The Indian government thinks that nuclear weapons are one simple way to gain respect in the international arena, and the stunned reaction to the explosions it set off this week abundantly confirms that belief. Plenty of governments are angry and fearful about the consequences of the tests, but none of them is derisive or contemptuous. A country with a usable nuclear arsenal has to be treated as a military power. And that is exactly how Indians want to be treated.
Who can blame them? The United States has the most formidable conventional armed forces on Earth, and our nearest enemy of any consequence is half a world away, but Americans would feel naked without nukes. We know there is no surer deterrent against attack than the capacity to retaliate with doomsday weapons.
Indians know that, too, and they have far better cause to feel insecure than we do. On their northeast border lies China, a nation boasting rising wealth, 1.2 billion people and an atomic armory exceeded only by the U.S. and Russia. India lost a war with China in 1962, and lately, New Delhi has accused its old antagonist of deploying nuclear weapons in neighboring Tibet. Beijing regards large swaths of India as Chinese land, and it has shown in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Spratly Islands that it will go to great lengths to defend what it sees as its rightful domain.
If that weren’t bad enough, China also helped to create another nuclear threat on India’s northwest border by providing Pakistan with missile components and technical help in making atomic bombs. Pakistan has fought three wars with India in the last 50 years and is believed to support insurgents in Punjab and Kashmir.
Just last month, the Pakistanis tested a missile that could deliver nuclear warheads to targets in India. Anyone who remembers the American reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba should not wonder why the Indians were impelled to act.
The Indian tests reflected the strong preference of voters in the world’s biggest democracy. The current government campaigned on a promise to embrace nuclear weapons, and Indians are happy that it has–despite economic sanctions and criticism from abroad. “Endorsement of the tests came from most of India’s most influential newspapers, from leading opposition politicians, from student groups, and even from Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s apostle of non-violence,” reported The New York Times.
The broad support from ordinary Indians is not hard to understand. They feel encircled by hostiles. They resent the U.S. and its allies for trying to keep a monopoly on a weapon we insist is indispensable to our security but unnecessary for India’s. And they share the sentiment of one nationalist politician who said, “We have to prove that we are not eunuchs.”
Why? Because South Asia is a tough neighborhood, and no one will assure India’s safety but India. Japan, Germany and dozens of other nations manage just fine without the bomb, but their security is guaranteed by the world’s only superpower. India no longer can rely on help from the Soviet Union, and it has never been an American ally. It can’t expect the U.S. to come to the rescue.
So India has a strong interest in making sure it isn’t attacked. Nuclear weapons are unsatisfactory for waging war–but perfect for preventing it.
Pessimists, of whom there are many, think the tests are a terrible setback for efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. But India has been a member of the nuclear club for 24 years. All it did was test weapons everyone knew it had. The number of nuclear nations was the same Tuesday as it was Sunday. The more recent case of proliferation is Pakistan. It was precisely the failure of the non-proliferation regime to keep Islamabad from getting the bomb that pushed India to conduct tests and upgrade its arsenal.
The real danger is not the existence of such armaments on the subcontinent but their vulnerability, which gives the owners an incentive to launch their missiles in a crisis for fear of losing them. Instead of ostracizing India, we should extend scientific and financial help in making its nukes (and Pakistan’s) safe, reliable and secure. The truly urgent task is to assure that neither side will ever feel it needs to start a nuclear war.
We ought to accept the reality that other governments have sane and sensible motives for wanting the bomb and concentrate our non-proliferation energies on keeping it away from belligerent rogue nations. Nuclear weapons can undoubtedly pose a grave danger. But handled correctly–as in the Cold War–they can also be a matchless force for peace and stability. What they prove to be in South Asia is partly up to us.
