‘Future is like anything that’s important.

It has to be earned. If we don’t earn it, we

don’t have a future at all. And if we don’t

earn it, if we don’t deserve it, we have to

live in the present, more or less forever.

Or worse, we have to live in the past.’

                                                           Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

THE nuclear deal with the United States is about an India without a (strategic) future. It is about this country negotiating away its military-cum-political independence and leverage – its nuclear force frozen in its present small size and featuring weapons that are untested, unproven, unsafe and unreliable. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be remembered, not for any good he might do to free the Indian economy from the dead hand of government, but for the scale of nuclear politico-military disaster he walked the country into. His team of official advisers will by then have melted into the background, and the cheerleaders for this deal in the media would have done their usual intellectual summersault and slammed the after-effects of the deal. Unlike the Indian apologists who justify this deal in terms of a changed global order that India needs to exploit, the US, as always is pursuing a strategy that serves its narrow national security interests. The difference is in the opposing policy templates.

The American template for this agreement was created by Richard L. Garwin, the legendary experimental physicist who critically inputted into the original US hydrogen bomb project. One of a rare breed of wizards in physics as well as nuclear policy, Garwin in 2002 first laid down the policy parameters that the George W. Bush Administration has scrupulously followed in configuring its approach to nonproliferation generally and to crafting the nuclear deal with India, in particular.

The world, Garwin observed in his presentation on ‘Megaterrorism’ at the University of New Mexico, had ‘survived 60 years of potential annihilation’ because of the existing ‘nuclear monopoly’ and ‘deterrence by assured destruction’, joint US-Russian interest in nonproliferation, and because of the political, intellectual and material barriers against proliferation. And, in a technical sense, because of the inaccessibility to weapon-usable highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

By way of ‘urgent remedies’, he suggested ‘muscular extension of NPT with universal enforcement’ and ensuring a complete ban on testing (with the US, however, having the means to modernize its weapons using the advanced technology National Ignition Facility, the mu-electronic center, etc.). ‘The US has no reason to test,’ Garwin wrote, ‘and every national security interest that Russia and China [and by extension, states with even less developed N-arsenals, like India] not test.’ However, in order to meet the Non-Proliferation Treaty Article 1 obligation of helping the signatory states acquire civilian nuclear energy as also to mitigate the consequences of energy shortages, he recommended encouraging the accelerated growth of civilian nuclear power plants from the present 400 plus reactors (15% of the world’s electricity) to ‘3,000 or 9,000’ reactors.

Most of these plants, he reasoned, should be light water reactors run on enriched uranium and a yet to be developed ‘economical plutonium breeder reactor.’ The mining of the ore, fuel fabrication and assured fuel supply for these civilian reactors all over the globe were to be under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And, he viewed ‘The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)’, which would have collaborative programmes for developing technologies like the economical breeder reactor, as apparently a stratagem to divert the energies of nuclear capable countries like India.

 

Now view the India-US nuclear deal in the context of this Garwin policy architecture. His principal concern that resumption of Indian testing not be allowed under any circumstances is met in a two-pronged fashion by the deal. The July 18, 2005 Joint Statement signed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush expressly bars India from resuming explosive testing and, depending on how the text is interpreted, perhaps even from conducting sub-critical tests. These are Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)-like strictures that Manmohan Singh has accepted heedless of the consequences, when an earlier Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, to his enormous credit, had in 1996 rejected the CTBT as fatally hurting national security. It led to Gowda’s instructions to veto the draft treaty at the Commission on Disarmament in Geneva. Atal Bihari Vajpayee began the rot by thoughtlessly announcing a ‘voluntary test moratorium’, which has given way to a now strictly enforceable bilateral undertaking with the United States. And this when the situation remains pretty perilous where the quality and reliability of Indian nuclear weapons/warheads are concerned.

 

The ‘Shakti’ series of tests in 1998 proved only that the miniaturized 20 kiloton (KT) fission bomb design, first tested in 1974, is militarily serviceable. All the other weapon designs – the boosted fission and, especially, the thermonuclear – due to their ‘simultaneous triggering’ in Pokhran, produced confused multi-test explosion data sufficient to conclude that the fusion design, for instance, did not work because of partial thermonuclear burn – authoritatively established by crater morphology and excessive traces of lithium in the rock and soil samples extracted from the L-shaped tunnel deep underneath the Thar desert where the devices exploded. Moreover, data from just one, and that too failed, test involving the decisive thermonuclear device is simply insufficient to write a software package simulating fusion reaction, leave alone help in developing new and more innovative designs for thermonuclear warheads/weapons of different power-to-yield ratios to fit varying missile nose-cone geometries.

