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The leading advocate of India's nuclear policies is K. Subrahmanyam, a large, forceful man, who is the retired director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, in New Delhi. Subrahmanyam advocates an aggressive nuclear program based on the premise that nuclear weapons are the currency of global power. "Nuclear weapons are not military weapons," he told me. "Their logic is that of international politics and it is a logic of a global nuclear order." According to Subrahmanyam, international security has been progressively governed by a global nuclear order made up of the five nuclear-weapons powers � the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. "India," Subrahmanyam said, "wants to be a player and not an object of this global nuclear order." I had expected to hear about regional threats and the Chinese missile program. But, as Subrahmanyam sees it, India's nuclear policies are only tangentially related to the question of India's security. They are ultimately aimed at something much more abstract and very much more grand: global power. India could, it if plays its cards right, parlay its nuclear program into a seat on the United Nations Security Council and earn recognition as a "global player." Subrahmanyam told me a story about a film. It was called "The Million-Pound Note" and it featured Gregory Peck. In the film, Peck's character uses an obviously valueless piece of paper printed to look like a million-pound note to con tradesmen into extending credit. "A nuclear weapon acts like a million-pound note," Subrahmanyam said, his eyes gleaming. "It is of no apparent use. You can't use it to stop small wars. But it buys you credit, and that gives you the power to intimidate." Subrahmanyam bristled when I suggested that there might be certain inherent dangers to the possession of nuclear weapons. Like most Indian hawks, he considers himself a reluctant nuclearist. He says he would prefer to see nuclear weapons done away with altogether. It is the nuclear superpowers' insistence on maintaining their arsenals that makes this impossible. Issues of safety, he told me, were no more pressing in India than anywhere else. India and Pakistan had lived with each other's nuclear programs for many years. "It was the strategic logic of the West that was madness. Think of the United States' building seventy thousand nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.8 trillion. Do you think these people are in a position to preach to us?" Subrahmanyam, like many other supporters of the Indian nuclear program, sees little danger of the deployment of nuclear weapons. In New Delhi, it is widely believed that the very immensity of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons renders them useless as instruments of war, insuring that their deployment can never be anything other than symbolic. That nuclear war is unthinkable has, paradoxically, given the weapons an aura of harmlessness. I went to see an old acquaintance, Chandan Mitra, a historian with an Oxford doctorate. I had come across an editorial of his entitled "Explosion of Self-Esteem," published on May 12th. At Delhi University, when I first knew Chandan, he was a Marxist. He is now an influential newspaper editor, and is said to be a B.J.P. sympathizer. "The bomb is a currency of self-esteem," Chandan told me, with disarming bluntness. "Two hundred years of colonialism robbed us of our self-esteem. We do not have the national pride that the British have, or the French , the Germans, or the Americans. We have been told that we are not fit to rule ourselves � that was the justification of colonialism. Our achievements, our worth, our talents have always been negated and denied. Mahatma Gandhi's endeavor all during the freedom movement was to rebuild our sense of self-esteem. Even if you don't have guns, he said, you still have moral force. Now, fifty years on, we know that moral force isn't enough to survive. It doesn't count for very much. When you look at India today and ask how best you can overcome those feelings of inferiority, the bomb seems to be as good an answer as any." For Chandan, as for many other Indians, the bomb is more than a weapon. It has become a banner of political insurgency, a kind of millenarian movement for all the unfulfilled aspirations and dreams of the last fifty years. Amitav Ghosh, Countdown: Why can't every country have the bomb?, The New Yorker, 26-Oct-1998/02-Nov-1998, p. 189. |
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I went to see Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's [Pakistan's] principal religious party. The Jamaat's headquarters are on the outskirts of Lahore [Pakistan], in a large and self-sufficient compound, surrounded by a high wall and manned by sentries. Ahmed has a well-trimmed white beard, twinkling eyes, and a manner of great affability. "Other than the Army," he said, "all the institutions in this country are more or less finished. These are all institutions of a Westernized élite, of people who are corrupt. We are now paying the price of their corruption. All the problems we have now � the economic crisis and so on � are the fruit of their corruption." I was hearing a strange echo of voices from India. "We are not for nuclear weapons," Ahmed told me. "We are ourselves in favor of disarmament. But we don't accept that five nations should have nuclear weapons and others shouldn't. We say, 'Let the five also disarm.'" Amitav Ghosh, Countdown: Why can't every country have the bomb?, The New Yorker, 26-Oct-1998/02-Nov-1998, p. 197. |
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I remember my astonishment both at the news of the tests and also at the response to them: the tone of chastisement, the finger-wagging by countries that still possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Had they imagined that the technology to make a bomb had wound its way back into a genie's lamp because the Cold War had ended? Did they think that it had escaped the world's attention that the five peacekeepers of the United Nations Security Council all had nuclear arms? If so, then perhaps India's nuclear tests served a worthwhile purpose by waking the world from this willed slumber. Amitav Ghosh, Countdown: Why can't every country have the bomb?, The New Yorker, 26-Oct-1998/02-Nov-1998, p. 197. |
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The motivation behind India's nuclear program is summed up neatly in this formula: it is status-driven, not threat-driven. The intention is to push India into an imagined circle of twice-born nations � "the great powers." In Pakistan, the motivation is similar. Status, here, means parity with India. Amitav Ghosh, Countdown: Why can't every country have the bomb?, The New Yorker, 26-Oct-1998/02-Nov-1998, p. 197. |
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I think of something that George Fernandes said to me: "Our country has already fallen to the bottom. Very soon we will reach a point where there is no hope at all. I believe that we have reached that point now." I think also of the words of I. A. Rehman, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan: "This is the worst it's ever been. Everything is discredited. Everything is lost, broken into pieces." I have never had so many utterly depressing conversations, so many talks that ended with the phrase "we have hit rock bottom." Amitav Ghosh, Countdown: Why can't every country have the bomb?, The New Yorker, 26-Oct-1998/02-Nov-1998, p. 197. |