The US administration is determined to stop India becoming a nuclear power in a meaningful sense – a power with a substantial stock of weapons with reliable means of delivery. That much is obvious from a variety of moves it has made in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its desperate bid to stop the delivery of a cryogenic engine by Russia is only one such move. It is part of a package.
Knowledgeable Indians and Russians have argued that the cryogenic engine can have no military use and that the US Administration is being guided by commercial considerations. Both these propositions are, on the face of it, unexceptionable. An engine that takes three months to be prepared for use cannot possibly serve a military purpose, and commercial considerations are known to dominate Western thinking and action.
But perhaps there is more to the US decision to ban dealings with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and its Russian counterpart, Glavkosmos, for two years in retaliation against their refusal (so far) to cancel the 1990 agreement. Since I know precious little about the kind of sophisticated technology that is involved, I cannot claim to speak with knowledge. Indeed, all that I have to rely on is an article by Gary Milhollin and Gerard White, director and assistant director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
They wrote in the Washington Post last December: “The Soviet rocket deals could help transform Brazil and India into intercontinental ballistic missile threats. Brazil has already developed its first three space rockets into surface-to-surface missiles that Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia purchased directly off Brazil’s production line. It is developing its fourth space rocket into a missile with a 900-mile (1,450-kilometre) range. If the Soviets sell Brazil a large liquid-fuel rocket engine, as proposed, Brazil will have an ICBM. The Indians are in line for an even more powerful cryogenic rocket. In addition, the Soviets have offered to build a plant to produce it, enabling India to supply missiles to others.’’ (Italics provided.)
Regardless of whether Milhollin and White reflect official thinking in Washington, it is obvious that it is the entire deal and not just the supply of one cryogenic engine that the Americans are out to negate. Indeed, not to speak of an intercontinental ballistic missile, it is common knowledge they are averse to India developing even an intermediate-range one. How then should we respond to these pressures?
China is the main worry
Even if we disregard our dependence on American goodwill for financial assistance from the World Bank, the IMF and members of the Aid-India consortium, it is not easy to answer this question at this stage. For all we know, the Russians, who are in an even worse economic plight, may still decide to withhold the actual delivery. So we have to wait and see how Moscow, in fact, acts. Meanwhile, I for one do not take a wholly negative view of the US action. It is, of course, highly inconvenient to ISRO and it smacks of arrogance of power on the part of the only ‘superpower’. But it is precisely because it smacks of the arrogance of power – and I hope for a similar demonstration of power in other similar cases – that I do not feel as provoked as members of Parliament and fellow commentators.
As I see things, perhaps mistakenly, it is not India’s acquisition of missiles that primarily worries Washington, though going by the famous (or infamous) Pentagon policy document, Americans do not want us to gatecrash into the club of the ‘haves’. It is China’s delivery of long-range missiles (capable of carrying nuclear warheads as well) and technology to countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria and even Saudi Arabia that causes grave concern to US policymakers and it is these deliveries above all which they are anxious to end.
It is difficult to say whether they will succeed. There have been reports as recently as last February that despite their assurances to the US Secretary of State last November, the Chinese were continuing to sell missile technology to Syria and Pakistan. This is in keeping with their assistance to Pakistan in the latter’s nuclear weapons programme. They said one thing and did another. So it is possible that Beijing will in practice not abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime, as Americans interpret it.
In that case, the US decision to make an example of India and Russia would prove futile. But the inconvenience to ourselves notwithstanding, we should be able to overcome our anti-Americanism and recognise that US success, however improbable, in respect of Chinese deliveries of missiles to Pakistan and others is also in our security interest, and that if Washington has to have any chance of success at all, it has to be seen to be impartial.
There is no alternative
Right now, it may be an exercise in self-deception to believe that official America has begun to be seriously concerned either over China’s growing military prowess (its military budget has risen by 50 per cent in the last three years, according to a recent report in the New York Times) or the spread of militancy and fundamentalism in the Muslim world from the Maghreb to Malaysia, or Beijing’s possible willingness to provide military muscle not too selectively to this anti-Western wave. Perhaps Washington is too preoccupied with immediate problems resulting from the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the near collapse of the Russian economy.
In all conscience, these are awesome problems which can test the resources – intellectual, nervous and moral – of any administration. On top of it, the US is faced with horrendous difficulties at home, as illustrated most eloquently by the recent outbreak of race riots in Los Angeles. Even so, it is inconceivable that policy-planners are impervious to the challenges posed by China’s rising military power, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the coming together of the two in some form. In any event, as (and if) the worst begins to beover in the Russian economy, these issues are, in my view, bound to move up on the US agenda. And as they do, Indo-US relations will fall into a different and more promising perspective, though even then India’s interests will not be identical to America’s.
America may or may not remain for long the only superpower it is said to be today. But it will without doubt remain, as far into the future as we can see, the world’s most important power with worldwide interests. India is self-contained and it is likely to so remain. Many factors account for this unhappy state of affairs in our case, which it is neither possible nor necessary in this piece to probe.
The pertinent point is that relations between two such dissimilar countries as America and India can never be free from difficulties and that the convergence of their interests cannot but be limited. Thus, euphoria over the prospects of Indo-American friendship is as out of place as anti-Americanism. That kind of hard-headed pragmatism does not come easily to many of us who happen to be in a position to make or influence policy. But there is no alternative in the new post-Soviet Union world.
The Pioneer, 15 May 1992