In short, should this nuclear deal be approved by the US Congress, India will be permanently stuck with a primitive nuclear arms inventory which can in no way propel India into the military great power ranks. President Clinton’s Under Secretary of State John Holum in his Congressional testimony had declared this as the main aim of US nonproliferation policy, which the successor George W. Bush Administration has now achieved.

 

The other measure working in tandem to hobble India’s nuclear military potential is the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) that Dr Singh has promised India will now join in pushing. If there is any intention by New Delhi to string out the FMCT negotiations and ‘buy time’ for the Indian nuclear complex to produce weapon-usable fissile material at an accelerated pace and build up its stockpile, the Indian government may be in for a surprise. Unlike the CTBT, India’s future relationship with the US is coupled by Washington with an early completion of the FMCT talks and its ratification by the Indian government. Having made pledges on FMCT, New Delhi will be in no position to slow down the negotiating process. Thus, say, in a couple of years at the most – because that is all the window realistically afforded India – New Delhi will have to shut down all fissile material production and the only stockpile of weapon-grade plutonium (WgPu) this country will have is what will be built up in the period between now and when the FMCT comes into force.

But considering the limited production capacity of the two military-dedicated reactors – the 40 MW CIRUS (assuming its close down is not immediately effected by twin Canadian-US pressure) and the 100 MW Dhruva – and the fact that the eight pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs) pumping power into the grid have not so far been used in a sustained fashion for weapons purposes which, as per the ‘separation plan’ accepted by the US, have been set aside to operate at ‘low burn-up rates’ and output bomb material, India will ultimately have only a relatively small-sized stockpile of WgPu to work with. In that case, the strategic value of the separation plan that earmarked many nuclear facilities for military use will be zero. Because once the limited store of WgPu in an FMCT regime is used up in weapons/warheads, the ‘military use’ tag on these military-use installations (including the breeder reactors) will become irrelevant.

In this respect, the Indian government is said to be satisfied with accumulating enough WgPu for an eventual deterrent force of around 100-150 warheads/weapons. This is wilfully to place the country in harm’s way because can any of the strategic gurus (such as they are) the Manmohan Singh regime has consulted say with certitude that a strategic force of this strength and one boasting of an array mostly of untested and unproven weapons will suffice in any all conceivable contingencies and crises in the future?

 

The Indian N-arsenal, according to public sources, of some 80 or so ready 20 KT nuclear weapons, have all used the weapon-grade plutonium (WgPu) obtained mostly from CIRUS and Dhruva. But there are 10 tons of accumulated spent fuel from all the PHWRs operating in the country over the last three-odd decades. This spent fuel, containing heavier isotopes of plutonium (Pu 240, Pu 241, Pu 242), is ill-suited for weapons/warheads, among other drawbacks, because of the uncertainty of the yield of the weapons using this fissile material. In an absolute crisis, there may be no way out other than producing weapons with the spent PHWR fuel. But, surely, this is only a stop-gap, with the real solution lying in converting the spent fuel into WgPu by running it, to begin with, in the prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR) which may not glitchlessly come on stream until, say, 2012. Moreover, the WgPu so obtained will need several years of ‘cooling off’ period before it can be handled to make weapons/warheads. All this requires time, and it is time the nuclear deal does not make available to India. In other words, India’s escape hatch will be shut tight.

 

And that is not all the trouble India faces. The text of the ‘Implementation of the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement’ is so badly drafted from the Indian point of view (which is not surprising considering that the working draft was of American origin) – or, to put it bluntly, acquiesced in by the Indian negotiators led by Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran – that there is every chance that the spent fuel from the indigenous PHWRs sequestered in the civilian sector, could be subjected to international safeguards just because these were products of reactors that will pass under IAEA safeguards. In that case, India’s stockpile of spent fuel potentially useable for weapons will shrink alarmingly.

Additionally, Garwin’s suggestion that the nuclear civilian energy sector worldwide be enlarged under strict IAEA supervision, is even more directly fulfilled by the India-US deal with the offer of enriched uranium-fueled 1000 MW light water reactors (LWRs) from the US (Westinghouse 1000), France (Areva) and Russia (VVER 1000) operating in a closed fuel loop, meaning, exhausted fuel bundles will be replaced periodically from international fuel fabrication centres. Should India import these LWRs with installed thermal capacity of 35,000 MW, it will expend some $50 billion, resulting in handing Washington a powerful lever to get Indian compliance with US demands in the nuclear policy realm as well as outside of it. Assuming the loss of $50 billion is absorbable by a burgeoning Indian economy, India may have to contend with the cut-off of contracted fuel, the shutdown of the imported LWRs, and the loss of 35,000 MW in the grid which could prove economically ruinous for the country. The contract for the supply of fuel for the lifetime of the reactors, it may be recalled, was violated by the US with regard to the Tarapur power station in the wake of India’s 1974 nuclear test. Except, that Tarapur was built with US aid monies – so it was no great loss to the Indian exchequer – and the potential loss of electricity was only about 365 MW.

