Stagecraft and Statecraft: WMD

India, a decade after gatecrashing the nuclear club

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:58:59 GMT

Up, up and frittered away

Brahma Chellaney

May 08, 2008

Hindustan Times

As the country observes this Sunday the 10th anniversary of the nuclear tests that enabled it to gatecrash the nuclear-weapons club, India stands out as a reluctant and tentative nuclear power, still chanting the disarmament mantra while conspicuously lacking even a barely minimal deterrent capability against China. Given that the 1998 tests' anniversary also coincides with the 34th anniversary of Pokhran I, it is important to remember that no country has struggled longer to build a minimal deterrent or paid heavier international costs for its nuclear programme than India.

The history of India’s nuclear explosive programme is actually a record of how it helped mould multilateral technology controls. The 1974 detonation impelled the secret formation of the London suppliers’ club, the reshaping of the non-proliferation regime, and export bans on dual-use items. The test helped remake US policy, spurring major reforms in export policy, the passage of the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, the attachment of non-proliferation conditions to foreign assistance, and the emergence of the sanctions approach. India’s space programme helped give birth to the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Had India done a test in the mid-1960s when it acquired the nuclear explosive capability, it would have beaten the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) trap. Had Indira Gandhi pressed ahead with weaponisation after Pokhran I, India would not have faced a rising tide of technology sanctions. Had Atal Bihari Vajpayee dangled a test moratorium as a diplomatic carrot post-Pokhran II, instead of gifting it away gratuitously, the US would have hesitated to slap an array of new sanctions on India. And had Manmohan Singh sought to plug the yawning gaps in capability, instead of pushing a divisive deal with the US that offers dubious energy benefits to insidiously neuter India’s deterrent, a more-confident New Delhi today would not have had to propitiate China or any other power.

India has always been let down by its leaders. The more India got hit with technology controls, the more it sank into its proverbial indecision, instead of doggedly pressing ahead. Almost a quarter century passed between Pokhran I and II, as a stock-still India masochistically put up with punitive actions. A decade after Pokhran II, the present leadership is more interested in deal-making than deterrent-building. Exactly 25 years after the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) was launched, New Delhi has announced its mysterious closure — without a single Beijing-reachable missile in deployment, and even as Pakistan has conducted countless missile tests since last year.

While China ploughs 28 per cent of its mammoth, rapidly growing military spending into defence R&D, geared to modernising its deterrent, India’s total annual budget outlays for the nuclear deterrent make up less than one-tenth of the just-announced $11 billion quarterly profit of one US company, Exxon-Mobil. Yet, India does not shy away from squandering several billion dollars annually in importing questionable conventional weapons. Consider some recent examples.

The Indian Air Force barely inducts the first batch of the British Hawk jet trainer — an obsolescent system in which India invested $1.8 billion ostensibly to help minimise crashes — and a Hawk crashes. No sooner the US had sold India a 1971 vintage amphibious transport ship junked by its navy than a gas leak kills an Indian officer and five sailors on board. The Defence Minister now discloses, nine months after the delivery date has passed, that Russia wants $1.2 billion more and another three years to deliver a refurbished Soviet-era aircraft carrier that India had agreed to buy for $1.5 billion in early 2004, although it had been rusting since a mid-1990s boiler-room explosion.

Is India seeking to build a first-rate military with strategic reach and an independent deterrent, or a military that will remain irredeemably dependent on imports and serve as a money-spinning dumping ground for antiquated and junked weapons? The defence of India is becoming an unending scandal just when new threats are emerging and chinks in the Indian armour are obvious. Even CAG indictments make little difference.

In peacetime, China is stepping up military pressure along the Himalayas, intimidating India through intermittent cyberwarfare, and warning of another 1962-style invasion through one of its State-run institutes, which in a Mandarin commentary posted on http://www.chinaiiss.org/ has cautioned an “arrogant India” not “to be evil” or else Chinese forces in war “will not pull back 30 kilometres” like in 1962. If China actually sets out to “teach India a lesson”, as it did in 1962 by its own admission, to whom will New Delhi turn? In 1962, despite Jawaharlal Nehru’s two frantic letters to John F. Kennedy, US arms arrived after the Chinese aggression had ceased and a weakened India had been made to agree to open Kashmir talks with Pakistan.

Today, instead of investing in the rapid development of a credible and comprehensive deterrent, New Delhi acts peculiarly. In an action that ominously harks back to the 1991-95 period when Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister starved the nuclear programme of necessary funds for expansion, the government’s just-passed 2008-09 Budget slashes the Department of Atomic Energy’s funding by $529 million. No explanation has been offered to the nation.

Rather than aim for a technological leap through a crash ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) programme, India remains stuck in the IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile) arena, where its frog-like paces have taken it — nearly two decades after the first Agni test — to Agni-III, a non-strategic missile in deterrence argot. Instead of securing India’s interests on planet Earth, the government has embarked on a $3.4 billion lunar dream, preparing excitedly to launch the first lunar orbiter. And although current international estimates of India’s weapons-grade fissile material stockpile put its quantity just marginally higher than Pakistan’s, the government has agreed to voluntarily shut down by 2010 one of the country’s two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors, once the deal with the US goes through. Yet, pulling the wool over public eyes, it says “the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme”.

No nation can be a major power without three attributes: (i) a high level of autonomous and innovative technological capability; (ii) a capacity to meet basic defence needs indigenously; and (iii) a capability to project power far beyond its borders, especially through intercontinental-range weaponry. With its strategic vision deficit compounded by a leadership deficit, India’s deficiencies in all the three areas are no secret.

By disproving the prophets of doom and launching the country on a rising trajectory, Pokhran II was supposed to lift India from its subaltern mindset and help focus its energies on capability-building. Critics like Manmohan Singh had warned the tests would seriously impair the economy. But India’s foreign exchange reserves multiplied five times in seven years and its GDP growth accelerated sharply. Who looked at India as a rising power before 1998? Pokhran II thus was a watershed.

A decade later, however, India doesn’t have much to celebrate. Nuclear diffidence continues to hold it down. It still doesn’t have minimal, let alone, credible deterrence. Its military asymmetry with China has grown to the extent that many in its policymaking community seem to be losing faith in the country’s ability to defend itself with its own means. Tellingly, the government has no major celebration planned for the decadal anniversary.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

When nonproliferation is palmed off as disarmament

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:40:21 GMT

Non-Proliferation as Disarmament

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 26, 2008

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/assets/graphics/proliferation-race

It is the very utility of nuclear weapons that serves as the main proliferation incentive. In the years ahead, it won’t be easy to stop more countries from pursuing nuclear-weapons ambitions if the present nuclear-armed states do not begin to denuke.

Yet, nuclear weapons, as the last U.S. posture review in 2002 stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties.” The growing attraction of missiles — which are much cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than manned bomber aircraft — flows from the fact that the attacking nation does not have to bring its forces in harm’s way.

