It is one of the big ironies of the moment. There is now a vigorous debate in India about our right to conduct nuclear tests, if we consider them necessary, and the risks of our nuclear arsenal being capped short of our credible minimum deterrence requirement if we go ahead with 123 Agreement with the United States. In the US, four veteran strategists, Henry Kissinger, George Schulz, William Perry and Senator Sam Nunn are urging their country to take the initiative to move towards a nuclear weapon free world.

On January 4, 2007 these four statesmen wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal calling for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world. Up to the end of the eighties India used to urge nuclear disarmament and the US used to stress the need for nuclear weapons.

Now after a year, on January 15, the four statesmen have returned to the theme, again in The Wall Street Journal. They claim to have received positive responses from all over the world for their earlier initiative. The list of people who have endorsed the idea reads almost like the list of the people who are now alive among the Americans who originally contributed to the building of the US nuclear arsenal to the obscene levels it reached in the eighties.

The four US statesmen have developed the ideas they had put forward in a preliminary way last year. They have now urged that the provisions of the START treaty of 1991 should be extended, the reductions agreed upon in the 2002 Moscow treaty should be completed, and steps should be taken to increase the warning and decision time for the launch of all nuclear armed missiles. They draw attention to new threats arising out of developments in cyber warfare that could have disastrous consequences to the command and control systems. They advocate discarding any existing plans for massive attacks and term deterrence based on mutual assured destruction an obsolete policy in today’s world. They urge negotiations towards developing cooperative multilateral ballistic missile defence and early warning systems. They demand dramatically accelerated work to provide the highest possible standards of security for nuclear weapons and nuclear materials all over the world. They favour strengthening the means of monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a counter to a global spread of advanced technologies. Above all, they plead for bringing into effect the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

... contd.