Western n-assistance to India, Pak.?

By C. Raja Mohan

LONDON, JUNE 9. Signals from the United States of a possible change in its non-proliferation policy towards the subcontinent have triggered a debate within the Western alliance on the merits of assisting India and Pakistan stabilise their nuclear rivalry.

Until recently the avowed U.S. nuclear objective in South Asia was to constrain and eventually roll back the nuclear and missile capabilities of India and Pakistan through political persuasion, economic coercion and technology denial.

In a departure from this traditional approach, the new national security establishment in Washington may now be ready to acknowledge that a rollback of Indian and Pakistani nuclear capabilities is not feasible.

But the U.S. remains concerned about a potential ``nuclear flashpoint''- the subcontinent. Washington strongly believes there is a real danger of military tensions between India and Pakistan escalating to the nuclear level.

One view is that the U.S. should drop its punitive measures against India and Pakistan and intensify its engagement with both countries to reduce the threat of early, accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. options could range from sharing ``early warning'' information with New Delhi and Islamabad to transfer of technologies that will allow better control of the nuclear arsenals. The U.S. has a long history of providing ``nuclear stability assistance'' to other nuclear powers. Concerned about the effectiveness of command and control in the Soviet Union, Washington discreetly passed on some nuclear control technologies to Moscow during the 1960s.

The U.S. had certainly assisted its allies - France and Britain - to improve their capacity to handle nuclear arsenals. During the mid-1990s there was some talk in Washington of providing similar assistance to China.

But the idea of ``nuclear stability assistance'' to India and Pakistan is running into resistance from the non- proliferation lobbies within the Western alliance. Over the last decade, the non-proliferation bureaucracy has expanded its clout in Washington and other European capitals.

The guardians of the non-proliferation regime argue that helping India and Pakistan manage their atomic arsenals violates the legal obligations under the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty.

India and Pakistan are considered non-nuclear weapons states under the NPT and are barred from receiving any assistance on the nuclear weapons front. Any transfer of nuclear arms- related technology to India, it is feared, would have a negative impact on the credibility of the global non-proliferation regime.

The realists in the Western chanceries, however, reject the legal hair-splitting and point to the importance of stabilising the nuclear situation in the subcontinent.

Other analysts on both sides of the Atlantic argue that there might be enough flexibility in the language of the NPT that permits the U.S. to undertake measures that will reduce the risk of a nuclear war in the subcontinent.

The debate within the Western alliance, informed sources here suggest, is focussed on two different sets of issues. One relates to the assessment on whether there is a specific problem of effective control over nuclear weapons in the subcontinent. The second grapples with the nature of legal constraints against nuclear stability assistance to India and Pakistan and the possible ways to circumvent them.

As the Bush administration seeks to finalise its policy towards South Asia, the debate within the Western alliance on extending nuclear stability assistance to India and Pakistan is expected to sharpen in the coming weeks.

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