Sam Manekshaw
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Not many people know that India has the fastest growing nuclear program in the world. With wide-ranging international help, India is massively expanding both its nuclear arsenal and civilian nuclear program and building large nuclear facilities across the country. In contrast, since 1970, a small uranium enrichment facility on the outskirts of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, has been under the constant spotlight of western leaders, diplomats and journalists alike.
India, however, does not receive such ‘unfriendly’ world attention. The international nuclear pundits and non-proliferation proponents remain conspicuous by their silence on the ambitious Indian nuclear drive. In the case of New Delhi, both profit and politics makes the international community look the other way and non-proliferation norms and international law to be interpreted differently. Helping India rise strategically, by deliberately compromising both international norms and regional balance of power, means the global drivers of power politics and nuclear trade have learned little from world history. While injustice in international politics is not new, this nuclear apartheid is not without grave dangers to the crisis prone and nuclear-armed South Asian region, changing Asia-Pacific power structure and the emerging world order.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is a Washington based think tank, which closely monitors the technical aspects of nuclear programs of various states. It recently released an assessment, which provides compelling evidence that India is covertly building a new and large industrial scale Uranium Enrichment Plant in Karnataka, with foreign help. This plant is expected to produce large quantities of highly enriched Uranium, useful for both powering Indian future ballistic missile nuclear submarine fleet and producing thermonuclear bombs.
A most interesting aspect of the ISIS report is not the size or capacity of this new Uranium Enrichment Facility, but the warning by a leading US nuclear expert David Albright that it is being built clandestinely with illegal means, a reference to international nuclear black market. One wonders who is currently running this international nuclear black market and how come India is building not one, but two Uranium Enrichment Plants at Mysore and Karnataka with its help. Was Dr. A. Q. Khan merely a fall guy to divert world attention from the suppliers and real movers and shakers of the multi-national nuclear black market, which continues to thrive, thanks to its biggest current customer, India? After all the U.S.-based analyst Pollack aptly quipped in his Playboy article two years ago that Pakistan could not be interested in proliferating the technology to the very State (India) against whose threat, Pakistan made the bomb in the first place!
The ISIS report becomes all the more ironic because it comes at a time when India, despite its well-known nuclear proliferation history, is being deliberately offered exceptional international help to join the exclusive 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), whose very purpose is to prevent nuclear proliferation. The NSG was founded in 1975 as a direct consequence of the Indian proliferation of internationally-supplied nuclear material and technology, intended only for peaceful purposes, by using it in its first nuclear bomb test in 1974. The first Indian nuclear weapon test, ironically called ‘Smiling Buddha’, was conducted under the misleading pretext of a peaceful nuclear explosion.
Today, the growing international technological help, supporting the enormous Indian nuclear ambitions, indicate that the profit-seeking and influential international nuclear industry would not allow their governments or non-proliferation norms and regime to limit the prospects of lucrative, but dangerous nuclear trade with New Delhi. Various states supplying nuclear materials and manufacturing nuclear technologies to New Delhi, particularly Japan, Australia, France and the U.S., are impatiently eying the large Indian nuclear market, at the cost of their own policies, laws, non-proliferation commitments, international obligations and norms, both for profit and geo-politics. But let us carefully read the fine print of the ISIS report to understand what India is actually doing with all this foreign help.
The ISIS report, along with its satellite imagery, provides incontrovertible evidence that India has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world. One fails to understand how three small Pakistani nuclear reactors can produce more plutonium than the eight large Indian production reactors and in future, and how will a much smaller and solitary Pakistani Enrichment plant (HEU), produce more HEU than two Indian HEU facilities in Mysore and another much bigger one being built in Karnataka.
What is also striking is the revelation by a previous ISIS report, which points out that the designs of the Indian Rare Metals Plant (RMP) centrifuge parts are very similar to the Dutch URENCO centrifuges, another evidence of India benefiting from covert foreign help, direct assistance from the manufacturer or both. This also indicates weak export controls, duplicity or both, by companies and states, manufacturing and supplying sensitive nuclear technologies to New Delhi, This is very interesting because the same states are also influential members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, who want India to join it so that their nuclear technology and materials can be freely shared with New Delhi which is otherwise considered illegal or harmful to the endangered non-proliferation regime. Many other states, either planning to peacefully use nuclear technology for their development or the countries hoping to keep it under responsible control, will no longer trust the checkered non-proliferation regime.
Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, former Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, confirmed three years ago that the large Uranium Enrichment Plant being built in Chitradurga district of the state of Karnataka, will have both civilian and military uses. This public admission by a top Indian nuclear scientist blatantly negates the spirit and defeats the very purpose of the controversial Indo-US nuclear deal, based on the separation of Indian civilian and military nuclear fuel cycles. The latest ISIS report also warns the foreign dual-use item suppliers to exercise extra care to ensure that Rare Metals Plant in Mysore and the new Uranium Enrichment plant being built in Karnataka, do not receive nuclear and technological exports, intended solely for peaceful and non-military uses.
This concern by a leading U.S. nuclear expert indicates that despite the effective eradication of nuclear black market by Pakistan, the multi-national nuclear black market is still active, has covert support of various large nuclear suppliers and India continues to benefit from it to expand its clandestine nuclear facilities, outside nuclear safeguards, to build both its nuclear and thermonuclear weapons.
Joining NSG will further help India build its land, air and sea-based nuclear weapon arsenal, with unrestricted international help. Again, this also defeats the very purpose of putting some of the Indian nuclear facilities under international safeguards. As a non-NPT state, India has a huge, five decades old, nuclear weapons program which, despite repeated Pakistani warnings, is accelerating and expanding, with both overt and covert foreign help. This international assistance is not confined only to nuclear materials and technologies but also includes open access to sophisticated weapon technologies, ranging from ballistic missile submarine reactors, cruise missile development, space launch vehicles, space satellites, ballistic missile defense, high power radars, fifth-generation stealth fighters, and training of its scientists and engineers.
These unprecedented but dangerous trends indicate that some powers are rapidly building up India against China by deliberately neglecting international laws, undermining norms and violating non-proliferation regime. These states are providing India with advanced technologies, materials and expertise, knowing very well that these will be used for strategic and military purposes by New Delhi. This massive nuclear expansion is underway, when half of the Indian territory is engulfed in an expanding and violent Maoist insurgency. Moreover, repeated incidents involving staff negligence, nuclear safety and secrecy issues, legal and environmental disputes involving Indian nuclear materials, key personnel, nuclear organizations and sensitive facilities, have been widely reported by the Indian press over the years. What is clearly ironic is the fact that instead of reacting to these obvious facts, it is the dramatic fiction around Pakistan’s small nuclear program, motivated solely by its national security imperatives and rising energy needs, which captures the imagination of various western international think tanks, movie makers and news organizations alike.
Compared to India, Pakistan has a modest nuclear program, whose safety and security is well-recognized and often appreciated by world leaders such as President Obama and Senator Kerry, senior U.S. State Department officials and the IAEA, the international nuclear watchdog. In spite of these facts, The popular western media and various think tanks rarely consult or quote either their own leaders, institutions or the IAEA officials and deliberately and incorrectly castigate Pakistan, describing its nuclear program as the fastest growing and its nuclear arsenal as the most sought after by the terrorists.
The ISIS report truly exposes the amoral character of international politics, hunger for profit by the international nuclear industry and highlights the fact that instead of non-proliferation, growing nuclear apartheid is the actual international nuclear norm. Political realists like Hobbes, Machiavelli, Morgenthau and Waltz have aptly warned against trusting promise more than power. Unfortunately, the bogus myth of the non-proliferation regime has been crafted by the major world powers, to monopolize and control nuclear technology and materials to exploit the developing world and keep it dependent. The myth of non-proliferation, with apologies to its believers or proponents, unfortunately, does not stand the test of history, from a liberal paradigm. The historical reality is that, notwithstanding any international norms, treaty or regime, all major powers have shared nuclear, missile and other sensitive technologies, know-how and materials with their existing and close allies, to suit their national interests and the ‘nuclear have-nots’ have not been able to do anything about that.