Even as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorism have emerged as the two most pressing issues in international relations, the global strategic environment today is more competitive than ever, with technological advances producing new destructive capacities.

It is against this background that one should examine a joint U.S.-Russia proposal to globalize their 1987 Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (the so-called INF Treaty). That proposal raises at least three basic questions:

■ The first issue is whether the U.S. and Russia are seeking to promote non-proliferation or disarmament through their interest in a global treaty outlawing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

■ The second question is whether such a proposal could actually act as a spur to the development of more deadly weapons by encouraging states to rely completely on long-range systems. Conversely, what is the military or technological logic to make strategic missiles preferable to intermediate-range missiles (IRBMs)?

■ The third question is whether this proposal is an earnest idea, given the new U.S.-Russian tensions over America’s missile-shield plans in Eastern Europe and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 10, 2007, statement that the INF Treaty no longer serves Russian interest. In fact, just four days after Mr. Putin’s statement, the Russian military’s chief of general staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, had warned that Moscow could pull out of the INF Treaty if the U.S. proceeded to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

If the INF Treaty does not mesh with Russian interests today, can Moscow seriously be seeking to globalize it? The proposal was first put forward through a scrappy October 2007 U.S.-Russian joint statement in the UN General Assembly. Earlier this month, the proposal was discussed at a workshop at Reykjavik, Iceland.

Let us begin with the first question. With disarmament off the international radar screen, the focus of the major powers increasingly has been on more stringent non-proliferation. Too often, we are seeing non-proliferation proposals being speciously packaged as disarmament.

Historically, technological progress has created the spur to eliminate by bilateral or multilateral treaty a type or class of weapons overtaken by newer discoveries. The Chemical Weapons Convention, for example, became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD.

During the Cold War era, the unfettered arms racing, with its action-reaction cycle, led to the build-up of such surplus armaments that many of the weapons in national stockpiles became obsolescent or redundant. That encouraged arms-control efforts from the 1970s.

The INF Treaty was the product of such efforts to slash destabilizing surpluses by eliminating a class of weapons that threatened peace in Europe. Signed during the height of the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the INF Treaty later created misgivings in Moscow, where some saw it as slanted in America’s favour, both in terms of what it did not eliminate on the U.S. side, and the manner in which the American single-warhead Pershing II system got counted as equivalent to every multiple-warhead RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20) Soviet missile. To be sure, this treaty contained pioneering on-site inspection provisions.

Tellingly, the INF Treaty was intended not to disturb the most-sophisticated weapon systems held by the two major powers, including long-range missiles and sea- and submarine-launched systems. A globalized INF Treaty, however, would mean decapitation of the nuclear deterrent of India or Israel because neither at present has sophisticated missile assets beyond ground-launched intermediate-range missiles.

Today, the U.S. and Russian interest in working together to stop the proliferation of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles is understandable, given the potentially adverse consequences of such proliferation for their strategic interests. The spread of missile technology impinges on the capabilities of all the five ICBM-armed major powers (the Permanent Five) to police high seas or to intervene without incurring significant political or military costs.

Such proliferation concerns are reinforced by the fact that, unlike other weapon systems, missiles, especially cruise missiles, are difficult to defend against. The progressive tightening of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) controls and the inclusion of civilian space and aerospace technologies within their clasp have only made it more difficult to build international consensus against the proliferation of missiles. Now, all delivery systems (other than manned aircraft) are banned for export.

The MTCR-centred missile non-proliferation regime is actually more inequitable than the NPT due to an absence of any mutuality of obligations between the missile and non-missile states. The MTCR incorporates no commitment on the part of the missile powers — akin to NPT’s Article VI — to work toward complete missile disarmament. Indeed, it facilitates continued missile modernization, with the missile powers now increasingly focusing on advanced submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles.

There are also no international monitoring and verification measures to detect and forestall interstate transfers of missile systems and production technology, as underscored by China’s covert transfers of INF-class M-9s and M-11s to Pakistan and its continuing production assistance to that country.

The global INF Treaty proposal, in effect, aims to accomplish what the missile non-proliferation regime has failed to thwart. But given that the MTCR remains largely a cartel of supplier states outside the UN framework, the establishment of a globalized INF Treaty before the advent of a global missile non-proliferation regime is like putting the cart before the horse.

Actually, greater inequities in the international security order risk undermining both nuclear and missile non-proliferation. Concerns are already growing in the developing world that the existing technology controls, through their progressive tightening and extension, are throttling legitimate civilian activities by the “have-nots.”

These concerns centre on the manner key technologies and sensitive commerce are monopolized by a few. Civil nuclear trade today constitutes the world’s most politically-regulated and cartelized commerce, with a tiny syndicate of state-guided firms controlling all reactor, fuel and component sales — a monopoly sought to be only reinforced by the proposed creation of an international fuel bank.

At the same time, MTCR controls are constraining civilian space cooperation, even as space assets are becoming critical for meteorology, civil communications, navigation, mapping of underground water resources, national defence and reconnaissance. Current export controls on inertial navigation system (INS) technology for commercial aircraft are just one example of the extension of controls to civilian fields.

The MTCR guidelines require members-states to consider the “capabilities and objectives of the missile and space programmes of the recipient state” before agreeing to export any item or technology. Since an indigenous space-launch vehicle (SLV) arms its possessor with potential IRBM capability, the civilian space programme of a non-member seeking to independently place satellites in orbit automatically becomes a target of MTCR controls.

Against this background, caution should be exercised in promoting yet another layer of discrimination in the international security rules.

With nuclear disarmament looking a utopian idea, the world faces fundamental challenges relating to the preservation of norms on non-proliferation in an era marked by major shifts in global economic and political power. Such challenges are accentuated by the fact that surpluses from the past arms racing continue to be glaring. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America and Russia together still have nearly 25,000 nuclear weapons, including 6,000 long-range weapons on hair-trigger alert.

The growing proliferation and use of missiles does carry serious implications for regional and global security. But a global INF Treaty has to be weighed against some grim realities:

♦ First, missiles have come to symbolize power and coercion in international relations. They are useful not only to achieve military objectives, but also to realize aims through political intimidation and coercion.

♦ Second, there is no international legal structure to control missiles nor any taboo related to their use. While nuclear weapons have not been employed for more than 62 years, missiles have been used with increasing frequency. The role of cruise missiles is growing the fastest. The low-flying, slower cruise missiles, unlike the much-faster ballistic missiles, strike with a high degree of accuracy.

♦ Third, conflicts and interventions since the last decade are a vivid reminder of the high costs of being defenceless against a foe firing missiles and other high-tech, remotely-fired conventional weapons.

♦ Fourth, only nations without the capability to hit back are falling victim to missile strikes. In some cases, such states — as the history of the past two decades testifies — have been targeted as guinea pigs to test out new missile systems or to help correct flaws in existing ones.

