By Pip Hinman
With negotiations over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty stalemated, India is being made out as the major obstacle to the world ridding itself of nuclear weapons. It would be far more accurate to blame the biggest nuclear power, the United States, which has no intention of dismantling its nuclear stockpile or stopping its research.
The Indian government refused to agree to terms which would extend the nuclear monopoly of the exclusive "club of five" (US, Russia, Britain, France, China). It sought to include a timetable for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. "Without such a commitment reflected in the CTBT", said India's external affairs minister, "we are convinced that this treaty will be an end in itself rather than a first step on the road to nuclear disarmament".
India has its own nuclear program and has conducted one nuclear test, but is clearly far behind the "five". It argues that the CTBT must ensure that nuclear weapons states do not continue refining and developing their nuclear arsenals.
"The CTBT that we see emerging", said Arundhati Ghosh, leader of the Indian delegation, before the talks ended, "appears to be shaped more by the technological preferences of the nuclear weapons states rather than the imperatives of nuclear disarmament".
India opposes a CTBT entrenching the current monopoly on nuclear weapons. "We cannot accept that it is legitimate for some countries to rely on nuclear weapons for their security while denying this right to others", Ghosh said.
Ghosh was critical of the decision, last year, to extend the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty indefinitely, because "it sought to legitimise the indefinite possession of nuclear weapons by the five countries. Today, the right to continue development and refinement of their arsenals is being sought to be legitimised through another flawed and eternal treaty."
India wants the CTBT to outlaw computer-simulated tests. This is being strongly resisted by the US and France, which argue that this technology is necessary to ensure the "safety" of their stockpiles while they use it to develop new warheads and refine existing ones.
The Clinton administration is keen for the CTBT to be signed before the presidential election in November. But while it masquerades as a campaigner for disarmament, the US government's commitment to nuclear weapons is as strong as ever. Since the end of the Cold War, other western powers have begun to scale down their military spending. The US, however, has increased spending on weapons research and development. According to a report by the Bonn International Centre for Conversion published in New Scientist, "[US] Spending on military R&D is higher now than at any time during the fifties, sixties or seventies".
While the design of nuclear weapons is primarily based on computers and computer simulation, "subcritical" tests are needed to gather data. The US makes out that such tests are not "nuclear" because no chain reaction takes place. However, they involve high explosives and deadly nuclear materials like plutonium.
According to a report by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein in the January 19 New Statesman, the Clinton administration launched its Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, at a cost of about US$3 billion a year, as a way of getting the nuclear research laboratories to support the CTBT negotiations and to bring the Republican-dominated Senate on side.
The program is designed to provide the full functioning equivalent of underground testing. It includes several dozen football stadium-sized facilities (some already constructed, some under way), which anti-nuclear campaigners have described as "training grounds for nuclear weapons scientists and designers".
As a former nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos, who now disagrees with these weapons, told New Statesman, the data obtained from the new round of experiments have more to do with new weapons design than monitoring the safety of stockpiles. "If we think there is nuclear proliferation now, we haven't seen anything yet", he said.
Third World countries, such as India, which will not have access to information obtained by computer simulated nuclear tests, have every reason to be suspicious.