Nuclear hopes and fears

Nuclear hopes and fears

At the month-long conference at the UN to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the US, Russia, France, Britain and China made an ``unequivocal commitment'' to eliminate nuclear weapons. Compared to earlier commitments merely to undertake nuclear disarmament negotiations in good faith, this is a definite step forward. However, without a timetable it will be hard to hold them to their word.

On its own, the pledge seems meaningless, another piece of hypocrisy, a means of maintaining undisturbed the status quo whereby those five signatories of the NPT maintain nuclear arsenals and the other 182 do not.

But although grand claims cannot be made for the outcome of the review conference, the first since 1995 when the NPT was extended indefinitely, it is somewhat simplistic to write it off as another grand deception by the P-5, the five nuclear powers who are also permanent members of the Security Council. Importantly, the conference saw the New Agenda Coalition (NAC), a two-year old coalition of diverse countries, acting for the first time as an independent and effective pressure group. Without the efforts of South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, Ireland, Sweden and others, the ``unequivocal commitment'' could not have been extracted from the P-5.

There is hope that the NAC will press for achievement of specific arms control and reduction measures by the P-5 over the next few years. Significant steps would be the de-alerting of nuclear weapons, reducing the role of nuclear weapons in security policies, declaring the size of national nuclear stockpiles and reductions in the number of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. India, naturally, was not at the conference but can take credit for the emergence of a group like the NAC. Until now there has hardly been any focussed challenge to the P-5 and they have got away for decades with empty promises.

Pokharan-II evidently concentrated the minds of non-nuclear weapons states as never before. By demonstrating so strikingly the inherent instability of the existing NPT regime, India's May 1998 tests compelled an influence group of countries to push for nuclear disarmament.

The fragile progress at the NPT conference is more than undone by the upheaval Washington is causing by persisting with its national missile defence plans or, put more accurately, Star Wars fantasies. Even though the technology of a ground-based defence against incoming ballistic missiles is not proven, many Republicans in the Senate are persuaded it will make the US invulnerable to attack. President Clinton hopes at a summit this June to persuade the new Russian President, Vladimir Putin, that a ``limited'' US NMD is no threat to Russia. If the US does go ahead with NMD, there is no question that it will destabilise relations between the nuclear powers and a new arms race will begin as other states scramble to cope with reduced nuclear deterrent capabilities.

China which maintains a relatively small number of weapons and ballistic missiles under its minimum deterrent policy, will feel compelled to enlarge the quantities of both. If an arms race ensues, nuclear disarmament will be set back for decades.