♦ Fifth, there is only one effective way to deter missile terror and blackmail — a reliable missile-deterrent capability to ensure a calibrated but proportional response. Without the capacity to effectively strike back with missiles, a state would be vulnerable to the type of blackmail China mounted against Taiwan in 1996 or the kind of missile warfare that has been waged one-sidedly in other theatres.

♦ Sixth, a missile-defence shield is a far more expensive, complex and dubious scheme than a missile deterrent. Such a shield makes sense only for states that are already armed with a robust missile deterrent. Indeed, the institution of missile defences is likely to compel states to build more-sophisticated missiles that can foil defences of any kind, including by arming ballistic missiles with decoys and other countermeasures.

In that light, how realistic is the idea of globalizing the INF Treaty?

Firstly, a global INF Treaty would be a spur to the development of, and reliance on, intercontinental-range weaponry, even when a state’s security threats emanate from the immediate neighbourhood. What may be a proposal to preserve the technological superiority of a few may actually help speed up a challenge to such ascendancy.

ICBMs are already an idiom of big-power status, playing a primary role in power-projection strategies. But with a global INF Treaty, the attraction of ICBMs would multiply.

Secondly, a global INF Treaty proposal runs counter to Russian threats to renew interest in intermediate-range missile forces if the U.S. installs a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

Would a globalized INF Treaty, as an incentive, sell surplus U.S. and Russian ICBMs to other states in lieu of the shorter-range missiles they eliminate? Such a trade-off might be a good way both to bring down the “overkill” arsenals that the U.S. and Russia still maintain, and to promote international cooperation and peace on the based of shared capabilities.

In the absence of tangible, compensatory incentives, the seriousness of the proposal is open to question. India, for example, has modest deterrent capabilities against a multitude of missile threats that few other countries face. Why would it accept decapitation under a globalized INF Treaty?

To effectively tackle proliferation challenges, the world needs genuine disarmament. However, what a globalized INF Treaty would offer is the reinforcement of the present power and prerogatives of the P-5, armed as they are with intercontinental missile-strike capabilities and other power-projection assets, such as naval forces that patrol far from their shores, instruments of precision strike in the form of cruise missiles, and space-based information systems.

Those who cite hypothetical threats to justify continued WMD modernization should not be seen as seeking to disarm those that confront real threats. A central tenet of international law and the UN Charter is that it is the sovereign right of every nation to defend its security by appropriate means.

Today, it has become more difficult than ever to palm off non-proliferation as disarmament, or to label a cutback of surpluses as disarmament. What the world seeks today are concrete measures that would turn growing concerns about rearmament into new hopes for common security.

The Butterfly Chase: Rearmament, not disarmament, looms large

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:22:52 GMT

Stop Chasing Illusions

Pursuing nuclear disarmament is a good pastime for retired men.

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, March 11, 2008

Nearly a century after chemical arms were introduced in World War I and more than six decades following the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is at the threshold of new lethal and precision weapons, as underlined by the ongoing research on lasers, information weapons, space-based platforms, anti-satellite weapons and directed energy systems. Technological forces are now shaping geopolitics and power equations in a way unforeseen before in history.

We live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The global power structure reflects this reality. Only countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry are United Nations Security Council permanent members, while those seeking new permanent seats have regionally confined capabilities and thus are likely to stay condemned as mere aspirants. Japan, with one-tenth of the population, has a bigger economy than China, but the latter, because of its rising military prowess, gets more international respect.

The past century was the most momentous in history technologically, with innovations fostering not just rapid economic change, but bringing greater lethality to warfare. Consequently, the 20th century was the bloodiest. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missiles came to occupy a central military role. In the new century, the advance of technology and the absence of relevant safeguards or regimes evoke possible scenarios of deadly information and space warfare.

Such are the challenges from the accelerated weaponization of science that instead of disarmament, rearmament today looms large on the horizon, with the arms race being extended to outer space. Take, for example, America’s February 20 destruction of a crippled satellite by missile strike. Having criticized China’s January 2007 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test — the first ASAT kill by any power in more than two decades — the US set out to be the first to knock out a space-based asset from a mobile platform at sea, in an operation that resembled shooting down an ICBM, except that the target was larger and easier to destroy.

In a Cold War-reminiscent tone, outgoing President Vladimir Putin last month vowed that Russia will field new strategic weapons because “a new arms race has been unleashed in the world”. Alluding to the US pressing ahead with a missile shield in Eastern Europe and working on new warheads, Putin declared: “We didn’t start it … funnelling multibillions of dollars into developing weapon systems”. The same day, the Russian foreign minister raised the spectre of “hundreds of thousands of missile interceptors all over the world … in the foreseeable future”.

Disarmament fell off the global agenda long ago, with the UN’s Conference on Disarmament (CD) bereft of real work for nearly 12 years now. Yet, some in India continue to chase illusions. More flattering attention has been paid in India than anywhere else to two newspaper articles written by four senior ex-US officials, who in office were votaries of unbridled nuclear might but who now, while peddling a nukes-free world as a distant goal akin to an invisible mountaintop, suggest modest steps for US forces (like changing the antediluvian Cold War posture), only to advocate more rigorous non-proliferation.

India has a rich history of floating disarmament proposals that come back and haunt it as non-proliferation pacts. It was India that put forth the ideas of an NPT and CTBT. Add to that its record of not acting when the time is right. Had it tested when it acquired a nuclear-explosive capability in the mid-1960s, it would have beaten the NPT trap. Had Indira Gandhi pressed ahead and not baulked after the May 1974 test, India would not have faced a rising tide of technology sanctions for the next quarter-century. No nation perhaps has paid a heavier price for indecision than India.

India’s priority today should its security, given that it still does not have a minimal, let alone credible, nuclear deterrent against China, which is rapidly modernizing its arsenal. Yet India has placed its future deterrent capability at risk by concluding a nuclear deal with the US whose touted energy benefits are dubious and dispensable. It is also unable to control its proverbial itch to win brownie points, as shown by its recent submission of a seven-point proposal to the deadlocked CD, calling for, among other things, the outlawing of nukes. Such ardour is baffling, given that India imports virtually all its conventional weapons and is in no position to deter China conventionally in the long run.

Pursuing disarmament is like chasing butterflies — enjoyable for some retired old men but never-ending and beyond the pale. Nuclear weapons, as the last US posture review stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties”. Until such time as nukes remain the premier mass-destruction technology, disarmament will stay a mirage. The Chemical Weapons Convention became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD. Considering the rapid pace of technological change, a new class of surgical-strike WMD could emerge, even as nuclear weapons, with their unparalleled destructive capacity, stay at the centre of international power and force.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

A jarring note in fast-growing India-Australia ties

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:03:04 GMT

Rudd’s rudderless reversal

Australia’s new government needs to deal pragmatically with India after its ideologically driven policy reversal on uranium exports

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 1, 2008

The rapidly developing India-Australia relationship has been underscored by the various agreements reached in recent years — from a trade and economic framework to cooperation on defence and counterterrorism. India has emerged as Australia’s fastest-growing merchandise export market, even as an increasing number of Indian students enrol in Australian educational institutions (more than 65,000 last year alone).

