Containing Shiva? India, non-proliferation, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

Abstract

This article examines the Indian nuclear tests of May 1998 and accounts for the events by locating them at the centre of a dynamic interaction between domestic and international change. Since the late 1980s, a change in Indian domestic opinion towards the utility of nuclear weapons occurred against a serious hiatus in the emergent international regime established to prevent horizontal nuclear proliferation. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their assertion of a more realist version of power, premised on the symbolic power of nuclear weapons, made it vital for India to claim the right for a limited nuclear deterrence before international opinion hardened around US President Bill Clinton's sponsored Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Though the BJP lay claim to previously established Indian critiques of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the CTBT, they sought to take advantage of the deliberate hypocrisy between nuclear arms control and arms reduction in a way distinct from both Congress and former United Front governments. They sought not to further disarmament, but to create the context in which they could weaponise with impunity. The article believes that the only way the BJP's growing affinity with nuclear weapons can be undermined is for the current nuclear weapon states to, ironically, take seriously earlier Indian thinking on the need to address the global elimination of nuclear weapons.