Today, the converging interests of a growing India, profit-seeking nuclear industry, influential black market merchants and major powers are collectively eroding international laws, national obligations and non-proliferation regime. At a time of transforming international security architecture, these trends pose grave dangers to regional security and international peace. However, it also helps explain why in history, peace has remained so elusive or difficult to maintain. The jealous pursuit of self-interest by states and the searing hunger for profit by industrialists makes apartheid, far less appreciated than justice in popular left-leaning literature and common narrative. However, the evidence of history, in the form of ignored international laws, overlooked non-proliferation commitments and compromised regional stability, suggests that the quintessential norm of international political history is the pursuit of unequal power by states and unequal wealth by businesses.
However, nowhere are the perils of international apartheid more dangerous or the consequences more disastrous than in the international nuclear trade. The quest for profit by nuclear suppliers, the Indian yearning for greater status and the major powers’ desire to constrain China could collectively harm international peace and security far more than any perceived or actual gain to any regional or global power.
The critical dilemma that the US and its Asia-Pacific allies currently face is that its exceptional help for the Indian rise could provoke China to rearm, bring China and Russia closer against Washington, and make the U.S. neglect its Western European security commitments, divide ASEAN, destabilize Asia and accelerate a nuclear arms race in South Asia. Such a distribution of power is neither sustainable nor tenable. It will help neither the US global, regional or public interests nor the world’s largest impoverished population which lives in India but only make the large military industrial complexes of the US and India richer, at the cost of international peace and regional stability. The saddest lesson of history, with apology to Isaac Asimov, is that science gathers knowledge and traders gain profit faster than society gathers wisdom. It is one thing to acquire power and wealth and quite another to use them wisely.
Syed Muhammad Ali is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Strategic Studies (CISS) Islamabad, Pakistan. Earlier, he has served as a faculty member at the National Defence University of Pakistan, where he taught Dimensions of Modern Strategy, Foreign Policy Analysis and Comparative Politics. He has also served as a founding board member of the Centre for Pakistan and Gulf Studies (CPGS). During the past two decades, he has over three dozen publications to his credit on international strategic, security and nuclear issues.
THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR APARTHEID – ANALYSIS | idrw.org
India, however, does not receive such ‘unfriendly’ world attention. The international nuclear pundits and non-proliferation proponents remain conspicuous by their silence on the ambitious Indian nuclear drive. In the case of New Delhi, both profit and politics makes the international community look the other way and non-proliferation norms and international law to be interpreted differently. Helping India rise strategically, by deliberately compromising both international norms and regional balance of power, means the global drivers of power politics and nuclear trade have learned little from world history. While injustice in international politics is not new, this nuclear apartheid is not without grave dangers to the crisis prone and nuclear-armed South Asian region, changing Asia-Pacific power structure and the emerging world order.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) is a Washington based think tank, which closely monitors the technical aspects of nuclear programs of various states. It recently released an assessment, which provides compelling evidence that India is covertly building a new and large industrial scale Uranium Enrichment Plant in Karnataka, with foreign help. This plant is expected to produce large quantities of highly enriched Uranium, useful for both powering Indian future ballistic missile nuclear submarine fleet and producing thermonuclear bombs.
A most interesting aspect of the ISIS report is not the size or capacity of this new Uranium Enrichment Facility, but the warning by a leading US nuclear expert David Albright that it is being built clandestinely with illegal means, a reference to international nuclear black market. One wonders who is currently running this international nuclear black market and how come India is building not one, but two Uranium Enrichment Plants at Mysore and Karnataka with its help. Was Dr. A. Q. Khan merely a fall guy to divert world attention from the suppliers and real movers and shakers of the multi-national nuclear black market, which continues to thrive, thanks to its biggest current customer, India? After all the U.S.-based analyst Pollack aptly quipped in his Playboy article two years ago that Pakistan could not be interested in proliferating the technology to the very State (India) against whose threat, Pakistan made the bomb in the first place!