Amid a growing convergence of strategic interests, however, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has struck a jarring note. Rudd, the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government, has made public his intent to cosy up to the world’s largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world’s largest democracy.

Before he was voted out of office last November after 11 years as prime minister, John Howard had agreed to sell uranium ore to both China and India. Rudd has no problem with uranium exports to Beijing but, in one of his first actions in office, scrapped Howard’s decision to sell yellowcake to New Delhi, although such transfers (unlike to China) were to be covered by stringent international and bilateral safeguards.

Rudd’s reversal — egged on by the anti-uranium export lobby within his Labour Party — closes the door on India even if the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group carves out an exemption for India from its rules. Considering that Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and annually exports more than 10,000 metric tonnes of processed ore, the action undercuts India’s endeavour to prise open international civil nuclear trade. It thus represents a major setback to Indian diplomacy.

On some issues, Rudd has taken welcome steps — from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (an action that leaves the United States isolated as the only industrialized country not to have done so) to seeking to open a new chapter in Australia’s troubled relations with its indigenous, still-marginalized peoples by offering a national apology for past wrongs, albeit without addressing the issue of compensation (which led one newspaper writer to say it meant, “Blackfellas get the words, the whitefellas keep the money”).

On India, however, Rudd’s approach hasn’t been forward-looking. Indeed, his justification for disallowing uranium exports has been notably regressive. Consider the following:

■ Rudd has linked Australia’s U-turn on uranium exports to India’s non-membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although the NPT carries no prohibition on civil nuclear cooperation under safeguards with a state outside its fold.

While it is true the Labour Party had pledged to scrap uranium exports to India if voted to power, election rhetoric often gives way to sober judgement when in office. Given that the Labour’s hostility to exports was founded on a legally untenable argument — India’s staying out of the NPT — Rudd, as PM, ought to have reviewed that opposition in the context of Australia’s geopolitical interests.

Instead, driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard’s decision, but his government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if it has not read the NPT text. In the words of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, “The current government … will not authorize the export of uranium to a country which is not a party to the NPT.”

In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states. All it requires is safeguards application, which its Article III (3) stipulates shall not hamper “international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use of production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of this Article and the principle of safeguarding set forth in the Preamble of the Treaty.”

The NPT has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil cooperation with a non-signatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy” (Article IV) so long as safeguards are in place on all peaceful nuclear activity.

Any restriction on civil cooperation with a country like India is not in the NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of a US-led cartel, the NSG. The NSG has amended its rules more than once since it was secretly formed in 1974, and today its founder, America, has come full circle by conditionally proposing that the group exempt India from its no-military-facility rule intended for non-nuclear-weapons states.

■ The Rudd government has opened itself to accusations of hypocrisy by deciding not to sell Australian uranium but at the same time saying it could back an NSG exemption that would allow other suppliers to export yellowcake to India.

Canberra has been at pains to clarify that its policy reversal does not mean it will oppose an NSG rule-change for India. On that issue, in Smith’s words, “the Australian government has not come to a concluded view on those matters. We will give consideration to those matters and will do that in an orderly way, having listened to the views of the Indian government … and the U.S. government.” Canberra, in fact, has hinted it won’t obstruct an NSG waiver.

However, in rushing to abandon uranium exports to India — that too on the pretext of wishing to defend the NPT — the Rudd government made no similar effort to go through “an orderly way” and solicit the views of others.

More significantly, how can Canberra justify its policy reversal and yet hold out the promise of backing an NSG waiver? Strange as it seems, Canberra won’t export uranium to India but may end up backing an NSG exemption that would encourage other potential suppliers to do business with New Delhi and “weaken” Rudd’s much-loved NPT.

■ While emphasizing an internationalist approach in foreign policy, Rudd has sought to plough a lonely furrow on India.

In promoting Australia’s greater participation in multilateral institutions and agreements, Rudd’s foreign-policy catchwords have been inclusion and internationalism. He moved quickly to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and announce the withdrawal of Australia’s 550 combat troops in Iraq by mid-2008.

Yet the policy reversal on India stresses exclusion and embargo as the key words. Worse, it puts Australia in the unenviable position of having taken the lead to isolate a rising India at a time when all other powers are courting New Delhi.

The Rudd government’s justification, inopportunely, comes out as a red herring to not reconcile with India’s decade-old status as a nuclear-armed state. Rudd sees no contradiction in keeping Australia ensconced under American nuclear and conventional deterrence while refusing to accept India’s sovereign right to build nuclear security in a highly troubled neighbourhood without any breach of its legal commitments. In that sense, he unflatteringly presents himself in holier-than-thou colours.

Australia has derived important security and other benefits from its alliance with Washington, and Australian public opinion strongly supports the so-called Anzus pact. Pragmatic considerations have prompted Rudd, despite his party’s left-wing support base, to affirm the centrality of the alliance with the US and to keep the roughly 1,000 Australian troops in Afghanistan. He could have taken an equally practical view of India’s security dynamics.

■ Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook — stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use.

Howard sought to boost uranium exports, declaring in 2006 that Australia, with its abundant natural resources, “had the makings of an energy superpower” — a point highlighted by the fact that it already is the world’s largest coal exporter and is set to become the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. As Howard put it, “With close to 40 per cent of the world’s known low-cost uranium deposits, for Australia to bury its head in the sand on nuclear energy is akin to Saudi Arabia turning her back on global oil developments.” At present, uranium makes up two-fifths of Australia’s energy exports in thermal terms.

Before it decided to export yellowcake to India, the Howard government finalized its uranium deal with China through two accords in 2006 — one a civil nuclear cooperation agreement and the other setting out the transfer terms. The uranium deal with India would have involved similar accords but on far more stringent terms because New Delhi has pledged to accept a host of legally irrevocable obligations that Beijing will not consider, including permanent international inspections on all civilian nuclear facilities.

While in China the civilian and military nuclear programmes overlap, India has, under the nuclear deal with the US, announced a watertight segregation of its civil and military parts. For Washington, the deal indeed has been a means to try and build, in the words of Australian analyst Robert Ayson, “a de facto NPT around India,” with the Howard government conditioning exports to New Delhi’s implementation of the various elements of the Indo-US deal. By contrast, exports to China will carry “zero real controls,” as the Australian Financial Review put it.

Yet the Rudd government has reversed policy on India while displaying the same zealousness as its predecessor to sell uranium ore to China. Canberra has turned a blind eye to the fact that, in contrast to New Delhi’s squeaky-clean record in not proliferating nuclear technology to other states, Beijing for long has played proliferation as a strategic card, with US intelligence identifying it as the “most significant supplier” of items and technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Given that Beijing is rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal and maintaining an opaque nuclear posture, Howard and now Rudd have overlooked concerns that uranium exports are likely to result in the diversion of more resources for China’s nuclear-weapons programme. Rather than insist that the International Atomic Energy Agency verifiably ensure that Australian uranium is used for nuclear-power generation, not for weapons purposes, Canberra has merely gone by the peaceful-use promise of a country that stands out for its egregious WMD record.

