ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Washington in ferment

Shekhar Krishnan in Washington

It is difficult to overestimate the surprise and dismay that attended the news of the three nuclear tests at Pokhran on Monday morning as Washington policy-makers, officials and the general public fought to come to terms with the new reality -- that India was now a nuclear weapons states. And just when Washington was recovering, came news of two more tests.

"I assumed the (Bharatiya Janata Party) would take longer, and would take the time to negotiate," said Tim Hoyt, research associate at the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Centre, and a scholar of South Asian security issues. "I think anybody who says they weren't taken by surprise is probably lying."

The Washington Post commented on Tuesday that prevailing assumptions about South Asian policy were proved "utterly worthless". "India has abruptly and loudly elbowed itself from the bottom into the top tier of this privileged elite," it asserted.

While the paper lacks some credibility, Goliath's anger was evident throughout the week, with questions being asked about what the US could have done to stop the tests.

Senator John Glenn, a self-professed friend of India and author of the 1994 Non-Proliferation Act under which Clinton imposed sanctions on India -- was "appalled". Other Congressmen expressed similar emotions and despaired of American powerlessness -- there were few forward-looking assessments.

On Tuesday, Frank Pallone, co-chairperson of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans, who represents a constituency with one of the largest Indian American population in the country, expressed concern to Congress over bilateral relations.

Pallone argued before the House, "This week's news demonstrates, if anything, the need for closer co-ordination between the US and India, the world's two largest democracies."

Underlining the threat from China and the context in which India detonated its weapons, Pallone urged India to sign the CTBT.

"Having nuclear capability means there is a greater burden on India to ensure peace in its region and the world." While expressing his dislike of nuclear tests, Pallone and others counselled restraint in view of a just-revived bilateral relationship which has gradually improved over the past six years.

"While the immediate reaction is an angry one from being caught so completely unaware, we should not spend time in expressing outrage and expending energy in accusations" commented ambassador Howard Schaffer, a retired state department specialist on South Asia who served in the region. "The last thing I want to see is the US act in a huff."

However, it seems this is precisely how officialdom reacted. Two Congressional committees and the White House have launched probes to find why CIA monitors were caught napping, unlike in late 1995 when similar preparations at Pokhran were detected and a test forestalled by a phone call from President Clinton to Narasimha Rao threatening sanctions.

Senator Richard Shelby, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the episode "the failure of the decade" for the intelligence community, betraying "a dreadfully inadequate job." "If we had an inkling of what they were going to do, perhaps we could have intervened."

While spy satellites and monitoring stations had the information by Sunday, by then analysts had retired home for the evening. They saw the picture only when they arrived at work on Monday morning by which time Vajpayee announced the tests.

White House officials quietly admitted that they had been lulled into thinking that India would not be so bold. The New York Times quoted an official as saying, "We made the mistake of assuming they would act rationally. We had no clue."

The President was required by law to sign into effect the suspension of defence assistance and military technology transfers, credit and loan guarantees, financial and developmental assistance, and had little room for manoeuvre.

Wednesday's second round of tests, a double blow to American sensibilities, effectively silenced any calls for a delay in sanctions and ended a last-minute concession extended from the White House to New Delhi.

The assessment of Washington analysts and scholars of defence and security issues largely blamed the US government for a faulty and inconsistent non-proliferation policy which offered India a host of economic and political advantages for refraining from testing while ignoring Chinese support to Pakistan's nuclear programme.

"India's decision to test is a clear repudiation of a failed Clinton administration nuclear non-proliferation policy" said Paul Laventhol, president of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute. Henry Sukoski, executive director of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre, took note in a New York Times editorial that "American catering to Chinese and North Korean demands for military technology "is a prescription for more proliferation". It advised a firmer approach to situations such like Russian assistance to Iran's nuclear aspirations.

While such pronouncement are often made with the sincerest intentions, their reception in India and elsewhere seems to reflect only the arrogant defence of an unfair status quo veiled in a concern for global peace.

Undeniably the policy-making elite in Washington is often blind to its own double standards. The US, which remains the world's largest arms-dealer, and is the only power to have ever used nuclear weapons in a war, has little moral clout or political right to counsel non-proliferation.

Indeed, for the officialdom to claim, as they have all week, that India's six tests to date are a threat to regional and world security, ignores the fact that the US had undertaken over 1,700 tests until it signed the CTBT in 1992.

And further, Senators Sam Brownback and Diane Feinstein on Thursday sponsored an amendment to repeal restrictions on conventional military assistance to Pakistan "to encourage the Pakistanis to stand strong" and convince them to "seek peace". The argument presumably being that proliferation of conventional weapons is a replacement for non-proliferation of other weapons.

Meanwhile, media portrayals of the new BJP-led government as hardline or fundamentalist are now firmly embedded in the American mind. "Hindu India" led by its "Hindu nationalist" government is seen to be irrationally jingoistic and militaristic.

Hoyt, a self-declared friend of India, said, "I think India gained attention but that is different from respect. If India is aspiring to be treated like a great power, I am not sure most Americans would view it as closer to a great power like Japan, than to a rogue state like Iraq. I was under the impression that India's declaration about nuclear morality were sincere. This is terribly cynical."

Dr Thomas Thornton, retired from the National Security Council Staff and an adjunct professor of South Asian and international diplomacy at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, said, "I don't see this as a moral issue, as the whole idea of non-proliferation is hypocritical... India hasn't betrayed anyone because it made no promises."

Schaffer points out that in modern times military might alone isn't enough. "In this day and age the true measure of a country's power is economic as well as military." All analysts agree, though, that India's prospects for a seat in the UN Security Council have been destroyed.

Thornton summed up this view: "From most people's points of views nuclear weapons are a bad thing, and if India wants to be taken more seriously, a two per cent higher economic growth rate is more impressive."

Tell us what you think of this report