Jaya Tiwari*

Until this point, we tried to step back from the current political environment and envision legal and technical tools and measures that could help foster and implement a global nuclear disarmament regime. In this presentation, I would like first to go over the current political environment in a region with a very short nuclear fuse, South Asia, to highlight why nuclear disarmament is so critical for the sake of billions of people.

Second, I will examine the state of existing bilateral nuclear confidence building and safeguard measures between India and Pakistan and multilateral agreements to which they belong. While limited in their scope, these measures and agreements have played a useful role in creating a platform for cooperation, transparency, and dialog related to nuclear issues in the region. Furthermore, they could potentially be useful mechanisms for moving toward regional nuclear disarmament.

Let us look at current tensions between India and Pakistan. The two countries have a long history of animosity. They have fought three wars, in 1947, 1965, and 1972, and engaged in an undeclared but serious military conflict in 1999 in the Kargil region. They continue to clash over the disputed territory of Kashmir. (I don’t think I need to detail the roots or the explore causes of the conflict for this audience). Following the terrorist attacks in India — on October 1st at the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislative building and on December 13th at the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi — already tense political relations between India and Pakistan took a turn for the worse. The attacks were carried out by Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba, extremist groups active in Kashmir with support from Pakistan.

In the weeks following the December 13 attack, the largest mobilization to date of Indian and Pakistani troops along the Line of Control (LOC) has taken place. Current reports indicate that there are nearly one million troops from the two sides along the LOC. While India and Pakistan have fought wars before and tension on the LOC is nothing new, the present conflict has the potential to quickly escalate to a full-scale war reaching a nuclear level.

More than ever, there is a feeling in India of "enough is enough" with respect to Pakistani support for militant groups active in Kashmir. The ruling BJP government in India is under intense domestic pressure to take action against Pakistan for the December 13th attack. India has demanded that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cut off support for Kashmiri militant groups based in Pakistan and extradite to India all those responsible for plotting the October 1st and December 13th attacks. The Indian leadership also appears ready to exploit President’s Bush’s rhetoric of a "global war against terrorism." With President Bush having broadly and universally defined the war on terrorism, the BJP Indian government is betting that Mr. Bush will find it hard to back track and denounce Indian action against the same Islamic extremist groups that the United States is fighting against in Afghanistan. India appears quite confident that, should the country seek to solve the current conflict militarily, the international community in general and the United States in particular will not be in a position to vocally oppose Indian action.

India seems so confident, self-righteous, and undeterred — even by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability — that just a few days ago the Indian Defense Minister, George Fernandes, announced that "India can take a first strike from Pakistan and survive, but Pakistan will be completely destroyed." Even more worrisome is a statement made by the Indian Army chief yesterday. While I don’t have the full details, the Army chief announced that India is ready to go to war with Pakistan and the use of nuclear weapons in response to a first strike from Pakistan could not be ruled out.

India’s tough stand and positioning of troops along the LOC has put President Pervez Musharraf in a difficult spot. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Pakistani President abandoned his support for the Taliban regime and, despite strong domestic opposition, backed the U.S. military action in Afghanistan. President Musharraf’s decision to support the United States in the war against the Al-Qaeda network and Taliban regime has considerably angered religious groups, as evidenced by frequent and continuing protests in Pakistan.

If, under pressure from India, President Musharraf abandons support for separatist group efforts in Kashmir (which all Pakistani governments have declared as the "struggle for Kashmiri independence") and is perceived as weak and bullied by India, maintaining domestic support for his regime could prove difficult. To maintain the appearance of not backing down under Indian pressure, even if only for domestic reasons, President Musharraf has to keep up with the counter rhetoric and troop mobilization from the Pakistani side. Another India-Pakistan war breaking out under these circumstances doesn’t appear that far-fetched. A full-scale conventional war between India and Pakistan now more than ever has the potential, whether intentional or accidental, of turning into a nuclear conflict. The consequences of the use of nuclear weapons in South Asia, home to some 1.5 billion people, will be truly horrific.

So how can we move away from the current situation, where Indian and Pakistani troops are clashing along the LOC with bombs and missiles in each other’s face, to a nuclear weapon free South Asia? Here are some thoughts:

* Even the most optimistic of us will have to face up to the fact that achieving such a goal in South Asia will take a long time. Slow and incremental progress toward the goal of nuclear disarmament is probably the most likely outcome in South Asia.

* Reaching such a goal will also require incremental and sustained efforts on local, regional, and global levels. Policies and steps taken by the five nuclear weapon states (NWS), the United States in particular, will greatly impact the situation in the region.

* Toward this end, incremental progress can be achieved by enhancing the information exchange required by existing confidence building and nuclear safeguard measures between India and Pakistan.

