testing, there is no conclusive proof that they have “weaponized”--manufactured the bombs and missile warheads for deployment by their armed forces. If true, that would make Pakistan’s announcement about the Ghauri more of a statement of intent than fact.

“I don’t think we’re at the stage where we can say there’s an armed race in South Asia, though maybe all we have to do is wait 48 hours,” Bowen said in a telephone interview. “One Rubicon has been crossed, but it doesn’t mean there will be war in South Asia.”

Retired Brig. Vijay Nair, who directs a forum for strategic and security studies in India’s capital, estimates that with 25 nuclear weapons of various sizes--17 for use against Pakistan, eight for use against China--India would have fulfilled all its strategic needs. And one Indian estimate before Thursday’s tests indicated that Pakistan had enough fissile material to manufacture 35 missiles and bombs.

The next “critical nexus” for the United States and other outside countries, Bowen said, is to exert influence in an attempt to stop these arms from being built.

Within days of its second round of tests May 13, India expressed readiness to enter into negotiations on the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Neither India nor Pakistan has signed another document, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that is the cornerstone of international cooperation to halt the spread of nuclear arms--a major U.S. policy goal.

With sanctions already imposed by the United States and several of its allies against India and with U.S. sanctions threatened against Pakistan, American officials should have some leverage to push the unfriendly neighbors toward a more moderate path.

Pakistan is heavily dependent on foreign loans and aid. India’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, for all of its Hindu nationalism, acknowledges that it needs outside help to expand and modernize India’s infrastructure.

The disputes of the past, including the proxy war that Pakistan has been waging in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state since 1990 and the recent upswing in cross-border shelling, make chances for improved ties seem slim indeed. But elected Indian officials already have been busy with damage control to counteract their own earlier utterances.

On Thursday, Defense Minister George Fernandes vowed that India will not be dragged into an arms race by this month’s testing. L.K. Advani, the powerful minister for home affairs who touched off a furor last week by advocating a “proactive policy” against Pakistan, called nuclear weapons a deterrent only.

“We’ve got a tiger by the tail,” Bhasker of the New Delhi think tank said about India’s policy as a fledgling nuclear power. “We’re now trying to work out how to present ourselves as a nonprovocative, responsible player.”