LONDON– The only surprise is why Bill Clinton was surprised. People, even non-expert journalists like myself have seen the Indo/Pakistani bombs coming for a long time. (see columns of April 8th and April 15th). John Kennedy would not be surprised. He foresaw 20 to 30 nuclear bomb powers by the year 2000. Nevertheless, it will go down as one of the great shocks of the twentieth century. It is going to consume the minds and the political energies of the best and the brightest of the twentyfirst century how to avoid a cataclysmic nuclear war between these two antagonistic neighbours who rub elbow to elbow 365 days a year in one of the most densely populated parts of the world and how to avoid a struggle for power and hegemony between the two giants that are going to dominate the world in the future, India and China.
Clinton, to my knowledge, has said the only thing that has hit the nail on the head, yet the import of that is apparently clearer to the listener than to him. “I cannot believe,” he said last Thursday, “that we are about to start the twentyfirst century by having the subcontinent repeat the worst mistakes of the twentieth, when we know it is not necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national greatness or national fulfillment”.
“Not necessary to peace” what a perceptive, mind-blowing riposte to all those presidents from Truman to Bush who believed it was. So why now does the U.S. on Clinton’s watch maintain such a massive nuclear arsenal, years after its confrontation with the Soviet Union is over?
It has long been argued by some quite hard nosed types such as Paul Nitze, the Reagan arms advisor and General George Lee Butler, the ex-chief of U.S. Strategic Command, responsible for all airforce and navy nuclear weapons, that there would be no way of stopping India’s relentless progression to being a fully-armed, nuclear-missile power, capable like all the others of destroying half the world in half an hour, unless the U.S. itself took a lead in slashing its own nuclear stockpile. Either the sauce that is good for the goose is good for the gander or it is not.
Endlessly these experts have touted one good idea after another. The most elementary is to speed up the Reagan-created Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) process, which means, as compensation for Senator Jesse Helms’ derailing it three years ago and thus giving the backwoodsmen in the Russian Duma time to mobilise against ratification of the latest treaty, a new deal is proposed by Washington that, unlike the past ones, is weighted in Russia’s favour. This would be no great disadvantage to the U.S., if one factors in that at least 25% of Russian missiles are now inoperable for lack of maintenance.
The stumbling block with these ideas is less the military and more the politicians with their uninformed posturing, playing to a populist gallery, undereducated by a superficial media. Those who simplistically blame the military should recall the charged moment during the preparations for the Gulf War when Defence Secretary Dick Cheney asked the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to ready plans for the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Colin Powell shot back, “we’re not going to let that genie loose.”
A growing proportion of senior military officers in the West, and in Russia too, are confident that the real deterrent in today’s world is modern conventional weapons that actually can be used. Indeed, the greatest irony of the Indian explosion is that, as long as there were no nuclear weapons on the Indian subcontinent, India had the advantage in men and machines. But a Pakistani nuclear bomb effectively neutralises an Indian armoured punch across the plains. The Indian government has shot India in both feet. As for winding up its confrontational rhetoric with China it has taken the dangerous step of opening its mouth ten years too early. India’s present generation of nuclear tipped rockets can only reach Tibet and a part of southwestern China that is industrially inconsequential. Whereas China can move its rockets to the Tibetan plateau overlooking India and take out nearly every important Indian city with the flick of a switch.
At this late hour the way out–a reversal of the Indian and Pakistani decision–points in the same direction as it did a month ago not sanctions, disapprobation and isolation. But the promotion, long overdue, of India to the Security Council and the Group of Eight and, in return, a demand from the UN that India honour the UN’s 1948 request to hold a plebicite in Kashmir to determine whether it stay part of India or be handed over to Pakistan. At the same time a move to rapid nuclear disarmament by the present nuclear powers as proposed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their summit in 1986, until they were undermined and effectively overruled by their experts.
If Clinton wants to avoid a nuclear catastrophe for the world and the dustbin of history for himself he has no other choice. His reward would be just as tangible he’ll be remembered as the greatest American president of the twentieth century.