This is manifest from the two accords — one titled, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Transfer of Nuclear Material,” and the other headlined, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy.”

The accords do not require Beijing to go beyond the largely-symbolic inspections it accepts under a “voluntary safeguards” agreement with the IAEA. The facilities under “voluntary safeguards” can be withdrawn from inspection at any time of Beijing’s choosing. Also, Australian uranium will first go to Chinese fuel-fabrication facilities, which remain outside IAEA safeguards. As Annex B of the transfer accord states, it is only after “conversion to uranium hexafluoride” that China will use Australian-origin material in designated plants that may be subject to token IAEA inspections.

The new Rudd-introduced duality in export policy unfortunately signals that Canberra is more concerned about India’s rudimentary nuclear-weapons capability than with the growing sophistication and reach of China’s nuclear arsenal.

Indo-Australian cooperation can be elevated to close strategic bonds through forward-thinking pragmatism. Abstruse, retrograde ideology, as manifest in the uranium-exports reversal, can hardly aid Australian interests with a country that will remain a significant power in the Indian Ocean and a fast-growing market for Australian minerals and fuels. Rudd, with the China fixation he carries from his diplomatic career, needs to demonstrate a more-balanced appreciation of Australia’s long-term interests in an Asia that is unlikely to countenance any power’s hegemonic ambitions. Before long, he will have to deal pragmatically with the realities of Indian power without his NPT reflexes.

U.S. and the Pakistani Nuclear Ring: The One-Eyed Cop

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:41:39 GMT

REVIEW

The One-Eyed Cop

How dubious US decisions made Pakistan a nuclear rogue and a tangled web of combustible forces

Brahma Chellaney on Deception: Pakistan, The United States And The Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy by Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark (Penguin, 2007)

Outlook, November 19, 2007

The worst proliferation scandal in world history, involving the sale of nuclear secrets across frontiers, was in Pakistan —today the main sanctuary of transnational terrorists. This well-researched book is not so much about that nuclear-smuggling ring as about the scandal behind that scandal: “How 30 years of parochial and sometimes criminal policy of the US enabled Pakistan to betray the West, build a vast nuclear arsenal with US aid, and sell the technology to countries hostile to the West, while giving shelter to the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda”.

But what is left unsaid is that the brunt of politically expedient US policies toward Pakistan has been borne not by the West but by India, a major victim of terrorism which now finds itself on the frontline of nuclear dangers. As the book concludes, the US has yet to learn from its past mistakes. With Pakistan sinking rapidly, the US today is courting India as a potential ally. But it continues to sell India-directed weapons to Pakistan, making that state the world’s largest arms importer. Much of the nearly $11 billion in US aid to Pakistan since 2001 has been in military hardware and cash support for that country’s operating budget.

Levy and Scott-Clark shatter the 21st-century fable of an A.Q. Khan-run nuclear supermarket busted by US intelligence. The main actors in that ring were Pakistani military and intelligence, with Washington in the know. To shield the principal players, the entire blame was pinned, as part of a US deal with Gen Pervez Musharraf, on a group of "greedy" scientists led by Khan, and then these very men have been kept away from international investigators.

Long before Khan turned from a national icon to a national scapegoat, he had been protected by the Central Intelligence Agency. Washington turned a blind eye to the covert Pakistani bomb programme since the 1970s for the same reason that China aided Islamabad’s nuclear and missile ambitions — as a counterweight to India. The authors show how the CIA shielded Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986. The Dutch government did not take Khan into custody at the request of the CIA. “The U.S. was not interested in successful prosecutions that highlighted Pakistan’s duplicity”, they claim.

In more recent years, the US has helped whitewash Islamabad’s official complicity in the sale of nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. In fact, the Pakistan military — which has always controlled the nuclear programme — claimed that it wasn’t aware of nuclear secrets being sold until Libya and Iran began spilling the beans. The main reason why Washington joined hands with Islamabad in that charade is because it still sees the Pakistan military as a key instrument to advance its regional interests. Just as it helped keep the jihad-spewing General Zia ul-Haq in power to take on Soviet forces in Afghanistan, it needs a pliant ruler in Islamabad today because it employs Pakistan as a gateway to military operations in Afghanistan, a base for clandestine missions into Iran and a vehicle for other geopolitical objectives.

After the Pakistani illicit supply network was uncovered, the UN Security Council passed a US-inspired resolution with no reference to Pakistan or even to the ring, but instead urged the world to share the responsibility. Resolution 1540 obligated all states to legislate and implement tight domestic controls on materials related to weapons of mass destruction so as to ensure that non-state actors do not get hold of them. In contrast, the US has taken such a tough line against neighbouring Iran that it got the Security Council to issue an excessively harsh diktat to Tehran to cease doing what the latter insists is its lawful right — pursue low-grade uranium enrichment under international inspection.

While the U.S. is pushing for tougher UN sanctions against Iran even though the International Atomic Energy Agency has yet to find evidence of a covert weapons programme there, it has gone to great lengths to ensure Pakistan is not penalized for its admitted nuclear transfers to Tehran and others. The exporting state has been allowed to escape international scrutiny and censure so that, as the authors point out, the importing state could paradoxically be put in the doghouse as part of a US policy to target Iran. The book warns that the various links in the elaborate Pakistani nuclear-supply chain have still not been unplugged, even as terror-exporting Pakistan has emerged “at the epicentre of world destabilization”.

Two contrasting cases of proliferation: Pakistan & Iran

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 11:56:21 GMT

Drawing courtesy: http://www.warlordsofafghanistan.com/pervez-musharraf.php

Double Standard at the UN

Brahma Chellaney International Herald Tribune

NEW DELHI Nothing better illustrates the way global efforts to halt nuclear proliferation are at the mercy of international politics than the contrasting responses of the United Nations Security Council to the two latest proliferation cases. Iran was handed an excessively harsh diktat to cease doing what it insists is its lawful right, while Pakistan has received exceptionally lenient treatment, despite the discovery of a major nuclear black-market ring run by Pakistani scientists and intelligence and military officials.

The uncovering of the illicit Pakistani supply network, which has been operating for at least 16 years, exposed the worst proliferation scandal in history. Yet in response the Security Council passed a resolution that made no reference to Pakistan, or even to the nuclear smuggling ring, but instead urged the entire world to share the responsibility. Resolution 1540 obligates all states to legislate and implement tight domestic controls on materials related to weapons of mass destruction so as to ensure that non-state actors do not get hold of them.

In contrast, the Security Council's tough line on Iran was expressed in a strongly worded resolution that set an August 31, 2006, deadline. To "make mandatory" Iran's cessation of all nuclear fuel-cycle activity, Resolution 1696 states that the Security Council "demands, in this context, that Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency."

