India and Nuclear Colonialism

[Guest guest]

India and Nuclear Colonialism By Richard Butler

>From Iraq to the Kashmir, the threat posed by the nuclear powder keg

looms once again. In this excerpt from former UNSCOM executive

chairman Richard Butler's new book, Fatal Choice, a conversation in

an Indian airport helps to illuminate the reasoning behind the spread

of nuclear weapons. As the former chief inspector of Iraq's weapons

of mass destruction discovers, non-proliferation can be interpreted

as Western aggression — at least in certain parts of the world.

 

Three years ago, I took a rest stop at Bombay, now according to the

canons of Hindu nationalism renamed Mumbai. I was en route to New

York, via Australia, from talks in Baghdad, held in my capacity as

chairman of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq.

 

Indulging in India

 

I had chosen to stop in India because of my long engagement with and

affection for Indian culture. I would have only one day, but I had

thought that even a brief contact with the architecture, sounds,

colors and food of India would refresh my enduring affair with one of

the greatest of human cultures. The talks in Baghdad had been hostile

and tense. This heightened my expectations of my one day of

indulgence in India.

 

 

Our history deserves better than a resignation to nuclear weapons or

an acceptance that we are compelled by them to a danse macabre.

 

 

 

As I waited for my bag at the luggage carousel in the airport, I

already felt the excitement of arrival. I was there, at last, in

India, after an absence of some five years. My reverie was broken by

a voice off to one side,"You are that wretched Butler."

 

I looked around and saw an Indian man approaching me, pointing at me

angrily. He was well dressed, 40-something, and apparently sober. My

immediate thought was that I was about to get the "why are you

persecuting the poor Iraqis" speech, once again. It proved to be not

as simple as that.

 

"Why are you so hateful of India," he demanded. I asked him what he

had in mind and got my answer — the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban

Treaty.

 

Enemies in far off lands

 

Almost two years earlier, as Australian ambassador to the United

Nations, in New York, I had tabled the treaty text in the General

Assembly, where it had been adopted overwhelmingly.

 

Discover more:

• Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

• United Nations

• Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

 

 

This had defeated India's earlier blockage of the treaty in Geneva

and had involved several very public clashes between me and senior

Indian officials. These actions had been widely publicized in India,

including newspaper amid television pictures of me as the main

antagonist of India.

 

I tried to explain to the man that I was not an enemy of India, quite

the opposite. That was why I was in Mumbai, on my own time, with no

official duties.

 

Nuclear double-standard

 

He then explained to me, in terms as clear as any professional

negotiator, that it was deeply wrong that the United States, for

example, could insist that nuclear weapons were essential to the

preservation of its security but refuse to allow the same to India.

 

 

"Nuclear colonialism will not stand. India's security is as important

as America's."

 

 

"Are we not threatened?" he asked. "We have a long border with China.

It has nuclear weapons. It has attacked India in the past. It has

occupied Tibet. Why should we not be able to defend ourselves against

China?"

 

I told him that the test ban treaty was a part of measures to control

and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons, something I had

understood all Indian leaders since Mahatma Gandhi had supported. It

was not directed against India, as such.

 

Fighting against nuclear colonialism

 

He said he was a shopkeeper, selling textiles and fine saris. The

world he saw from his store front had indelible features, including

historic inequity between sovereign states. The latest form of this

was expressed in ownership of nuclear weapons.

 

It was, of course, a touch fatuous to think that this airport

argument would lead anywhere or solve anything. Indeed, my bag had by

then arrived, and I wanted to be on my way into the city.

 

"I will not be detaining you any further. I am not a ruffian. But you

must know that this nuclear colonialism will not stand. India's

security is as important as America's. We fought for our independence

from the British just as America did. We will defend it."

 

Praise for non-nuclear states

 

However, a crucial example exists in the 40-some countries that could

make nuclear weapons but have decided not to do so and have promised

never to do so under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). One

country, South Africa, made nuclear weapons but later disassembled

and destroyed them. South Africa is now a non-nuclear-weapon state

under the NPT. It clearly knows how to make nuclear weapons — it made

them. It has committed itself never to do so again.

 

 

The test ban treaty is a measure to control and eventually eliminate

nuclear weapons, something I had understood Indian leaders supported.

 

 

The assertion that nuclear weapons are a permanent, ubiquitous

feature of human life is an opinion, not a fact. To represent it as

the latter is deeply misleading. All that can be said, as a matter of

fact, is that they have existed for 56 years. It is also a fact that

5 of the 8 countries that possess them have formally declared that it

is their policy to eliminate them. The other three are ambiguous on

the issue.

 

What is most shocking about the various arguments that conclude that

nuclear weapons are a given, embedded in the very nature of things,

is that these weapons are the singular human invention capable of

destroying the earth and all that lives on it. Our history deserves

better than a resignation to them or an acceptance that we are

compelled by nuclear weapons to a danse macabre.

 

March 1, 2002

Adapted from "Fatal Choice" by Richard Butler.

2001 by Richard Butler.

Used by permission of Westview Press