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.

These proposals are to be discussed in an international conference to be sponsored by the Government of Norway in February. The four statesmen also draw attention to the growing global interest in development of nuclear energy and suggest development of an international system to manage the risks of the nuclear cycle. They support an international nuclear enrichment programme under a strengthened IAEA to provide reliable supplies of nuclear fuel reserves. They plead that other nuclear weapon powers should join, after US and Russia agree to undertake further substantial reduction beyond those already agreed to in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty and proceed with such reductions. They stress strongly the need for a clear statement of the ultimate goal of a nuclear weapon free world.

This total reversal in the nuclear strategy of these American statesmen may be received with cynicism by some members of our strategic establishment. There may be paranoid arguments that the American thesis advanced by these former US hawks are part of an elaborate conspiracy directed against India and therefore they should straightaway be rejected and India should assert its right to conduct nuclear weapon tests if necessary and continue to build its weapon grade fissile material stockpile. Any interest in the US proposals or attendance at the Norway conference may be denounced as bowing to US imperialist pressure though China and Russia are bound to take keen interest in the proposals.

There is no difficulty in our being indifferent to these proposals and the developments they may lead to and take the line that we may deal with them as the proposals mature and come up for formal intergovernmental discussions. It would be a pity to adopt that line.

India has been in the forefront of the global struggle for disarmament since India became independent.

India proposed CTBT in 1954, balanced nonproliferation in the sixties, outlawing the nuclear weapons in the late ’70s (when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was foreign minister), no-first-use of nuclear weapons in the eighties and came up with the Comprehensive Rajiv Gandhi Disarmament Plan in 1988. Therefore, at this stage India cannot take a cynical indifferent attitude when the former American hawks are displaying interest in elimination of nuclear weapons and finally have come round to accept the logic of elimination of weapons of mass destruction.

One is familiar with the arguments that weapons, once invented, have always been used and there have always been wars among human beings. Such arguments were used in the past against abolition of slavery, against decolonisation, against gender justice and against elimination of other weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological ones. In fact, chemical weapons were used extensively in World War I. Thereafter came the Geneva Protocol outlawing it. Subsequently it was used only in asymmetric situations when the using side was confident that the victim could not retaliate. Then in 1993 the international community agreed to eliminate it under verification. So there is a precedent for elimination of a weapon of mass destruction which was used extensively.

Since a large number of US strategists have supported this move, India’s indifference would give the lobby that is campaigning against India on the 123 Agreement leverage vis-à-vis this country to portray India as a nation committed to the conventional ‘Strangelove’ type of nuclear deterrent strategy. Our foreign minister has declared in Parliament that nuclear disarmament was India’s goal. The Indian nuclear doctrine is against nuclear war-fighting, espouses no first use and asserts that India’s nuclear weapons are only for credible minimum deterrence.

In these circumstances, even while safeguarding India’s security interests against China which initiated and sustained nuclear proliferation to Pakistan, and Islamabad whose nuclear weapons are India-specific, India should attempt to regain its earlier reputation as a champion of a nuclear weapon free world. The Rajiv Gandhi-Gorbachev declaration for a nuclear weapon free world preceded the Kissinger-Schulz-Perry-Nunn thesis by 20 years.

The writer is a senior defence analyst

ambimani@gmail.com