 

Further, Garwin’s design for the GNEP working on proliferation-resistant advanced PHWRs and breeder reactors for universal use under IAEA oversight will seriously benefit from Indian research in it, in the most part because India is, perhaps, the leading country in terms of developing the fast breeder technology. So, the Indian created technologies will go into a finished product which may be sold back to us at a premium – an updated model of classical neo-colonial economics.

At the core of their respective approaches that resulted in the Manmohan Singh-George W. Bush agreement is Garwin’s sophisticated all-aspect and comprehensive blueprint for policy that is relentless in reducing any military risk to the United States and acquiring for the US as absolute security as is possible. A friendly India armed with thermonuclear weapons nevertheless complicates the military threat and risk calculus, a complication the United States and the other four so-called NPT-recognized nuclear weapon states would rather do without. It is akin to India’s being wary of a nuclearized Iran even though New Delhi is on the friendliest terms with Tehran. And hence the precautions Washington has taken to ensure that the nuclear deal fully defangs India’s nuclear stance, even as the latter is allowed symbolically to enjoy the status of a quasi-nuclear weapon state.

 

Now compare Garwin’s hard-edged policy game-plan with the woolly ideas enunciated by K. Subrahmanyam as the intellectual leader of the pro-deal camp, which the Manmohan Singh government has used as scaffolding for its approach; any wonder the ensuing deal has seriously compromised the strategic standing and nuclear security of the country? Subrahmanyam’s thesis is that in the emerging international order there will be six great power nodes – the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, Japan, and India, with the dominant country, the United States, being increasingly stretched militarily and hence needing the help of countries, like India, to shoulder the burden of regional security.

So far so unexceptionable (this being a theme many international relations theorists have expounded over the years). But it is Subrahmanyam’s follow-on premise that is problematic and which is this: As there is a potential rival, China, for the US to contend with, it is in American interest to help India become a weighty power to counter-balance China in Asia. The fact that there is no instance in history of an extant great power helping a lesser state become a great power, did not deter Subrahmanyam. His arguments on behalf of the nuclear deal was based on a questionable belief that India can play a system ‘balancer’ but without possessing the necessary strategic military wherewithal of consequential thermonuclear warheaded Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile forces. Great Britain’s ‘continental strategy’ of the 18th and 19th centuries relied on the decisive military force of that time, the Royal Navy, to balance the continental powers. Able to control the European littoral, it could at any time blockade an adversary country and stage uncontested landings of armies led by a Marlborough or a Wellington on the side of the weaker state or alliance of states. An India that has been rendered incapable of ever achieving even ‘notional parity’ with China – a second tier nuclear weapon country – is unlikely to be able to countervail it. In the event, Subrahmanyam’s concept of ‘India as balancer’ seems to be one of those abstractions that in the real world amount to nothing.

 

Subrahmanyam’s case also hinged on his swallowing whole the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s essentially self-serving view that Washington needs to help India attain ‘major power’ status, which Subrahmanyam has hailed as a revolutionary turn in American thinking. Read in conjunction with the ongoing nonproliferation thrust of US policy that prevents the continuous modernization and augmentation of the Indian deterrent, this turns out to be nothing more than a measure to strengthen India’s conventional military in the hope that New Delhi can be persuaded to partake of President Bush’s ‘Global War On Terrorism’ and democracy-building missions requiring ‘boots on the ground’ which the US and its closest European allies are growingly unwilling to supply. So, this it turns out, is only a ruse to farm out the military low-end, dirty, work to India.

But an apparently gullible Subrahmanyam is convinced that help rendered India to become a ‘major power’ will come without strings attached. And he has resorted to citing distorted history to prove the Rice-thesis right. Take. For example, his view that Britain of the last fin de siecle ‘helped’ Japan towards great power status in a bid to neutralize the imperial expansionism of Czarist Russia in Asia. This is nonsense. The facts are that by the late 19th century Britain and Japan were nearly equal powers in the Far East – they had about equal warship tonnage in the Far Eastern waters – and had developed huge financial, industrial and political stakes in China and Korea. The two countries came by these possessions, because Japan successfully prosecuted a war against China in 1894-95 and Britain because of its penetration of that country as a result of the Opium War and the ‘open door’ policy of the 1870s, which permitted the US and several West European countries to exploit a weak and enervated China.

