South Asia and the Politics of Non-Proliferation

Abstract

National power is inherent in the system of independent states, and military force is inherent in national power. In influencing the rise, fall, and hierarchy of states, force is the decisive element in the structure of any given international system. Thus, military power will remain a prominent feature of international relations. There is a very real risk, however, that the pursuit of national security through a strategy of self-help will produce regional and international insecurity as a result of a process of competitive rivalry and the build-up of arms. Thus we have a paradox: international realities compel us to look to our own forces or risk becoming the victims of others'; but the unchecked proliferation of arms and weapons systems will degrade everyone's security.Arms control refers to efforts to constrain reciprocal threats from unchecked build-up of arms through formally negotiated agreements or tacit understandings on restraints on numbers, types, and deployments of weapon systems. Proliferation refers to the dispersion of weapons, capabilities, and technologies. Weapons can be sought for one or more of six reasons: deterring enemy attack, defending against attack, compelling the enemy to one's preferred course of action, leveraging adversary and great-power behaviour, status, and emulation. Specific causes of proliferation are many, diverse, and usually rooted in a local security complex. On the supply side, a major emerging proliferation challenge is the globalization of the arms industry, the flooding of the global arms market, and a resulting loosening of supplier constraints.The nuclear arms control agenda has three inter-linked components: non-proliferation, arms control (for example de-alerting and de-mating), and disarmament (the partial, limited, or total abolition of nuclear weapons). Some states focus solely on disarmament as the most urgent task in order to camouflage their own proliferation agendas. Others focus on non-proliferation as the immediate and most urgent priority in order to evade their responsibility for disarmament within a foreseeable time frame. Both invoke arms control as a refuge from calls for non-proliferation and disarmament and to obfuscate rather than clarify, let alone advance, the agenda. Both also seek to appropriate the mantle of the 'international community' to their respective though competing points of view. In fact, the closest and most substantial articulation of the point of view of the international community can be found in the 'Principles and Objectives for Non-Proliferation and Disarmament' adopted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review and Extension Conference in 1995.The barriers against the acquisition, spread, and use of nuclear weapons include legal conventions, norms, and the fact that they have not been used in over fifty years. Safeguards and export restraints do not amount to non-proliferation, which is essentially a political goal requiring political judgment on the part of a given government that, on balance, nuclear weapons do not serve its interests. Before the key problem states can be persuaded to move to a non-nuclear weapons status they have to be convinced that the balance of advantage lies with forswearing the nuclear option. This necessarily includes not just the national security calculus, but also the internal political constellation. In this article, I hold in abeyance strategic arguments in favour of or against the overt nuclear weapons status of India and Pakistan(f.1) and focus instead on the politics of the debate. For in the decision to weaponize, politics was always in command.OF NORMS AND REGIMESNorms, not deterrence, have anathematized the use of nuclear weapons as unacceptable, immoral, and possibly illegal under any circumstance - even for states that have assimilated them into military arsenals and integrated them into military commands and doctrines. There have been many occasions since 1945 when nuclear weapons could have been used without fear of retaliation but were not, even at the price of defeat on the battlefield (the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, for example). …