* Increased transparency in the nuclear field could lead to lasting and irreversible nuclear threat reduction agreements between India and Pakistan, increase the prospects of future agreements, and serve as an element of increased stability in times of crises.

Leveraging Existing Confidence Building and Nuclear Safeguard Measures: A few examples

1. The Bilateral Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack Against Nuclear Installations and Facilities

Under this agreement, India and Pakistan have agreed to not attack, directly or indirectly, nuclear installations or facilities in either country. This is a unique bilateral agreement that no other hostile countries have yet concluded. The scope of the Indian-Pakistan No-Attack Agreement is even broader than the Geneva Convention’s prohibition against attacking nuclear electrical generating stations. Indian and Pakistani agreement prohibits attacks against "nuclear power and research reactors, fuel fabrication, uranium enrichment, isotope separation and reprocessing facilities as well as all other installations with fresh or irradiated nuclear fuel and materials in any form and establishments storing significant quantities of radioactive materials."

As a part of this agreement, India and Pakistan exchange a list of the latitude and longitude of their nuclear installations and facilities each year on January 1st. Even in the midst of one of the tensest times, the two countries conducted their annual exchange at the beginning of 2002. Such information exchange between the two countries provides an excellent framework for transparency. With this exchange, each country implicitly accepts that the other side could and does gather satellite imagery of the sites included in the list. In its current state, the bilateral nuclear data exchange is limited in nature but could be useful for creating more stable and more transparent nuclear relations between the two nations.

2. The Lahore Memorandum of Understanding

On February 21, 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries signed a Memorandum of Understanding pledging to prevent accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and take steps for the creation of communication mechanisms to enable early notification of a nuclear accident to the other party. Implementing the provisions of this agreement in good faith would be an excellent step to build trust and promote transparency.

3. IAEA Safeguards Agreements

Both India and Pakistan have agreed to site or material-specific safeguard measures designed to prevent the diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to weapons-oriented uses. There are a number of voluntary steps that the two countries could take that would not only strengthen international monitoring but also facilitate bilateral cooperation on nuclear issues. A simple first step, for example, could involve releasing data each party supplies to the IAEA for review by the other.

Possible Additional Steps in South Asia

1. No Deployment

The most encouraging news for those seeking the establishment of a nuclear weapon free South Asia is that, despite the political rhetoric, there is little evidence that India and Pakistan are pursuing full-scale deployment in the near future. Numerous technological and financial constraints facing India prevent it from deploying fully operational and survivable nuclear weapon systems at an accelerated pace. Given that Pakistani officials have stated that they will not be the first to openly deploy nuclear weapons, but will only do so in response to such action from India, sustained pressure and active efforts from the international community can help halt the pace of nuclear developments in the region.

If the international community is to succeed in capping South Asian nuclear capabilities below the deployment threshold, it will have to change India and Pakistan’s cost-benefit calculations regarding weaponization and deployment decisions. In no uncertain terms, it should be made clear that overt weaponization and deployment by either India or Pakistan will result in stringent and sustained fiscal, military and technology transfer sanctions.

2. Limiting the Areas of Deployment of Nuclear Weapons

In the event that India and Pakistan move ahead with deployment decisions, steps could be taken to limit the scope of the deployment. Since 1975, Pakistan has proposed the idea of a South Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (SANWFZ), which has not been accepted by India (though there are a number of UNGA resolutions on this). India has, however, supported the concept of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace (IOZP). Such a zone is proposed to restrict nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean. Combining some aspects of each of these proposals, a stabilizing measure for India and Pakistan to consider could involve, first, pledging to restrict nuclear weapons deployment from the western and northern Indian Ocean and their coastal areas. This first phase would be a compromise of the SANWFZ and the IOZP ideas. It would also limit Indian plans to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles on submarines, restricting such deployment to the oceans on India’s eastern seaboard. As a second phase of restricting areas of nuclear weapons deployment, India and Pakistan could make a similar pledge for the Kashmir region. Such agreements would still leave open a wide swath of territory for basing nuclear weapons. However, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons in a tactical battlefield scenario in Kashmir could be minimized through the pledges suggested here.

The Role of Non-State Actors in Nuclear Weapon Free South Asia

The non-state actors can also play an important part in changing the course of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapon programs by educating the public of the dangers associated with production, possession, and use of these tremendously expensive and destructive weapons. There are some examples of steps already being taken in this direction. The Convention for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, held in New Delhi in November 2001, brought together a large group of participants from all walks of life under one banner — no nuclear weapons in South Asia! The NGO communities in India and Pakistan must do a better job in educating the public and encouraging it to demand accountability and explanations for continuing to spend huge sums of money on nuclear weapon programs in countries where a large portion of the population still does not have access to very basic human need items.

Jaya Tiwari

Physicians for Social Responsibility

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