Blame the U.S. For India's Nukes
By MICHAEL LEDEEN
WALL STREET JOURNAL 5/15/98

President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright should not punish India for its nuclear tests. U.S. policy toward China made it all but inevitable that the Indians would modernize their atomic arsenal. If the "guilty" parties must be punished, the beatings should start at the White House and continue at the State and Commerce Departments. Much of the technology that enabled India stealthily to develop bigger and better nuclear weapons came from America, thanks to an abrupt change in government policy in 1995.

From his first days in office, Mr. Clinton has made it possible for China to buy a vast range of militarily useful technology that will enable it to field a modern army in the foreseeable future. Beijing has purchased everything from advanced machine tools (for building missiles, bombers and fighter planes) to supercomputers, including special software that simulates nuclear tests and thereby allows China to modernize its nuclear arsenal without setting off real bombs. So anyone worried about the extent and sophistication of Chinese nuclear forces will henceforth have to rely on guesswork or extraordinary intelligence operations.

The U.S. seems quite happy to contribute to Chinese military power. Recent news stories have documented the Clinton administration's nonchalance at the discovery that American corporations indirectly helped China's military to develop more-reliable missiles, without obtaining the government approval such assistance required.

Nuclear Fungibility

No serious neighbor could fail to respond in kind to the Chinese military buildup. New Delhi took care to spell out its intentions in advance by formally branding China its greatest potential enemy. The Indian explosions were thus the most explicit possible message to Beijing: We too have modern nuclear weapons, and don't think you will be able to intimidate us militarily. The Indians showed the Chinese that they have a variety of nuclear weapons, and, by implication, a substantial stockpile (any country willing to explode five bombs must have plenty to spare).

India's nuclear capacity benefited enormously from the Clinton administration's 1995 decision permitting India to purchase American nuclear technology for use in unsafeguarded facilities (those not subject to periodic inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency). Previous presidents had refused to authorize such sales except in rare emergencies, because nuclear technology is fungible. Any country interested in secretly building nuclear weapons would ask for technology for peaceful purposes and divert it to its military facilities. Devices for "environmental" purposes could also be used to help hide clandestine weapons programs from international inspectors and from U.S. detection systems.

Nonetheless, claiming concern for the environment and human safety, the administration authorized the sale of a vast range of technology to unsafeguarded Indian sites--despite warnings from some Pentagon officials that the Indians were likely to use them for their military program. We sold them supercomputers and advanced CAD/CAM software that they could use for weapons design. We sold them advanced control-room technology and devices for artificial-intelligence-based monitoring, along with robotics technology that could be used to handle dangerous materials.

The presumed principal site of the Indian nuclear weapons program is the Bhabha Atomic Research Center at Trombay, just north of Bombay. It contains two research reactors and a plutonium extraction plant, none of which are subject to IAEA inspection. But Bhabha is only one of an impressive array of similar facilities, all recipients of American technology, and none under IAEA surveillance. There are unsafeguarded facilities capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium across the country. It would be a serious challenge to monitor such a large program even if the facilities were safeguarded; it would require an extraordinarily effective operation to spy on all these unsafeguarded sites.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been rightly criticized for its failure to detect India's detonation plans in advance. But far graver are the policy decisions that made the explosions possible by enhancing India's nuclear arsenal. The CIA's failure stems from a lack of human intelligence--a manpower problem that can be remedied over time--while the policy catastrophe bespeaks a lack of understanding of international politics. It was naive to think that India, which exploded its first nuclear device in 1974, wouldn't exploit our technology to strengthen its nuclear program. If the administration had been serious about nonproliferation, it would have insisted that the U.S. be permitted to inspect all the sites that received American technology. Failing that, the shipments should have been vetoed.

Washington had warned the Indians that tough sanctions would follow any nuclear explosions. New Delhi was not cowed. Perhaps India had noticed that many times during Mr. Clinton's presidency various countries have gotten away with ignoring U.S. warnings. Saddam Hussein was not scared by warnings of harsh reprisals if he invaded northern Iraq two summers ago or if he threw American inspectors out of the country; North Korea has walked out of the nuclear deal with the U.S.; Israel is balking at Mr. Clinton's insistence on further land for Yasser Arafat's regime; the Europeans and the Russians are bullying us into retreating from our insistence on sanctions against Iraq, Iran and Cuba. In each case, we talked tough and warned other nations not to call our bluff. They called it every time, and we folded.

It is therefore unlikely that we will have any long-term success in convincing Pakistan to refrain from matching India's demonstration of nuclear power. The precedent is not promising: We failed to take action when China provided Pakistan with military assistance, even when American technology was involved. And one must wonder how long Japan can afford to stay out of the mounting Asian militarization. The Japanese are clearheaded enough to recognize a security threat when they see one.

The Indians' brash challenge may yet serve a useful purpose if it concentrates our minds on the real problems we face. We cannot blithely arm the world's most populous nation without causing tremors throughout the globe. We cannot assume that nations will act in accordance with the highest moral principles. History shows that war, and the preparation for war, is the most common human activity. If we truly want peace, we must deprive potential enemies of powerful weapons.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, we have heard Mr. Clinton and his friends tell us that the economy is the central fact of life, as if wealth were a substitute for might. Machiavelli scorned such nonsense. "Men, steel, money and bread are the sinews of war," he wrote, "but of these four, the first two are more important, because men and steel find gold and bread, but bread and gold do not find men and steel."

What Wars Are Made Of

The situation in Asia has what real wars are made of: social and economic malaise combined with mounting military power. Our own blunders have made matters considerably worse than they might have been. American supercomputers and software have given both India and China the ability to build new, more lethal nuclear weapons without conducting tests we can monitor, while we do not have the spies necessary to ferret out the truth on the ground.

The world's two most populous nations are arming themselves with the best weapons American technology can design. Our own ability to influence events has been gravely weakened. And we owe a large part of this mess to our own folly.