Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Wednesday blamed the United States for contributing to the India-Pakistan nuclear crisis by stalling the nuclear disarmament process and becoming the world’s largest arms merchant.
Speaking at the Smithsonian Institution during the First International Conference on Addressing Environmental Consequences of War, the onetime Nobel Peace Prize winner said the U.S. was setting a bad example not only for the Indian subcontinent but for Russia as well.
“The process of nuclear disarmament has been stalled . . . and is just marking time,” Gorbachev said, speaking through an interpreter.
“I believe this is one of the things that pushed them, in addition to the conflict on the (Indian) subcontinent.”
In recent weeks, former Soviet ally India and U.S. ally Pakistan have reported detonating 11 nuclear devices between them in underground tests, raising fears of a nuclear conflict that had been largely dormant since the Cold War ended in 1989.
“In 1985, President Reagan and I, at our first summit, said nuclear war cannot be won and should not be fought,” he said. “It would be a threat of the very extinction of life on Earth. . . . We must condemn these tests, but we cannot be of two voices on this.”
Gorbachev said that India and Pakistan cannot be expected to relent in their nuclear competition if members of “the nuclear club” persist in maintaining their own atomic arsenals.
He said that sales of missile technology around the world have aggravated the nuclear danger.
He charged that instead of trying to reduce armed conflict around the world, the U.S. has exploited the end of the Cold War to take over the weapons market.
“Suffice it to say, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Russia was mired down in social problems and the U.S. acquired 70 percent of the world arms market, that did little for disarmament,” he said. “The result is that Russia, too, has decided to step up its arms manufacturing. . . . We see increasing sophistication of weapons. We see arms going to poverty-stricken, backward nations.”
Gorbachev was joined by fellow Nobel laureate and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who said that 80 percent of U.S. weapons sales go to undemocratic governments in underdeveloped nations.
“In sub-Saharan Africa, military expenditures totaled nearly $8 billion in 1995, while economic aid came to $700 million, about $1 a person,” Arias said. “This figure is appalling, considering that this region’s population–which doubles about every 20 years–has the highest proportion of poor in the world.
“India spent more than $12 billion on weapons purchases from 1988 to 1992 alone. . . . For its part, Pakistan increased its defense budget sevenfold from 1978 to 1991, so that defense now accounts for nearly 40 percent of all government spending,” Arias said.
Asked if the Soviet Union shouldn’t take some of the blame for helping India with its nuclear program, Gorbachev said, “It’s very difficult to say.”
He said Canada, the U.S. and Britain also contributed to India’s nuclear progress.
The three-day conference, sponsored by the Smithsonian, the Washington-based Environmental Law Institute and the Kuwait government, has drawn political, military and scientific experts from all over the world.
Its agenda includes a proposal to levy a heavy international tax on arms transactions and for rewriting military “rules of engagement” to prevent the kind of environmental disasters
that ravaged Kuwait and portions of Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev has remained active in world affairs as president of the Green Cross international environmental organization.
