More on the India Nuke Deal

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Fred Kaplan gets at some of the problems with the Bush administration’s recent nuclear deal with India. Among other worries, India could start building fast-breeder reactors—which can be used to build lots and lots of plutonium bombs—inside its unmonitored military facilities. The whole thing also undermines the Non-Proliferation Treaty: after all, if the U.S. can offer India nuclear technology without requiring the latter to disarm (or even, more weakly, put a moratorium on new weapons), what’s to stop Russia and China from offering, say, Pakistan or Iran a similar deal?

But there’s another—and, I think, far more serious—problem here. A few weeks ago in the New Yorker, Steve Coll had a scary piece of reporting about how in December of 2001, after Kashmiri jihadis allegedly tried to blow up the Parliament House in New Delhi, India and Pakistan came very close to war. Very close. And because neither country could tell how serious the other side was about deterrence and using its nukes, the world came closer to seeing a real-life nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. For instance:

At a round-table discussion in London, a Pakistani general involved with his country’s nuclear program discussed the crisis with Indian civilian participants. “They said, ‘We can live with losing Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, but we will wipe out Pakistan,'” the general recalled. “I said, ‘That’s easier said than done. Losing Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay, it would be very difficult for India to survive.'”

Such talk unnerved British and American officials, and in late May Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, called Armitage, asking him to visit Islamabad and New Delhi; he was hoping that a new round of diplomacy might at least slow down India’s war planners. Armitage agreed, and he invited analysts from the State Department’s intelligence and regional bureaus to his office. He asked for a show of hands: “How many think we’re going to war?” Everybody’s hand went up but his.

(Indeed, the State Department took the threat so seriously that it evacuated its diplomats from the region—the first time it had ever done so.) Now the standoff was resolved, at least in Coll’s telling, because Colin Powell and Richard Armitage did a deft job of mediating between the two sides. That’s partly because they could be seen as somewhat impartial mediators—among other things, relations between the United States and Pakistan were warming in late 2001. But because the Bush administration has cozied up to India of late, Pakistan’s generals now have “an absolute certainty that the U.S. is not an honest broker,” one Defense Department official told Coll.

It’s hard to tell whether the nuclear crisis in late 2001 has scared Pakistani and Indian leaders into bouts of moderation—the two countries have warmed slightly towards each other of late. But another major attack by Pakistani groups could easily provoke a war—or at the very least another round of brinksmanship. (Some jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed seem to have this very goal in mind.) And the next time, the United States might not be able to calm everyone down.

War would be disastrous for all the obvious reasons, but even having Pakistan and India get close to war would be extremely dangerous from a global security perspective. As Coll reports, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are pretty well guarded until they’re put on alert and dispersed in preparation for battle. When that happens, the chances that a nuclear weapon could fall into the wrong hands will suddenly go up significantly. (And it won’t be known when that happens—it’s not even known to what extent Pakistan’s arsenal was dispersed in late 2001.)

A few years ago in the Atlantic, Graham Allison explained why we should all be terrified of this scenario—he was also worried about a possible coup in Pakistan, which could again lead to nuclear weapons falling in the wrong hands—and suggested that as a solution, the U.S. should provide technological safeguards to Pakistan, such as bomb locks known as Permissive Action Links that would ensure that only Gen. Perez Musharraf could activate the weapons. It seemed like a sound idea, but Coll describes why Pakistan never accepted:

Colin Powell first raised the possibility of American assistance with Musharraf [on nuclear safeguards] in the autumn of 2001, but Musharraf rejected the idea; the Pakistani side “just said no,” the former Bush Administration official recalled. The Pakistanis said they “had it all under control themselves.”

Many of Pakistan’s ruling generals fear that, given an opportunity, the United States might stand by as India attempted to preëmptively destroy Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons facilities. In the view of Musharraf and his senior generals, Feroz Khan told me, “the United States is not hostile to Pakistan, but they do know that the U.S. was inimical to the Pakistani program from the beginning, so they would not assume any sympathy” if India attacked. Pakistan’s military has gone to great lengths to keep the operational details of its nuclear-weapons systems secret, several well-placed American officials told me. To accept U.S. nuclear-security assistance, the generals would have to be convinced that the aid would not be used to collect intelligence or undermine Pakistan’s control of its nuclear arsenal.

It’s not an entirely unreasonable fear, really, and the United States’ recent deal with India will very likely make Pakistan’s generals even less likely to accept assistance anytime in the near future. And that makes nuclear proliferation more likely. Now perhaps it really is in our best interests to make a long-term strategic alliance with India—so that they can help us “contain China” or whatever nonsense is the rationale here—but it’s easy to see the problems here.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate