The bomb and the bombast

Our nuclear power plants are inefficient, super-expensive and are behind targets on most parameters. The excuse, always, is sanctions and denial of technology. That must end now.

A nuclear power plant | Representational image | Pixabay

Just a couple of weeks after Pokharan II and Chagai, I got into an entirely avoidable argument with a junior, but high-profile BJP minister at a private dinner in Mumbai. The argument was not so much over whether India’s nuke tests were a good thing or bad. It was more on the kind of illiterate jingoism the BJP was unleashing following the tests. The stupidest – and the scariest – of all was the plan of its younger cadres to carry the “holy”, but probably radio-active, sands from the Pokharan site all over the country in a kind of victory parade.

There was irresponsible talk on both sides of the border on whose bomb was bigger, more destructive or more indigenous. The discourse on both sides was scary. Only one as thick-skinned as my friend Jugnu Sethi of Pakistan’s Friday Times could still find it funny: “What are we all getting so paranoid about?” she asked, “India and Pakistan are only arguing over whose ‘bum’ is bigger”.

My worry, and that of many others who were not opposed to the idea of testing, forcing Pakistan to test and therefore ending the dangerous nuclear ambiguity in the subcontinent was precisely this. How lightly did public opinion on both sides seem to take the nukes.

That’s why the argument at that dinner. I made the mistake of telling the minister that nuclear jingoism was dangerous. That testing was a high political and strategic gambit and was best left at that. But his patriotism, by now also laced with oodles of Black Label spirituality, he was not willing to listen. “Learn to be proud,” he said. The idea was to convey a message to America. And what was the message? “That Pakistan we can sort out en passant. These nukes were meant for America… If you misbehave, we will put one in New York”, he said, leaving one only to ask how he expected to get it there. By DHL? Or good old Air India?

The voluble minister, I believe, was later restrained from making any more “nuclear” statements as Jaswant Singh, and later Brajesh Mishra picked up the thread of cleaning up the political and diplomatic fallout. But I am reminded of the story with the revival of an equally ludicrous series of arguments on the nuclear issue. The Manmohan Singh-George Bush joint statement is being seen as a sellout by some (the BJP) and a hasty concession to American power by others (the Left). Both are wrong. They make the mistake of seeing the nuclear issue through their own prisms: the BJP’s is straightforward partisan politics, and the Left is still fighting the Cold War and, to be fair to them, fighting on gamely to achieve the objective of a multipolar world so touchingly enshrined in the Holy CMP.

There are obvious pitfalls in seeing the nuclear issue either as an extension of larger national politics or ideology. This writer has often enough questioned the wisdom of running a foreign and security policy by consensus. It’s been my argument that foreign policy should be made as much a part of the national political debate as economics. But the nuclear issue has to be handled differently simply because its long-term implications necessitate continuity. It is for this reason that beginning with Nehru, prime ministers in India have kept the atomic energy department with themselves, passing on the confidences and the family silver only to the successor.

With Pokharan, the Vajpayee government made a bold departure from the old consensus of developing nuclear weapons, but keeping an ambiguous public posture. It was an idea whose time had come, because of Pakistan’s growing nuclear and missile capability and the rising pressures over CTBT, NPT and FMCT, then led by a viciously anti-proliferationist Clinton Administration. The idea of ending India’s ambiguity and thereby forcing Pakistan to come out in the open was an audacious one. It would force the US, and the rest of the world to accept India as a responsible nuclear power in the long run, and it would rob them of the luxury of any deniability on Pakistan’s weapons.

If you read Strobe Talbott’s accounts of his subsequent negotiations with Jaswant Singh in Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb, it is evident that the Vajpayee government’s game plan was to counter the sanction-mindset, chip away at restrictions and ultimately get a larger P-5 acceptance of India as a responsible nuclear power with whom it was better to engage rather than blackball. Pakistan, in contrast, was to be seen as aggressive, unstable and irresponsible. If Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra make a close reading of the latest joint statement, it won’t look so different from what they themselves had set out to achieve. After all, they were the ones who made a unilateral commitment not just on no-first use, but also on no-further testing, much to the consternation of nuclear hawks.

But in these highly polarised times, their reaction, if disappointing, is understandable. What is more intriguing is the reaction of the political and liberal Left who have always maintained a principled opposition to nuclear brinkmanship. They were bitterly critical of Pokharan and the jingoism that followed it. Many of them questioned the very idea of not merely nuclear weapons but even nuclear energy. Our nuclear reactors were seen to be a safety hazard, and, with much greater justification, the nuclear establishment was accused of being secretive and not accountable to Parliament or the courts. Now, before they dismiss this joint statement as an abandoning of India’s nuclear scientists’ interests, they must think where all the shadowy secretiveness they complained about in the past came from. It mainly came from the fact that in a situation where nobody knew what was military and what was civil, secrecy served everybody’s purpose.

I am tempted here to share a story on the nuclear establishment I had salted away for my memoirs. An IAS officer friend of mine was once posted to the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). His job, he told me, was to basically draft answers to Parliament questions. And the then DAE chairman’s advice to him was, never lie in response to a Parliament question. But when they ask you your name, tell them your date of birth. Separation of military facilities and installations will end all that, enforcing greater accountability from both.

At another level, for too long has our nuclear establishment earned national adulation by passing off reverse engineering as cutting edge research. Our nuclear power plants are inefficient, super-expensive, take too long to build and are behind targets on most parameters. The excuse, always, is sanctions and denial of technology. That must end now.

And finally, the most ludicrous argument of all: that this would limit the size of our arsenal. Do we want to continue with the notion of stealing from civilian reactors to power the nukes? If so, why did we end nuclear ambiguity in the first place? Also, which threat are we preparing our nukes for? This joint statement will not prevent you from having an arsenal much bigger and better than Pakistan. China, if you read the gushy para on it in the Holy CMP, is our Permanent Natural Ally for all times to come. So what do you need a limitless stockpile for? It is one thing to fight America with words and rhetoric. It is quite another to think of nuclear defiance as a warped statement of sovereignty, unless you are like the BJP junior minister of the summer of 1998 who, propelled by Black Label, dreamt of “putting one in New York,” if the Yanks did not behave!