Equitable NSG

“The only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons will never be used again is through their total elimination”. This was said by the Austrian foreign minister, Sabastian Kurz, during the April 2015 nuclear review conference. The quote sums up the nuclear dilemma of the global nuclear community.

Article VI of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) clearly stipulates that all nuclear powers will take effective measures under a treaty to ensure general and complete disarmament of all nuclear weapons. This was the real leitmotif of the NPT, around which was woven the desired pattern of a ‘nuclear-safe’ world without a possibility of visiting the kind of death and destruction upon mankind that scarred generations of Japanese victims of the nuclear holocaust.

Article IV of the NPT also explicitly lays down the ground rules for peaceful nuclear cooperation amongst NPT-compliant nations. It does not leave any room or loophole for inclusion of any non complier into nuclear export control regimes like the NPT. The most ludicrous part therefore of the past and present Indo-US nuclear confabulations is that the leading nuclear disarmament protagonist – the US – is going hammer and tongs against the sedulously nurtured post-1963 NPT regime, sacrificing principles at the altar of ‘strategic expediency’.

The Chinese spectre has so badly started haunting the US psyche that the latter has jettisoned all circumspection to the wind, allowing nuclear proliferators like India to jump on the nuclear bandwagon.

There has been much talk recently of global concerns about nuclear proliferation, orchestrated chiefly by the US. The specious discourse, however, fails to notice that the ‘original sin’ of nuclear proliferation, in clear and flagrant denial of the NPT, was committed by a nation called India.

The 1974 Pokharan nuclear tests were the first confirmed nuclear tests by a country other than the five permanent nuclear weapon states. In response, a worried global community hastened to create a Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to prevent future misuse of transfer of nuclear technology. A detailed list of guidelines for nuclear commerce and transfer of technology was published in 1978 to ensure that nuclear technology for peaceful purposes is not diverted towards any unsafeguarded nuclear fuel cycle.

In 2008 a paranoid US, fell pell-mell for nuclear exceptionalism in South Asia, while granting iniquitous and unprincipled exemptions to India for accessing nuclear fuel for its 14 safeguarded civil nuclear reactors. This was done with blithe disregard to the fact that India was operating several unsafeguarded nuclear reactors from where the reprocessed fuel could be diverted for military purposes without anybody being the wiser.

Could there be a greater example of nuclear duplicity and egregious lack of proliferation concerns? When India offered its services to the US in 2008 as a regional surrogate to contain the Chinese influence, a nuclear exemption was arm twisted out of NSG members in blatant disregard of Articles I and II of the NPT.

What could be the effect of the unprincipled US support for Indian membership of the 48-nations NSG? The step would seriously undermine the global nuclear disarmament and arms control regime, especially the NPT, besides fuelling a nuclear arms race in South Asia. The Indian feverish acquisition of a triad of ground, air, and sea based nuclear toys betokens a status consciousness to keep up with the Joneses rather than a serious quest for threat alleviation.

The continual vertical proliferation of nuclear capability by India as a junior rebalancing partner in the US’s ‘Pivot to Asia Pacific’ strategy portends ill for deterrence stability and concomitant non-proliferation in South Asia, provoking not only Pakistan but China too in a nuclear arms’ race. 

India has not been an honest recipient of the US nuclear largesse. Despite signing the additional protocol to the IAEA in June 2014, India’s separation plan of military and civil use reactors includes some reactors that are connected to the electrical grid but are declared part of the military programme. Furthermore, there are serious issues with standard provisions of information sharing in India’s additional protocol that have made the US chary of Indian intentions.

The principles of nuclear equity and fidelity to the non-proliferation regime dictate that the US pursue merit-based criteria for membership of the NSG. The criteria should include nuclear safety requirements, export controls, and restrictions on expansion of nuclear arsenal.

Without the above course correction, all US endeavours at nuclear favouritism employing the NSG forum would fail. They would also seriously dent the image of the US as the global bulwark to nuclear proliferation. The entire NPT regime, therefore, should not be imperilled on the rocks of geopolitical expediency and fears of a rising China.

Economic interdependence and Kantian cooperation should trump Hobbesian competition while viewing China’s economic and political progress as a world power. An equitable NSG can be the first step towards that quest.

The writer is a PhD scholar at Nust.

Email: rwjanj@hotmail.com