The difference between these approaches is all the more startling given that the Security Council is acting against Tehran on reasonable suspicion but not clinching evidence, while Islamabad has admitted that the Pakistani ring covertly transferred nuclear secrets (including enrichment equipment and nuclear-bomb designs) to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The exporting state has been allowed to escape international scrutiny and censure while the importing state is being put in the doghouse.

The resolution on Iran acknowledges that the Security Council is acting not on conclusive proof but because there are "a number of outstanding issues and concerns on Iran's nuclear program, including topics which could have a military nuclear dimension." But the council has refrained from doing the obvious to settle the outstanding issues relating to Iran's past unlawful imports - empower the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate the supply chain in Pakistan.

Iran has to shoulder much of the blame for the rising concerns over its nuclear program. It was not until an Iranian dissident group blew the whistle in 2002 that Tehran admitted it had built undeclared facilities in Natanz and Arak. To this day, however, technical assessments by the IAEA still affirm there is no "evidence of diversion" of nuclear materials for nonpeaceful purposes by Iran.

The Security Council has to act wisely and ensure that it does not follow double standards that undermine its credibility and effectiveness. After allowing Pakistan to get off scot-free, despite having been caught red-handed running the world's biggest nuclear proliferation ring, the council should not seek to make amends by prematurely penalizing Iran.

A certain balance is necessary, or else Iran may emulate Pakistan and go overtly nuclear. In fact, by implicitly condoning Pakistani proliferation while taking a tough line on Iran, the Security Council has already sent a message to Tehran that it pays to be a nuclear-weapons state.

In the case of the far-reaching Pakistani network, a single individual, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was conveniently made the scapegoat in a charade that saw Pakistan's military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, pardon him and then shield him from international investigators by placing him under indefinite house arrest.

While Iran is being demonized for certain suspect activities, the world has been made to believe that Khan set up and ran a nuclear Wal-Mart largely on his own.

The Security Council needs to rethink the wisdom of a resolution that commands Iran to accept a standard applicable to no other country. The attempt to single out Iran and enforce a discriminatory standard could well prove counterproductive, if it provoked Tehran to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and kick out IAEA inspectors.

What is needed is a new global consensus on standards governing fissile-material production, not an arbitrary regime that divides the nonnuclear world into fuel-cycle possessors and a single fuel-cycle abstainer. It is not helpful when the Security Council acts as if the military regime in Islamabad is on the right side of international politics but the clerical regime in Tehran is detestable and thus presumed guilty.

At present, Iran is years away from acquiring a nuclear- weapons capability. Through prudent diplomacy backed by stringent IAEA inspections, the Security Council can still ensure that Iran will remain free of nuclear weapons.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Adapted from: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/30/opinion/edchell.php

World's Worst Nuclear Proliferation Scandal

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:47:01 GMT

A quiet burial of a scandal that will haunt Washington

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

With global attention focused on the U.S.-led face-off with Tehran over the nuclear issue, Pakistan has ingeniously seized the opportunity to give a quiet burial to the worst proliferation scandal in world history, involving the Pakistani transfer of nuclear knowhow and equipment to three states -- Iran, Libya and North Korea.

On May 2, Pakistan announced the closure in the scandal-related case, as it freed from jail the last of the 11 nuclear scientists imprisoned more than two years ago for suspected roles in the covert transfers. The 12th figure, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ring's alleged mastermind, was granted immunity from prosecution and has been made to stay at home under tight security since his February 2004 televised confession on illicit nuclear dealings.

Contrast the international crisis being contrived over Iran -- a country that would take at least 10 years to acquire nuclear-weapons capability after freeing itself from International Atomic Energy Agency inspections -- with the lack of any response to Pakistan's defiant statement that "as far we are concerned this chapter is closed."

And notice the dramatic irony that at the very time Tehran is under pressure to come clean on its imports of Pakistani nuclear designs and items, the exporting country has announced closure of the probe. A full international investigation could yield answers to several key unresolved Iran-related issues cited by the IAEA in its report released April 28.

It was the Pakistani proliferation ring that gave the Iranian nuclear program its start.

No one to date has been charged, let alone put on trial, in Pakistan for involvement in a clandestine proliferation ring whose international-security ramifications thus far exceed Iran's enrichment of a minute amount of uranium. None of the actors in the scandal has been allowed by Pakistan to be questioned by the IAEA or any other outside investigators, although Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has acknowledged transfers of bomb know-how, including complete uranium-enrichment centrifuges, to Iran, North Korea and Libya from 1987 to 2003.

In fact, the principal actors are not A.Q. Khan and his fellow scientists but the Pakistan military and intelligence. To ensure that the role of the principal actors is not exposed, the entire blame was pinned on a group of 12 "greedy" scientists led by Khan, and then these very men have been religiously kept away from international investigators.

What's more, the military -- which has always controlled the nuclear program -- claimed that it wasn't aware that nuclear secrets were being sold until Libya and Iran began spilling the beans. As part of Pakistan's nukes-for-missiles swap with North Korea, a Pakistani C-130 military transport aircraft, for example, was photographed loading missile parts in Pyongyang in 2002. Yet Musharraf claimed he was in the dark.

No country has concocted a more ridiculous tale than Pakistan as an excuse for roguish conduct. The uncovering of the proliferation ring should have persuaded Islamabad's Western allies to distance themselves from the military and invest in the only real guarantee for Pakistan's future as a stable, moderate state -- its civil society. Instead, the Bush administration went along with Islamabad's charade because it sees the Pakistan military as central to U.S. strategic interests in that country. It even lent a helping hand to the Musharraf regime to dress up the pretense as reality.

Such is America's ability to shape international perceptions that the world has been made to believe that A.Q. Khan, on his own, set up and ran a nuclear Wal-Mart. And that Khan's network of "private entrepreneurs" had only less than a dozen Pakistani scientists, including his right-hand man, Mohammad Farooq, who has just been freed from incarceration.

It was Libya, seeking to re-enter the international mainstream, that first disclosed the existence of the Pakistani proliferation ring, but the United States took the credit by stage-managing an event in October 2003. With the help of documents Tripoli had turned over to Washington, a German cargo ship was intercepted en route to Libya with centrifuge components routed through Dubai. The 21st-century fable of a Khan-run nuclear supermarket busted by the U.S. has now become part of American nuclear folklore.

Long before Khan turned from a national icon to a national scapegoat, he had been a favorite of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency during the period when Washington knew that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons. America turned a blind eye to the underground Pakistani bomb program for the same reason that China aided Islamabad's nuclear and missile ambitions. Not only did the CIA twice shield Khan from arrest in Europe, it also had a likely hand in the disappearance of Khan's legal files from the Amsterdam court that convicted him, according to recent Dutch revelations.