The ISIS report becomes all the more ironic because it comes at a time when India, despite its well-known nuclear proliferation history, is being deliberately offered exceptional international help to join the exclusive 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), whose very purpose is to prevent nuclear proliferation. The NSG was founded in 1975 as a direct consequence of the Indian proliferation of internationally-supplied nuclear material and technology, intended only for peaceful purposes, by using it in its first nuclear bomb test in 1974. The first Indian nuclear weapon test, ironically called ‘Smiling Buddha’, was conducted under the misleading pretext of a peaceful nuclear explosion.
Today, the growing international technological help, supporting the enormous Indian nuclear ambitions, indicate that the profit-seeking and influential international nuclear industry would not allow their governments or non-proliferation norms and regime to limit the prospects of lucrative, but dangerous nuclear trade with New Delhi. Various states supplying nuclear materials and manufacturing nuclear technologies to New Delhi, particularly Japan, Australia, France and the U.S., are impatiently eying the large Indian nuclear market, at the cost of their own policies, laws, non-proliferation commitments, international obligations and norms, both for profit and geo-politics. But let us carefully read the fine print of the ISIS report to understand what India is actually doing with all this foreign help.
The ISIS report, along with its satellite imagery, provides incontrovertible evidence that India has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world. One fails to understand how three small Pakistani nuclear reactors can produce more plutonium than the eight large Indian production reactors and in future, and how will a much smaller and solitary Pakistani Enrichment plant (HEU), produce more HEU than two Indian HEU facilities in Mysore and another much bigger one being built in Karnataka.
What is also striking is the revelation by a previous ISIS report, which points out that the designs of the Indian Rare Metals Plant (RMP) centrifuge parts are very similar to the Dutch URENCO centrifuges, another evidence of India benefiting from covert foreign help, direct assistance from the manufacturer or both. This also indicates weak export controls, duplicity or both, by companies and states, manufacturing and supplying sensitive nuclear technologies to New Delhi, This is very interesting because the same states are also influential members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, who want India to join it so that their nuclear technology and materials can be freely shared with New Delhi which is otherwise considered illegal or harmful to the endangered non-proliferation regime. Many other states, either planning to peacefully use nuclear technology for their development or the countries hoping to keep it under responsible control, will no longer trust the checkered non-proliferation regime.
Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, former Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, confirmed three years ago that the large Uranium Enrichment Plant being built in Chitradurga district of the state of Karnataka, will have both civilian and military uses. This public admission by a top Indian nuclear scientist blatantly negates the spirit and defeats the very purpose of the controversial Indo-US nuclear deal, based on the separation of Indian civilian and military nuclear fuel cycles. The latest ISIS report also warns the foreign dual-use item suppliers to exercise extra care to ensure that Rare Metals Plant in Mysore and the new Uranium Enrichment plant being built in Karnataka, do not receive nuclear and technological exports, intended solely for peaceful and non-military uses.
This concern by a leading U.S. nuclear expert indicates that despite the effective eradication of nuclear black market by Pakistan, the multi-national nuclear black market is still active, has covert support of various large nuclear suppliers and India continues to benefit from it to expand its clandestine nuclear facilities, outside nuclear safeguards, to build both its nuclear and thermonuclear weapons.
Joining NSG will further help India build its land, air and sea-based nuclear weapon arsenal, with unrestricted international help. Again, this also defeats the very purpose of putting some of the Indian nuclear facilities under international safeguards. As a non-NPT state, India has a huge, five decades old, nuclear weapons program which, despite repeated Pakistani warnings, is accelerating and expanding, with both overt and covert foreign help. This international assistance is not confined only to nuclear materials and technologies but also includes open access to sophisticated weapon technologies, ranging from ballistic missile submarine reactors, cruise missile development, space launch vehicles, space satellites, ballistic missile defense, high power radars, fifth-generation stealth fighters, and training of its scientists and engineers.
