Pledges Do Little to Disarm Pakistan-India Tensions

Despite hopeful headlines, the promises by India and Pakistan to abstain from future nuclear weapons tests will do little to ease the threat of a nuclear conflict in one of the world’s most volatile regions, experts warn.

The nervous South Asian neighbors, which have gone to war three times in the last 50 years and routinely fire artillery barrages across a disputed border in the Kashmir region, appear determined to develop and build a stockpile of nuclear weapons, although on a limited scale and without further underground tests.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee raised hopes that the archrivals had stepped back from the nuclear brink when they separately told the U.N. General Assembly last week that they had changed policy and were prepared to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty within a year.

But George Perkovich, who heads the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., said that neither country has given any indication that it will refrain from building weapons even if it ultimately signs the treaty.

“It doesn’t stop either side from building an arsenal, not at all,” Perkovich said Monday. “It just puts a limit on the sophistication of the arsenal.”

Sujit Dutta, a U.S. Institute of Peace senior fellow from the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis in New Delhi, said that India clearly plans to create a deterrent nuclear force.

“Minimum deterrence means a nuclear arsenal, an effective, small arsenal,” Dutta said.

Indian military officials have told their U.S. counterparts that their current thinking is to create a nuclear force that is ready for use but not deployed.

In theory at least, that nuclear stance would lessen the chance of a nuclear accident.

But Scott Sagan, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said the “single most important question both states face” is whether they will give control of the weapons to the military, as every other nuclear power has done, or maintain them under separate civilian command.

“The real issue is who has possession of those devices,” Sagan said.

In the United States, the civilian Atomic Energy Commission maintained control of all the country’s nuclear warheads from the dawn of the nuclear age in 1945 until the Korean War in the early ‘50s. The military steadily took command as the Cold War deepened.

India’s underground tests in a remote desert in May reportedly were planned and carried out by civilian operatives rather than the military. Pakistan’s tests, which followed India’s, apparently were controlled by the military, which plays a major role in Pakistan.

But never before have two democratic states been nuclear adversaries, and it is an open question whether political considerations will speed up or slow down a potential arms race.

U.S. officials initially welcomed the speeches at the U.N. while cautioning that signing the test-ban treaty was only one step toward curbing nuclear tensions and stabilizing the Asian subcontinent. But considerable confusion has ensued because neither Vajpayee nor Sharif specifically pledged to sign the treaty.

Vajpayee promised only to bring “discussions” about the test-ban treaty to a “successful conclusion” before a deadline next September. And that raised questions, in turn, about what concessions India will seek for its cooperation.

“Whether this [treaty signing] comes to fruition is a vastly open subject,” said Jan Nolan, an author on nuclear policy and professor of international security at Georgetown University here.

Indian officials have said they seek to import so-called “dual-use technology” that is now barred under international law because it can be used for military purposes. Other sticking points are likely to be India’s refusal to open its nuclear facilities to international monitoring and its historic demand for a worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons.

India’s and Pakistan’s policy change announcements at the U.N. clearly were not enough to convince the White House to reinstate a visit to the region by President Clinton that was originally scheduled for November but was put on hold after the nuclear tests. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Tuesday that no final decision had been made.