Most of the argument against India’s membership of the Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG), if not all of it, is predicated upon its refusal to sign the NPT. India, which could accrue enormous economic benefit from that membership, is viewed through the lens of its 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests.
New Delhi was sanctioned by the Clinton Administration after the 1998 tests, which were only partially successful, and only had the sanctions lifted by the succeeding Bush Administration.
If India’s refusal to sign the NPT, which it does on security and moral grounds, is to be the deciding factor on whether it obtains membership of the NSG or does not, the reasons for that decision must be examined, devoid of pre-conditions being applied and within their context.
A major goal of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is to prevent the emergence of new nuclear-weapons states and, simultaneously, limit qualitative and quantitative developments in the arsenals of existing nuclear-weapons states. India’s hopes of this occurring were dashed after witnessing the proceedings of the NPT conference in New York in 1995.
When the NPT came into force in 1970 it provided for a duration of twenty-five years, at the end of which a scheduled conference would consider renewing it and making amendments to reflect the current situation.
In the run-up to the 1995 conference, India faced growing pressure to sign the NPT.
China then issued a “National Statement on Security Assurances” with India. According to this statement, which echoed its 1982 assurances, China would not, at any time or under any circumstances, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapons states.
Indian analysts, however, noted the changed phrasing of the Chinese statement. Whereas the 1982 declaration used the term “unconditionally”, the 1995 one stated, “at any time or under any circumstances”.
This change, the analysts suggested, could apply only to those non-nuclear states that signed and ratified the NPT. They also suggested that now that China had gained accession to the NPT, it wished to deny India the same opportunity for strategic reasons.
The UN Security Council passed Resolution 984 six days before the NPT Extension Conference began in 1995. This resolution provided security guarantees to those non-nuclear weapons states which signed the NPT.
By implication, however, those countries that did not could not expect any such guarantees, thus diminishing their security against nuclear threat or attacks. Indian critics of the resolution pointed this out. They also noted in their criticism that all that Resolution 984 required was for the Security Council to meet. Any proposed action could then be vetoed by any one of the Permanent Five members, which club included China.
They raised the same questions that were asked in the 1960s and 1970s:
Can a country prudently base its security on the willingness and verbal bonds of other, non-allied states to intervene in any aggression against it?
What if the aggressor was a state that had provided those verbal assurances?
India refused, therefore, to accede to the NPT and reiterated its reasons for doing so: by creating two classes of states, the NPT was discriminatory and did not encourage countries to move towards nuclear disarmament.
To compound the matter, New Delhi pointed out that extending the treaty only signified acceptance of the prevailing unequal order. The NPT, it noted, required non-nuclear states to foreswear nuclear weapons but legitimised the nuclear arsenals of the permanent members of the Security Council.
India was, effectively, pressured into accepting permanent consignment to a second-class status in the world order.
Simultaneously, Indian leaders noted the US decision to ease the transfer of military technology to Pakistan, no matter that that country had covertly received nuclear technology from China, which has today blamed one man, A.Q. Khan, for the entire episode, thus absolving itself of any wrongdoing, and passed that technology on to countries as far afield as Libya and North Korea through the Khan network.
To compound the matter, India believed, correctly as it turned out, that the US had full knowledge of these activities but chose to ignore them for its own reasons.
The current analysis asks two relevant questions.
First, if the NSG was created in response to India’s 1974 nuclear test with the goal of inhibiting assistance to the latter’s nuclear programme, it must decide if it could continue to do that. Second, how could it do that if India becomes a member?
These are questions that must indeed be answered.
To best answer them, however, the NSG must examine its own history and the nuclear proliferation of some of its senior members and decide if it wants to be a party to lifting untold millions of Indians out of grinding poverty, just as China was able to do, or to maintain the double standards on which it was founded, no matter India’s record of non-proliferation.
It may also wish to keep in mind the news that, contrary to the requirement of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the permanent members of the UN Security Council are building deadlier nuclear weapons and upgrading their existing ones.
While it may not be able to provide a workable response in time for this week’s meeting, the NSG needs to prioritise the issue and do so at the earliest. Any less would be an exercise in hypocrisy.
—By Lindsay Hughes, Research Analyst, Indian Ocean Research Programme
Future Directions International, Australia.