As disclosed by former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers last August, the CIA protected Khan from arrest and prosecution in Europe in 1975 and 1986. The Dutch government did not take Khan into custody at the request of the CIA, which pretended that it wanted "to follow him."

Khan was sentenced in absentia by Judge Anita Leeser in 1983 to four years in prison for stealing Dutch enrichment secrets on the basis of which Pakistan's Kahuta plant had by then been set up. After the conviction was overturned on a technicality, U.S. intelligence may have influenced the Dutch decision not to bring new charges against Khan, whose case files, according to Judge Leeser, disappeared "on purpose."

Now, karmic justice has caught up with Khan. After having been assisted for years by the CIA, Khan has become the butt of U.S. vilification.

More broadly, the U.S. should have foreseen the consequences of its action in winking at Pakistan's covert nuclear program. It is well documented how the Pakistan military helped build nuclear weapons with materials and equipment illegally procured from overseas through intermediaries in Dubai and front companies set up in Europe by its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. What could not be procured from the West was imported covertly from ally China.

With the ISI spearheading operations and Khan as the brain, the military ran the world's most successful nuclear-smuggling ring. That success only bred proliferation in the reverse direction -- out of Pakistan.

There is a long history to how Pakistani nuclear mendacity has been aided by America's pursuit of politically expedient foreign-policy goals. Now, by whitewashing Islamabad's official complicity in the sale of nuclear secrets, the U.S. can only spur more rogue proliferation in the future.

Despite a military quagmire in Iraq and instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bush administration is itching to fashion a continuous arc of volatility between Israel and India by taking on Iran. The White House openly seeks to foment regime change in Tehran while it simultaneously pursues coercive diplomacy, backed by the tacit threat of military strikes, on the nuclear issue.

Compare the Bush team's leniency toward Pakistan with its belligerence against Iran. America and its allies want a U.N. Security Council resolution that would strip Iran of its legal rights under the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by ordering it to cease all IAEA-safeguarded enrichment and reprocessing activities, including research and development and the construction of a heavy-water reactor. Yet, Washington and its three Tehran-bashing friends -- Britain, France and Germany -- have said nothing on the Musharraf regime's use of the downward spiral on Iran to release the last remaining Pakistani scientist from preventive custody and cheekily announce that the proliferation case is over, with no further investigation planned or required.

America's indulgence toward Pakistan defies logic. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that were not there but has allowed Pakistan, with real WMD and al-Qaida sanctuaries, to escape international censure for its egregious nuclear transfers to three states.

The IAEA demands additional documentation or data from Iran regarding its P-1 and P-2 centrifuges. Consecutive IAEA reports have harped on the Iranian refusal to hand over a 1987 document from the Pakistani ring offering to supply "drawings, specifications and calculations" for an enrichment facility, along with "materials for 2,000 centrifuge machines" and data on "uranium re-conversion and casting capabilities." The IAEA, to "understand the full scope of the offer made by the network in 1987," is also seeking a copy of a second 15-page document.

A good way to get around Tehran's reluctance to share full information is for Washington and its friends to facilitate IAEA investigations into the Pakistani ring. Several key outstanding issues on Iran could be readily settled if the IAEA were permitted to do the obvious -- probe the front part of the supply line in the country where it originated. Yet the U.S.-backed Musharraf regime on May 2 again rejected that idea, declaring, "There is no question of direct access."

Even the task of containing the risks of further Pakistani leakage in the future cannot be met without verifiably unplugging the various links in the elaborate Pakistani nuclear-supply chain. A charade that hushes up the role of the military -- in the interest of Musharraf and the U.S. -- is hardly the answer to those risks.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

The Japan Times, May 13, 2006

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060513bc.html

Let Iran Save Face

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:21:28 GMT

Defuse crisis by letting Tehran save face on nuclear issue

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

(C) Japan Times

NEW DELHI -- With Iran rebuffing the United Nations Security Council, yet another global hot spot is emerging in the vast but volatile region between India and Israel. This arc of volatility between the only two democracies in the region has been made worse by the developments in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now U.S. President George W. Bush is itching for a showdown over Tehran's defiant refusal to bow to the Security Council demand that it immediately suspend uranium enrichment. Eager to divert attention from his failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush has pursued an approach on Iran in which carrots have been dangled merely to legitimize his first choice to use sticks. If Bush were to use the sticks against Iran -- either by imposing new sanctions or carrying out punishing airstrikes -- a bad situation would become worse in an arc already bristling with failed or failing states.

In its long-delayed response to the package of incentives offered by the five permanent Security Council members and Germany, Tehran has refused to suspend enrichment as demanded by the recent Security Council Resolution 1696. Instead it has shrewdly proposed immediate talks on finding a compromise settlement, tantalizingly leaving open the possibility that it might suspend enrichment as part of a negotiated bargain. Not surprisingly, this offer has been rejected by the Bush team.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a technical organization whose governing board has increasingly been politicized over the Iran issue. In its assessments, the IAEA still insists it has neither seen any "indications of diversion" of nuclear materials for non-peaceful purposes nor found any "conclusive evidence" that Iran is attempting to produce nuclear weapons. Yet, such is the politics waged through the IAEA's governing board and the Security Council that Iran has been commanded to accept standards not applicable to other nonnuclear states in the world.

For example, the IAEA board resolution of Feb. 4 seeks to hold Iran to a much higher standard. It demands that Iran commit itself to "implement transparency measures . . . which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol." More explicitly, Iran has been asked by the IAEA board and the U.N. Security Council to forgo its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue work on a nuclear fuel cycle even under stringent international monitoring.

While Iran is being put in the international penalty box before clinching evidence against it has been found, Pakistan has been allowed to go scot-free despite having been caught red-handed running the world's biggest illicit nuclear-exports ring through its military and scientific establishments. Worse, the IAEA board has not empowered the IAEA's inspectors to probe the Pakistani supply network even to find answers to the outstanding issues relating to Iran's past unlawful imports.

Instead, a single individual, A.Q. Khan, was conveniently made the scapegoat for a far-reaching Pakistani proliferation ring involving admitted transfers of prohibited nuclear items and blueprints to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Contrast also the diametrically opposite ways the Security Council has been used to deal with the Iran and Pakistan cases. Following the uncovering of the Pakistani proliferation ring, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540, which made no reference to Pakistan or any of its citizens but instead urged the entire world to share the responsibility. The resolution obligated all states to establish domestic controls to ensure that terrorists and other non-state actors do not get hold of materials related to weapons of mass destruction.

The United States invaded Iraq to eliminate WMD that were not there, but has allowed terrorist-haven Pakistan, with real WMD, to escape international scrutiny and censure for selling nuclear secrets to other states.

On the other hand, the U.S. succeeded last month in getting the Security Council to pass Resolution 1696 against Iran with harsh, intimidating language. The resolution, with its deadline of Aug. 31, demands that "Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development" and threatens "appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII" of the U.N. charter.