 

To protect these investments from being contested by militarily strong Russia and France is why in January 1902 Japan and Britain agreed on a naval alliance. It obligated the signatories to remain neutral if one or the other side went to war but to come to the assistance of the country attacked by France or Russia. The naval treaty from the Japanese perspective was a preventive measure that ensured the Royal Navy did not expediently side with the Czar’s Pacific Fleet based in Vladivostok, which the Japanese Admiralty had intended to crush and which the Japanese Imperial Navy accomplished in the 1905 Battle of the Tsushima Straits.

The other example Subrahmanyam repeatedly brought up was equally off the historical mark. He talked about US playing the ‘China card’ strategically to distract the Soviet Union in the Cold War and its help to Beijing to strengthen the Chinese economy by having it plug into the international economic system. In both instances, the necessary prior condition for cooperation between Japan and Britain in the first case and between the United States and China in the second case was that in these two cooperative dyads the countries involved were dealing with each other as near equals because of the existing deterrence between them.

Thus Britain was on par militarily and industrially with Japan, which after the Meiji restoration in 1867-68 had frenetically westernized itself and acquired a modern military, before re-discovering its nationalist roots in Confucianism and the Shinto religion. China, had firmed its Communist identity and by 1967 achieved long range nuclear missile deterrence vis-a-vis the United States and by conventional military means defeated the Soviet Union on the Ussuri River in 1969. In the event, Washington woke up to the heft that Beijing carried, and hence to the possibility of an informal Sino-American partnership discomfiting Moscow.

 

These two historical examples, in any case, have no relevance to the India-United States deal, considering India is nowhere near having an effective strategic deterrent against China, what to speak of the most powerful state, which alone will win it respect. After this analyst pointed out his flawed history (‘George’s Nuclear Durbar’, The Asian Age, 1 March 2006), Subrahmanyam and his media cohort stopped using these cases to buttress their case for the N-deal. The more troubling nature of the public championing by Indian analysts of this N-deal is that it aims to exactly realize the ‘intellectual barrier’ against India’s nuclear military advancement that Garwin had advocated be set up.

 

The only worthwhile lesson history teaches is that strength respects only strength, and that the political value of strategic military wherewithal – naval might in the 19th century-early 20th century and thermonuclearized ICBM forces in the nuclear age – is the decisive pivot for balancing interests. And it is the absence of this strategic wherewithal that conspicuously marks out India as a mere pretender to great power status. This is not because the Indian nuclear weapons and missile programmes cannot deliver on high yield thermonuclear weaponry and intercontinental ballistic missiles. But because the Indian government has deliberately disabled their capability by agreeing to this nuclear deal and thereby prevented them from doing so. The present set of Indian rulers, like their colonial-era counterparts, are verily the Calibans of a new age. They would rather be a cog in someone else’s machine, and work to make India into a part of some other country’s security architecture.

If the Manmohan Singh government were serious about making India a great power, it would articulate an Asia-girdling vision, an ‘Indian Monroe Doctrine’ for a start (which I had fleshed out as a more substantive version of Jawaharlal Nehru’s impracticable ‘Asian Monroe Doctrine’ idea, over twelve years ago in my book Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond) to encompass the entire Indian Ocean basin on the seaward side and the landmass stretching from the Caspian, Central Asia to the Vietnamese littoral on the South China Sea and to provide the geopolitical justification for sizable Indian nuclear and conventional military forces.

Had the Manmohan Singh government this kind of geopolitical vision, the Indian negotiating team could have reasonably insisted that the CTBT-type restrictions and an imminent FMCT would be acceptable (i) only after India had built up its WgPu holdings to the level of 75% of the mean of the estimated total fissile material stockpile figures for the US, China and Russia, and (ii) if the US, and by extension the other four NPT weapon states, agreed not to modernize or replace the current warheads/weapons in their inventories with new more innovative designs (see my ‘Why the nuclear deal is a disaster’, The Asian Age, 18 March 2006). The US would, of course, have rejected any such conditions. But it would have provided evidence to Washington that India cannot any more be trifled with.

 

But such a course of action would have required great power convictions on the part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which he does not have. He would rather, it seems, wallow in the comfortable nonsense of riding piggyback on America to get somewhere, except that somewhere is a dependency station. Alas, it is a denouement that conforms with New Delhi’s unwillingness to make the hard choices primarily because it does not see India as a great power on its merits but as a form of social entitlement, like some backward caste seeking to go up in the world on the basis of a quota. But because international politics is not an exercise in social consciousness raising or charity, the chances of India’s becoming a great power on the cheap are nil. This is ironical because in the early years of the 21st century India has growingly the resources. If only the Indian government had the confidence to articulate a rising nation’s sense of itself, a matching grand strategic vision and, most crucially, the will to realize it.