By Wayne Hall
[Below we continue a discussion about the nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Wayne Hall, in our September 18 issue, published a letter criticising an article by Pip Hinman in the August 21 issue, which reported the Indian government's explanation of its refusal to sign the CTBT. Hinman replied to that letter in the September 25 issue. This article by Hall has been put together from two letters which he sent, one before and one after reading Hinman's letter. In putting them together, we have cut them to avoid repetition, and have also omitted a long passage summarising "the thinking of opposition intellectuals in Pakistan".]
The fact that the major nuclear powers have a cynical stance on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty does not mean that India's refusal to sign the treaty is not either misguided or equally cynical. It is a fallacy to imagine that India's grievances against the other nuclear states can be used as a lever to achieve nuclear disarmament.
India refuses to accept constraints on it nuclear option "as long as nuclear weapons states continue to rely on nuclear arsenals for their security". No states rely on nuclear weapons for their security. Nuclear weapons do not provide security. One would have through that the fact of the Soviet Union would be enough evidence for this simple truth to be grasped, but it seems that it is not.
The existence of nuclear weapons has as much to do with military strategy or security as nuclear power stations have to do with a rational energy policy. In both cases what is involved is the power of vested interests, political and ideological inertia (including that of Communist parties) and the tendency of some sections of the power elite to believe their own propaganda.
The reality is that since Truman's genocidal act of dropping atomic bombs on Japan, with widespread popular support, no government including the United States has ever been in a position to do the same thing again, or even plausibly threaten to. The political consensus which was misused to massacre the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the anti-fascist consensus of World War II, backed by the full power of the international working class. After the outbreak of the Cold War, that backing was never again available except to the extent that it was made available by the Soviet Union itself pursuing the chimera of "nuclear deterrence".
The Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles which brought the Soviet Union to it knees were aimed at the Soviet nuclear arsenal. There was no other target there capable of generating the degree of mass hysteria required for Russian leaders to believe that western nuclear missiles were a threat rather than a scarecrow.
Why is it that we who would not accept the nuclear-armed Soviet Union posing as an apostle of nuclear disarmament, and who are equally impatient with China's nuclear weapons policies, are so indulgent towards India? We would never have taken sides with the Soviets on a nuclear-weapons-related issues as we are now doing with the Indians.
Robert McNamara many times made the confession that "the emperor has no clothes". It is also conventional wisdom that all that is gained from acquiring nuclear weapons is to make oneself into a nuclear target. The actual meaning of these observations does not sem to have sunk in. Otherwise it is inexplicable that people should still be under the illusion that they can use nuclear-armed India as a pawn in their campaign against the other nuclear powers.
The Indians, like all the nuclear powers, should be told to get rid of their nuclear weapons, with no ifs, no buts and no self-defeating pseudo-Machiavellianism on our part.
It's no good explaining, as Pip Hinman does, that you don't support India having nuclear capability. This is abstract. You have to be outside the Indian Embassy with your banners demanding that India sign the CTBT.
Why, you say. The swinish hypocritical United States is to blame for the deadlock with India. I agree.
Let me quote the positions of the Islamabad daily Muslim, citing official Pakistani sources.
Pakistan, it says, has communicated to the Conference on Disarmament its reservations on the CTBT draft, but in order to advance the process of denuclearisation, it is prepared to accept the text of the treaty, while making it clear that in the event of a nuclear explosion by a third state (i.e. India), Pakistan would have sufficient grounds to withdraw from the treaty and any obligation linked to it.
Is this clear enough? Do we demonstrate outside the Indian Embassy now or when India has carried out its bomb test? By which time it may be too late.
If India is to be commended for its principled anti-nuclear decision to keep its nuclear arsenal, then why should Pakistan not be condemned for its gutlessness in not doing so? This will surely be the viewpoint of the Talibaan Islamists currently taking over neighbouring Afghanistan.
What I am trying to say is quite simple. It is too late for protest politics. The hypocrisy and/or schizophrenia of the big nuclear powers is simply part of the data of the situation, a structural product of the system of representative democracy which they have now imposed on much of the world. There is nobody for us to protest to. Either we take charge of the situation or nobody will. One faction of the international power elite is genuine in its desire for nuclear disarmament, but things are getting out of its control. Its own political system prevents it from imposing its will either on the United States or on India. If "civil society" (to use the now forgotten jargon of '80s Eastern Europe) does not get its act together and intervene intelligently, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to accelerate and eventually move beyond the point of no return.
OK. Civil society reporting for duty. What can we do but demonstrate and protest? Nothing. But we demonstrate and protest about the Indians.