Danger of weapons slipping into terrorist hands

Anand K Sahay:

The American fear of nuclear terrorism first surfaced with the demise of the Soviet Union and spread rapidly across the Western universe. The Cold War was dead, but was another threat looming? The anxiety derived from the supposition that terrorists might successfully penetrate nuclear installations in some of the countries that emerged from the dispersal of the USSR. The scenario was scary enough but appeared distant to many, and worried chiefly Western circles. But the 9/11 attack on America was real enough. It helped to bring the fear home to the global community as a whole.

However, it is the recent revelation about Pakistani promiscuity in playing the nuclear black market that has served to dispel any lingering doubts that terrorists could indeed arm themselves with nuclear weapons. To turn a Marxian philosophical dictum on its head, now it is the irrational that looks real.

President George W Bush’s profession of faith in General Pervez Musharraf’s willingness and capacity to fight terrorism notwithstanding, the spectre of nuclear hooliganism does not go away. Pakistani acknowledgment that sections of the Islamabad establishment was playing ducks and drakes with dangerous knowledge has appropriately led to questions that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) has shown itself to be of no avail. Worse, there is panic in some quarters that the NPT is dead. The alarm, frankly, is unrealistic.

The cold reality is that so long as the bulk of the nuclear weapons and weapons-making materials, legally speaking, remain with a coterie of countries, and there is a persistent desire to keep things that way, the NPT will not be permitted to expire. It may indeed be tightened to confer even greater advantage on the NPT oligopolists and to deepen the exclusion of the nuclear have-nots even from nuclear technology for civilian purposes with the aid of new provisions. The ensuing discontent may, however, facilitate the ambitions of ‘non-state actors’, such as the terrorists, with the help of irresponsible elements in certain countries that can make the bomb or possess its basic ingredients.

Unless the nuclear restraint regime changes its hide-bound character, and moves in a democratic direction to harness the willing compliance of those who care for world peace and who are eager to end the menace of nuclear terrorism, that menace will not go away.

The NPT was perhaps the most unequal in history; in practice it allowed the ‘original five’ that first made the atom bomb (the US, USSR/Russia, Britain, France and China) to go on making and refining nuclear weapons but strictly prohibited all others, at least in theory.

Not being a signatory to it on account of its discriminatory character, India owed the NPT nothing. But it faced the full brunt of condemnation and retaliation, especially from the US-led Western bloc, though in all respects it was scrupulous to observe the NPT-dictated restraints, especially concerning export controls of fissile materials and bomb-making technology, before and after it declared its weapons-making capability.

But Pakistan, another non-signatory and long-standing friend of the US, made the bomb by creating an international nuclear blackmarket and stealing designs and materials from Europe, and with egregious Chinese help. It was permitted by the NPT’s overlords to get away lightly. The bitter truth is that the NPT looks like unravelling because its worst abuses, including remaining silent witnesses to its own throttling, came from the sanctimonious ‘Club of Five’. The IAEA, UN’s nuclear watch-dog, has made much of this explicit. The US, from the beginning, knew almost everything about Islamabad’s stealth but moved only when it feared the Pakistani stuff was reaching “the axis of evil”, countries whose political inclinations and orientation it did not approve of.

The problem for non-proliferation, clearly, was not the NPT but its one-eyed enforcement. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s current inventory of 30,000 nukes and enough fissile material to make 240,000 more is with the US and Russia. This makes their responsibility in guarding against nuclear spread all the more onerous.

Indeed, the danger of weapons and materials slipping into terrorist hands may well be greater from the remaining five per cent of the inventory stockists, and possible suppliers of bomb-making materials and components. This includes not only UK, France and China, but also India, Pakistan, Israel (known to have the bomb), besides the latest, self-confessed interloper North Korea. Iran and Libya, Pakistan’s beneficiaries, are also close to being there.

Such being the magnitude of the problem, the existing NPT order will have to be made flexible enough to induce the participation of all of these countries in a regime that denies potential nuclear terrorists any opportunity. Terrorist-proofing may otherwise remain a pie in the sky. The credibility of such a regime will improve if America drops its plans for research on bunker-busters and mini-nukes toward which the US Senate approved $ 27.3 billion only last September. But the most effective security from nuclear weapons will only come when nuclear weapons are made unlawful and work begun to eliminate them.

Sahay, a political analyst, writes for THT from New Delhi