U.S.-India Tensions: Misperceptions on Nuclear Proliferation

Deepa Ollapally and Raja Ramanna

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 2,503 words total.

Summary:  America's view of India as a nuclear revisionist state discounts India's many disarmament initiatives and its adherence to basic nonproliferation efforts.

Deepa Ollapally is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. Raja Ramanna is Director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, and a former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India.

Relations between India and the United States have improved considerably since the end of the Cold War, but they are still punctuated by controversies over nuclear nonproliferation. To a significant extent, these conflicts seem to be the result of persisting American beliefs that India is obstinate about the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, that India is vulnerable to technology?denying efforts, and that it can be equated with its neighbor, Pakistan. These perceptions take on added import because of the assumption by American policymakers that South Asia is the most dangerous nuclear hot spot. Implicitly, India's image also continues to be that of a revisionist state destined to be at odds with the United States, a status quo global power. These are misperceptions that deserve attention, as only four months remain for constructive dialogue before the NPT conference convenes to review the expiring 30?year?old treaty.

The NPT has come to represent the core of U.S. nonproliferation efforts. The Clinton administration has promised to spare no effort to get an indefinite extension. The United States sees India's continuing opposition to signing what New Delhi considers an inherently discriminatory NPT as symptomatic of India's tendency to obstruct global arms control efforts. This view, however, discounts India's numerous disarmament initiatives (in the United Nations and elsewhere) and its adherence to the principles that underlie the NPT.

In India's view, the NPT curbs the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states without providing adequate security guarantees. Furthermore, it fails to reduce or eliminate stockpiles of the weapon states and thus legitimates them. India regards vertical and horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons as equal threats to peace, and contends that elimination efforts ought to proceed in tandem. It also believes the United States unfairly singles it out from Pakistan and Israel, two other key NPT nonsignatory states. Although undeclared, Israel is surmised to have a sizable nuclear arsenal. While controversy surrounds the Pakistani nuclear program, Pakistan is on record as having the components of at least one bomb and was identified in reports last summer as smuggling weapons?grade contraband plutonium from the former Soviet Union through Germany.

INDIA'S RESTRAINT

For its part, India has remained at the threshold level. In the two decades since the Pokharan test explosion, India has neither tested nor deployed nuclear weapons. Nor has it transferred sensitive nuclear technology or trained nuclear experts from other countries. Within India there is a broad consensus for protecting the country's nuclear option but no significant lobby for "going nuclear" among the scientific and political elites. India's support of nonproliferation has received little U.S. acknowledgment, although its record is better than the United States' from this perspective.

Given that military planners assess capabilities rather than intentions when making strategic choices, India's restraint could be viewed as exceptional. Neighboring China has steadily advanced the size and sophistication of its nuclear weapons program, and until recently the superpowers continued their intense competitive buildups. The second Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty ceiling of 3,000 to 3,500 warheads for the United ...

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