These unprecedented but dangerous trends indicate that some powers are rapidly building up India against China by deliberately neglecting international laws, undermining norms and violating non-proliferation regime. These states are providing India with advanced technologies, materials and expertise, knowing very well that these will be used for strategic and military purposes by New Delhi. This massive nuclear expansion is underway, when half of the Indian territory is engulfed in an expanding and violent Maoist insurgency. Moreover, repeated incidents involving staff negligence, nuclear safety and secrecy issues, legal and environmental disputes involving Indian nuclear materials, key personnel, nuclear organizations and sensitive facilities, have been widely reported by the Indian press over the years. What is clearly ironic is the fact that instead of reacting to these obvious facts, it is the dramatic fiction around Pakistan’s small nuclear program, motivated solely by its national security imperatives and rising energy needs, which captures the imagination of various western international think tanks, movie makers and news organizations alike.
Compared to India, Pakistan has a modest nuclear program, whose safety and security is well-recognized and often appreciated by world leaders such as President Obama and Senator Kerry, senior U.S. State Department officials and the IAEA, the international nuclear watchdog. In spite of these facts, The popular western media and various think tanks rarely consult or quote either their own leaders, institutions or the IAEA officials and deliberately and incorrectly castigate Pakistan, describing its nuclear program as the fastest growing and its nuclear arsenal as the most sought after by the terrorists.
The ISIS report truly exposes the amoral character of international politics, hunger for profit by the international nuclear industry and highlights the fact that instead of non-proliferation, growing nuclear apartheid is the actual international nuclear norm. Political realists like Hobbes, Machiavelli, Morgenthau and Waltz have aptly warned against trusting promise more than power. Unfortunately, the bogus myth of the non-proliferation regime has been crafted by the major world powers, to monopolize and control nuclear technology and materials to exploit the developing world and keep it dependent. The myth of non-proliferation, with apologies to its believers or proponents, unfortunately, does not stand the test of history, from a liberal paradigm. The historical reality is that, notwithstanding any international norms, treaty or regime, all major powers have shared nuclear, missile and other sensitive technologies, know-how and materials with their existing and close allies, to suit their national interests and the ‘nuclear have-nots’ have not been able to do anything about that.
Today, the converging interests of a growing India, profit-seeking nuclear industry, influential black market merchants and major powers are collectively eroding international laws, national obligations and non-proliferation regime. At a time of transforming international security architecture, these trends pose grave dangers to regional security and international peace. However, it also helps explain why in history, peace has remained so elusive or difficult to maintain. The jealous pursuit of self-interest by states and the searing hunger for profit by industrialists makes apartheid, far less appreciated than justice in popular left-leaning literature and common narrative. However, the evidence of history, in the form of ignored international laws, overlooked non-proliferation commitments and compromised regional stability, suggests that the quintessential norm of international political history is the pursuit of unequal power by states and unequal wealth by businesses.
However, nowhere are the perils of international apartheid more dangerous or the consequences more disastrous than in the international nuclear trade. The quest for profit by nuclear suppliers, the Indian yearning for greater status and the major powers’ desire to constrain China could collectively harm international peace and security far more than any perceived or actual gain to any regional or global power.
The critical dilemma that the US and its Asia-Pacific allies currently face is that its exceptional help for the Indian rise could provoke China to rearm, bring China and Russia closer against Washington, and make the U.S. neglect its Western European security commitments, divide ASEAN, destabilize Asia and accelerate a nuclear arms race in South Asia. Such a distribution of power is neither sustainable nor tenable. It will help neither the US global, regional or public interests nor the world’s largest impoverished population which lives in India but only make the large military industrial complexes of the US and India richer, at the cost of international peace and regional stability. The saddest lesson of history, with apology to Isaac Asimov, is that science gathers knowledge and traders gain profit faster than society gathers wisdom. It is one thing to acquire power and wealth and quite another to use them wisely.
Syed Muhammad Ali is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Strategic Studies (CISS) Islamabad, Pakistan. Earlier, he has served as a faculty member at the National Defence University of Pakistan, where he taught Dimensions of Modern Strategy, Foreign Policy Analysis and Comparative Politics. He has also served as a founding board member of the Centre for Pakistan and Gulf Studies (CPGS). During the past two decades, he has over three dozen publications to his credit on international strategic, security and nuclear issues.
THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR APARTHEID – ANALYSIS | idrw.org
These people cannot digest we are developing Indigenous reactors 
And the world thought Pakistan has the fastest growing nuke arsenal in the world! 