There can be little doubt that Iran has engaged in illicit actions and provocative rhetoric. It was not until an Iranian dissident group blew the whistle in 2002 that Tehran admitted it had built secret facilities in Natanz and Arak. Nothing better illustrates Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's irresponsible rhetoric than his threat to "wipe out Israel."

Yet, with Tehran turning down the core demand of Resolution 1696, it will not be easy for the U.S. to keep Russia and China on its side as it attempts to take out the sticks against Iran. Moscow and Beijing voted for Resolution 1696 only after eliminating language that could have been used to justify punitive action against Iran. The resolution merely says "further decisions will be required" in case of Iranian noncompliance. The U.S. says Tehran cannot be trusted with fuel-cycle technologies and insists on an immediate cessation of Iranian enrichment work -- a demand it can enforce only by militarily taking out the concerned Iranian facilities.

Rather than be a precondition to negotiations with Tehran, the demand for the sustained suspension of Iranian enrichment activity should have been pursued as part of a negotiated deal. Iran, which has always insisted on the legal right to enrich uranium, is being asked to concede the main point of negotiations before the talks have started. Had Iran been allowed to save face in public, it could have conceded the same demand as part of a negotiated bargain. Indeed, Iran so far has enriched only a minute amount of uranium -- to less than 4 percent, well below the weapons-usable level.

The U.S.-encouraged referral of the Iran case to the Security Council only weakened the bargaining capacity of Washington and its three European partners, with Tehran responding by resuming low-level enrichment. Now the U.S. is dependent on securing the backing of Russia and China for any move.

The U.S. and Iran have both made a major strategic error in the current standoff. Had Tehran not agreed following the November 2004 Paris agreement to a voluntary but temporary halt to all enrichment and reprocessing activity, it would not have come under swirling international pressure to maintain such a moratorium. What Iran accepted of its own accord has become the very benchmark that the Security Council is now seeking to apply.

For its part, the U.S. has seriously erred in seeking to enforce an enrichment moratorium when a better way to choke Iran's nuclear ambitions would have been to pressure it to ratify the Additional Protocol it already has signed. The Additional Protocol would give the IAEA enduring legal powers to subject Iran to stringent, challenging inspections. Now the current face-off has prompted Tehran not only to suspend its implementation of the Additional Protocol but also to hold out the threat to withdraw from the NPT and kick out IAEA inspectors -- the route North Korea chose.

Despite Bush's desire for punitive action against Iran, the wise way to tackle Iran is through sustained international pressure. Any penal steps against a theocratic state that has already faced assorted sanctions for more than a quarter-century would only play into the hands of the Iranian clergy and its political deputies led by Ahmadinejad. It should not be forgotten that Iran's stance on the nuclear issue enjoys broad political support at home, including from moderates and those opposed to the clerical regime.

A confrontational approach indeed is likely to prove counterproductive, adding to the list of Western blunders on Iran, including the 1953 externally scripted overthrow of nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq and the 1980 U.S.-encouraged Iraqi aggression under Saddam Hussein against postrevolution Iran.

Today, historical sensitivity and prudent diplomacy are necessary to help steer Iran in the right direction. Diplomacy is clearly a much better option for several reasons.

First, there is no real military option against Iran. With U.S. troops already stretched thin in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan deteriorating and the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon not helping matters, Bush can only think of unleashing U.S. air power against Iran. Airstrikes, however, will only drive home the message that building nuclear bombs offers Iran the best line of defense.

Second, the world has already seen the larger consequences when the U.S. and Israel have embraced military options to complicated regional problems. Not only will airstrikes on Iran compound the security situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, but also tie down the U.S. military in the arc of states between Israel and India.

Third, the imposition of additional sanctions on Iran, especially in the energy realm, would only constrict the already-tight world oil supplies and further drive up prices, affecting the global economy. Penal measures against Iran (the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) would surely have a greater impact on world oil supplies and prices than the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Unlike in 2003, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other OPEC producers do not have the spare capacity to make up a supply deficit.

Fourth, a military or sanctions approach, and the likely Iranian reaction to it, will only fuel the turbulence, violence and extremism in the arc of volatility. The greater upheaval would mean that free, secular, pluralistic societies would become an even more likely target of international terrorism. The international emphasis should be on stabilizing this zone, not on adding fuel to the fires raging there.

Fifth, despite the justifiability of the efforts to make Iran fully comply with its international obligations and to ensure that it does not pursue a nuclear-weapons program, the nonproliferation challenge posed by the Iran issue should not be exaggerated. Iran is years away from acquiring the capability to build nuclear weapons. And it is unlikely to attain such capability as long as the IAEA is tightly monitoring its nuclear program, as it has been ever since it discovered undeclared Iranian nuclear activity.

Sixth, the attempt to single out Iran and enforce unique standards carries the risks of undermining the credibility and effectiveness of international institutions. When a Security Council resolution does not have even the pretense of equity, how can the target country be made to accept flagrantly discriminatory standards? By challenging the overt effort to divide nonnuclear states into two categories -- those that can and cannot pursue nuclear fuel-cycle capabilities -- Iran is determined to bring matters to a head in the crisis-torn NPT regime. Rather than arbitrarily fashion a double-layered regime of fuel-cycle possessors and fuel-cycle abstainers, a new global consensus on standards governing fissile materials should be sought.

Seventh, with the security scenarios in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan getting very difficult, Iran realizes the West needs its help to stabilize the situation in those countries. Tehran, therefore, is likely to insist, more than ever before, on getting tangible diplomatic, economic and security benefits from the West before it makes nuclear concessions.

At issue today are Iran's intentions, not actual capabilities. The intentions can be effectively monitored and checkmated through stepped-up IAEA inspections and by greater multilateral cooperation on export controls to ensure that no sensitive items or designs reach Iran, especially from China, Russia and Pakistan.

Tehran may still be willing to halt enrichment as an outcome of a successful bargaining process. For that to happen, it needs to be offered a face-saving formula. One way would be to allow Iran to pursue largely symbolic, research-related enrichment activity on a tiny scale under very tight IAEA monitoring. A variant of that could be to let Tehran do pre-enrichment activity -- process natural uranium into uranium hexafluoride, to be shipped to Russia for enrichment and returned to Iran as finished fuel assemblies. A third way would be to try and reach agreement to halt national fuel-cycle activities across the Middle East.

Washington, for its part, can help strengthen the hands of moderates in Iran -- the only Islamic state other than Turkey with a well-developed civil society -- by agreeing to discuss the restoration of diplomatic relations with Tehran and the de-freezing of Iranian assets in the U.S. Given that Iran remains a part of Bush's "axis of evil," Tehran would surely seek credible security assurances from the U.S.

Prudent diplomacy backed by stringent IAEA safeguards can ensure that Iran never develops nuclear weapons. But there can be no effective diplomacy without a constructive atmosphere. This means no preconditions, no artificial deadlines to negotiations, and no threats by any side.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060831bc.html

The Japan Times

August 31, 2006