South Asia’s Nuclear War Risk
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PlurkChina’s planned nuclear reactors sale to Pakistan highlights the risk of war on the Subcontinent. It could also increase it.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has just concluded a visit to China on a trip that attracted particular attention because of Beijing’s contentious plan to sell two nuclear reactors to Pakistan.
There’s nothing new about Zardari visiting China—in fact he’s been a regular guest there since taking office, having travelled to Beijing five times since September 2008. The frequency of the visits (on average about once every about three months) is likely largely aimed at reassuring Chinese policymakers who preferred dealing with his authoritarian predecessor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. But although ostensibly, the latest trip was over whether China will sell the two additional nuclear reactors to Pakistan, the meeting also raises deeper—and in many ways more troubling—questions about the dynamics of Asia’s nuclear proliferation.
China is eager to sell Pakistan additional reactors, having already constructed one 325-Megawatt nuclear power reactor at Chasma (sometimes Chashma), in Pakistan’s Punjab Province, while construction on another should be completed in 2011 or 2012. During a visit by Zardari to Beijing in March 2009, Chinese officials reportedly reaffirmed their commitment to provide two more reactors; this May, two Chinese companies signed a contract to join in construction.
The Chinese government has yet to announce a formal decision to proceed with the transaction. But for several years now, its representatives and Chinese nuclear security experts have claimed that they had agreed to build the two reactors before China joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 2004, making the sale exempt from NSG rules excluding the sale of nuclear technologies to countries like Pakistan that haven’t signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (They’ve offered other public defences of the sale, including that Pakistanis desperately need more electricity).
Such protestations haven’t stopped the US, UK and Indian governments from objecting to the sale and disputing Chinese assertions that ‘grandfathering’ exempts any nuclear deals agreed to before a country enters the NSG. But their efforts at pressing Chinese representatives attending the annual NSG plenary meeting in Christchurch late last month didn’t bear any fruit.
US State Department Spokesman Philip Crowley, speaking last month, indicated that the United States was potentially troubled by the Chinese plan and said it was ‘looking for more information’ from China on what it’s potentially proposing, and stating the deal would need the agreement of the NSG.
But such concerns have failed to move China, with Chinese officials perhaps calculating that Washington and others ultimately won’t try to expel China from the NSG or retaliate in other ways if the sale occurs because they need Beijing’s assistance on other nuclear non-proliferation issues, including Iran and North Korea.
Photo Credit: Agência Brasil
T Rama Bhat
“Yet even setting aside the question of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands, nuclear competition between India and Pakistan is especially dangerous.” :- Pakistan is able to fund this program because of the financial aid that they are able to extract from USA and other western countries by playing on their strategic fears and stringing them along. Money is after all a fungible commodity. Even though aid is not given for this purpose specifically, they are able to avoid spending their own capital for relevant needs and divert it. In fact, these powers waive off the debt due to them from Pakistan regularly. Pakistan has never felt the pinch of the expenditure towards their nuclear armament development as they are sure loans made to them will be waived off to them in future also!
It is China that is the nuclear arms proliferator (sitting securely in the club of “accepted” nuclear weapons states) that has designed the Pakistan nuclear bomb and tested it, unofficially, prior to 1998. They have given them the technology for nuclear-tipped missiles also and are working on giving them technology for upgrading these missiles.
“Pakistani leaders in particular have concluded that their nuclear arsenal has deterred India from again using its conventional forces to attack Pakistani territory. As a result, Pakistan’s implicit nuclear doctrine presumes the possible first use of nuclear weapons.” :- This is an argument raised by western powers to instill fear in our media, intellectuals , and political leaders. It is a pity that many Indians lap up this theory hook line and sinker.
Even USA has restrained itself from the nuclear first-strike option at the height of cold war. Using this first strike option is not a joke. Every world leader knows that there will be a retaliatory strike from the opposite nuclear power which will destroy the “first-strike” power also. No nation wants to commit suicide enmasse .After all, wars are fought to gain something and not to lose the lives of a majority of one’s own population. That is why Pakistan is desperately clutching to the illusion of “strategic-depth” in Afghanistan against the possibility (however remote) of a conventional military offensive by India.
If we go by their rhetoric that their threshold is very low, and at the first possible opportunity they will use the nuclear first strike option, then the necessity of seeking the “illusion of strategic-depth” will not arise. The Punjabi military leaders of Pakistan will dare not risk enmasse suicide.
Aj
@Kayani
What rubbish. The highest possibility of nukes falling into the wrong hands is in Pakistan right now. What universe are you living in mate?
Kayani
There were no concerns shown when India went into deal with the USA despite unsecure nuclear facilities in India which are posing highest possible risk in the region.
ronnie
Exception,exception,exception.Here is one more exception.The bullying and declining ex hyper power is reaping what it sowed by making an exception.