As leaders of 47 countries gather in Washington to discuss how to better secure nuclear materials, not a few observers are noting that what’s not happening may be more interesting and significant than what’s happening–and that’s not to belittle the importance of what’s under formal discussion, by the way.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled plans to attend, reportedly for fear he might be made the target of a drive by other Middle Eastern nations to declare the region a nuclear-weapons-free zone. Meanwhile, it’s becoming apparent, as the New York Times detailed in its lead story Monday morning, that India and Pakistan are now engaged in an aggressive arms race that inevitably will add to the total stock of nuclear materials that the world has to worry about.
Not all the off-camera news is necessarily bad. In 1979, the year before its attack on Iraq’s Osiris nuclear reactor, Israel proposed creation of a Middle East nuclear-free zone; most likely that was a ploy, crafted to provide diplomatic cover for the controversial raid. What if Israel were now persuaded to get really serious about the idea? It might be the only real hope of saving the country from the truly nightmarish scenario not merely of a nuclear-armed Iran, but of an Iranian atomic bomb falling into the hands of Hezbollah or Hamas.
That said, it’s a lot harder to think of anything positive in the nuclear arms race raging on the Subcontinent. And the Times is right that there seems to be a certain chronic myopia when it comes to nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan, even among the most seasoned and trustworthy experts.
George Perkovich is the author of an excellent book about India’s nuclear weapons program and its implications, in which he argues persuasively that an opportunity was lost in the late 1970s to keep India non-nuclear. This winter he has had a compelling article in Daedalus about the global fallout from the Bush Administration’s U.S.-India nuclear agreement, in which he argues that “the deal gave India benefits that the non-nuclear-armed states felt devalued their virtue.”
Perkovich advances convincing reasons to regret the deal, most having to do with its corrosive effect on the Non-Proliferation Treaty and on efforts to consolidate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and follow up with a ban on further production of fissionable materials. Yet he seems also to lose sight of certain strategic and material fundamentals.
He treats commercial motives behind the agreement as a kind of subtext when in fact (or so it seems to me) they quite plainly drove it: Why impose self-crippling limits on nuclear exports to India when, after all, the horses were out of the barn?
Despite his impressive Indian expertise, Perkovich seems to forget that there is a basic distinction between India and the other nuclear-weapons states that are not party to the NPT, and that the distinction is not merely a matter of geostrategic heft. India always refused to join the NPT on principle, arguing it disarmed the unarmed while leaving the armed free to keep arming. That was not the position of North Korea, which joined the treaty only to violate it. Nor was it the position of Israel, which declined to join but developed a nuclear arsenal secretly, saying coyly it would “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.” And it was not the position of Pakistan, which pledged to develop an Islamic bomb to match the Christian, Hebrew and Hindu bombs (a way of looking at things that did not have a positive ring), and then, while doing so, peddled nuclear-bomb-making technology to anybody willing to meet its prices.
Perkovich says that we should now try to develop a set of common, uniform rules that would govern all three nuclear-weapons states that are not party to the NPT. That’s not a good idea. Israel should be denuclearized, not indulged. As for Pakistan, the priority for it and India as well is to get them into the NPT as recognized nuclear-weapons states, so that they will be subject to the treaty’s ban on weapons states giving bomb assistance to the non-weapons states.
That’s a ban, by the way, that’s in urgent need of fortification. Let’s not forget that much of the technology A.Q. Khan was peddling came from China, which flagrantly violated its nonproliferation etiquette. To my knowledge, it has never been called to account for that breach. But that’s another story.
