DISARMAMENT-INDIA: CTBT Rejection a Setback for Avowed Goal

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Sep 18 1996 (IPS) - India’s rejection of the nuclear test ban treaty this month is a set-back for a cause which the South Asian nation itself ardently campaigned for over the last four decades.

In doing so, New Delhi has not only pushed back the global post-Cold War momentum favouring nuclear restraint, but compromised its own regional security.

On the one hand, India says it is for a nuclear weapons-free world. On the other, it has scuppered the only nuclear restraint measure to have been put on the global negotiating agenda in a quarter century.

India, Libya and Bhutan were the only opponents of the CTBT at the Sep. 8 vote in the UN General Assembly. The test ban resolution was backed by 158 of the 185 UN member states, with five abstentions.

However, the CTBT, which was debated at the UN Disarmament Conference for more than two and a half years, cannot come into force until all the 44 states, including India, who must ratify it, do so.

India’s opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would make sense if it were to propose a serious alterative to what it strenuously maintains is a flawed, loopholes-ridden measure not seriously linked to disarmament.

But it has not done so. At the same time, New Delhi is under pressure to expand, deepen and even exercise the nuclear weapons option which it has possessed since May 1974, when it carried out an atomic test explosion.

India has declared that it was forced to oppose the test ban treaty because an attempt was made to coerce it by introducing an ‘Entry into Force’ clause which makes ratification by the three nuclear threshold states — India, Israel and Pakistan — mandatory.

Indian External Affairs Minister I.K. Gujral has said that India could not accept this unprecedented provision which violates multilateral negotiating practice and a nation’s freedom to agree or not to agree to an international convention.

However, the main reason for New Delhi’s objections to the CTBT is the growing pressure from nuclear hawks who argue that India should aim not just for a ‘minimal deterrent’ against neighbours China and Pakistan, but go in for sophisticated, second generation atomic weapons.

Scuttling the CTBT may also temporarily help India delay a nuclear fissile material cutoff treaty which it opposes.

But in turning down the nuclear test ban, India may be jeopardising its own security environment. Arch-foe Pakistan, which is known to have nuclear weapons capability, has declared it will not sign the CTBT unless India does.

And China can use the Entry-into-Force clause to walk out of the treaty to resume testing to refine its nuclear arsenal. Indian negotiators at the CTBT have cited the threat from Chinese nuclear missiles and Beijing’s support to the clandestine Pakistani nuclear programme.

During the CTBT negotiations at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, New Delhi opposed the treaty on two main grounds. First, it said that since the treaty text did not locate it in a perspective of “time-bound” disarmament, there was no strong link with the objective of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons.

Second, it argued that the treaty did not ban non-explosive nuclear testing by sophisticated computer simulation methods which would enable the nuclear weapon states to continue refining their arsenals, thereby defeating the treaty’s purpose.

However, India ignored the fact that the present CTBT text sees the treaty as part of “progressive and systematic efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally” and constrain the “development and qualitative improvement of nuclear weapons” with a view to eventually eliminating them.

The CTBT though does not specify a linkage with time-bound disarmament. But India did not insist on this until last year.

India’s argument that the CTBT will not achieve its aim unless it also bans non-explosive tests, is challenged by most Western nuclear experts who agree that a ban on test explosions is enough to stop nuclear weapons development. Non-explosive tests yield some useful information to weapon designers, but not enough to develop new weapons or substantially improve existing ones.

The efficacy of the CTBT can be gauged from the opposition it

has faced from the right wing pro-nuclear weapons lobby in the West which wanted the treaty scuttled because it threatens the nuclear monopoly of these nations.