Nuclear Treaty Without Alliance
BARNES, PETER
PERSPECTIVES Nuclear Treaty Without Alliance By Peter Barnes Buried In Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg's initial address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24 was a single...
...The notion of nuclear guarantees surfaced only once more before Goldberg's address — in Foster's much-touted article in last July's Foreign Affairs...
...At first blush it seems almost ludicrous to worry about a nuclear holocaust emerging from the thin airs of Sikkim over a few stray sheep and yaks...
...PERSPECTIVES Nuclear Treaty Without Alliance By Peter Barnes Buried In Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg's initial address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24 was a single sentence that contains the germ of a new American approach to the security of the "non-nuclear" and non-aligned nations...
...but it was dissected in India and found to contain too many loopholes to be a meaningful deterrent to China...
...Would we in the U.S., the Chinese will ask themselves, risk destruction of San Francisco and Los Angeles to protect a distant country with which we have no ties...
...But Ambassador Goldberg's statement, echoed by Vice President Hubert Humphrey in a speech to NATO parliamentarians on October 5, was the first sign that the United States is willing to do more than recite platitudes, that we are seriously concerned about enhancing India's security if it will remain non-nuclear...
...The implications of a nuclear shield over Asia, both in terms of the effect on our existing alliances everywhere, and on the scope of our already enormous global commitments, are vast...
...And Chinese ultimatums will, after a few more years of atomic testing, acquire all the trappings of nuclear blackmail...
...On that occasion the AC DA Director acknowledged some of the problems of nuclear guarantees, without endorsing the approach, and noted that our alliances will probably erode whether we ply the uncharted waters of nuclear assurances or not...
...It is little wonder, then, that Goldberg's statement came after months of serious study within the State Department, and after the events in Asia and at Geneva made a new approach more urgent...
...Ambassador Chester Bowles and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) Director William C. Foster have repeatedly praised New Delhi for its present policy of nuclear abstinence, and reminded the government of Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri that India needs every penny of its scarce resources for economic development...
...As China develops its nuclear capability, an increasingly nationalistic and power conscious India will be hard-pressed not to do the same...
...He is also cognizant of the drain on India's resources that development of a nuclear striking capability would entail, and of the strategic handicaps that an Indian deterrent would have to overcome (China's big population targets are 2,500 miles away near the Pacific Ocean...
...Whether the Soviet Union is similarly prepared to talk at this point is doubtful...
...With Goldberg's statement, it is apparent that the Administration is now ready to talk about nuclear guarantees with India in some de tail...
...If, as India wants, the Soviet Union became one of the nuclear powers underwriting a guarantee, then India would be unable to support the U.S...
...The Goldberg speech was in fact only the third time the U.S...
...The fervid atmosphere that led to the recent exchange of bombing raids PETER BARNES covers Washington for the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun...
...in war or diplomacy except in those rare instances where Soviet interests coincide with our own...
...it would compel no party to the agreement to support any political or military endeavor other than those spelled out in the guarantee...
...But the possibility of eventual Soviet participation in a nuclear curtain around China should not be dismissed...
...At the height of the latest showdown with China, Shastri was handed a petition from 106 members of Parliament—including 18 members of his own Congress party—calling upon the government to build the bomb...
...Undoubtedly, by the time China acquires a medium range delivery system for its atomic bombs, the mystery of the disappearing yaks will have faded into history...
...If India goes nuclear, Pakistan cannot stay far behind...
...At once some of the complexities that have been confronting U.S...
...It is thought that India could explode a Hiroshimatype device within 18 months...
...Allies might well ask themselves who has the better deal-—those who pledge to share the common burdens of defense, or those who simply forswear nuclear weapons...
...Shastri's vision as a world statesman is wide enough to comprehend that a go-ahead decision by India on atomic weapons would end forever the hopes of containing the spread of the bomb...
...The non-alliance nature of nuclear assurances—while re lieving New Delhi of the quid pro quos traditionally inherent in de fense pacts—is precisely what makes them the type of arrange ment which would permit the So viet Union to team up with the West against China...
...A still secret report by a committee headed by former Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell L. Gilpatric also reportedly made recommendations on the subject...
...Kashmir and Peking's pressures on India's ill-defined Himilayan frontiers will continue to be major problems...
...has officially mentioned nuclear guarantees, and the first time we have expressed an interest in talking about formal agreements...
...Goldberg's declaration was all the more timely because of the failure of negotiations at Geneva to break the deadlock over West Germany's possible participation in a NATO nuclear force...
...to do so would imply a degree of rupture with Peking which Moscow has not yet reached...
...And ultimately, if the assurance loses its credibility to China, it will also lose its effectiveness for India, which would then have to build nuclear weapons when it may already be too late, TO COMPLICATE MATTERS Still more, there is legitimate concern about what might happen to our existing alliances if non-aligned nations are allowed to move under our nuclear umbrella...
...now is ready to talk about, is something quite unique in international relations: a defense treaty, without a political alliance...
...and the Soviet Union remain at loggerheads over West Germany, the less likely it becomes that India (or Israel or Sweden, for that matter) will be waiting around for the outcome...
...Russian interest in the viability of India is as great as ours...
...The sign could not have come much later than it did...
...India's large cities and industries are vulnerably situated just a few hundred miles south of Tibet...
...Though it is not at all certain that the United States can do much to eliminate the spectre of nuclear war in Asia, we have not been ignorant of the danger...
...Another serious problem is credibility...
...between India and Pakistan would be a far graver menace if either side possessed something more than conventional weapons...
...Coming just a day after Communist China had stepped back from a military confrontation with India, Goldberg's statement was an implicit recognition that the possibility of a nuclear war in Asia within 10 years is not just a chimera...
...It will be months, if not years, before progress toward any formal agreement can be made...
...That alternative, which he has been pursuing since the first Chinese nuclear test in October 1964, includes both a non-proliferation treaty and a multi-lateral guarantee against nuclear intimidation from Peking...
...The State Department for many months has been preoccupied over India's growing urge to go nuclear...
...In August 100,000 Right-wing demonstrators beseiged New Delhi with the same demand...
...Should such a coalition of nuclear guarantors emerge, with its concommitant blessing of keeping atomic weapons out of new and inexperienced hands,it might well be worth a little erosion in our old alliances...
...Why, for example, as a high State Department official remarked recently to an Indian correspondent, should the United States risk millions of lives to defend India, when India is not helping us in Vietnam...
...The question of "assurances of support against threats of nuclear blackmail"—to use Goldberg's words—is as highly complex in theory as it is untested in practice...
...But the longer the U.S...
...The promise, such as it is, still stands...
...But the apolitical nature of nuclear assurances precludes this very important link of credibility...
...By far the more difficult task will be to make the assurance credible to Peking, particularly after China has developed nuclearequipped submarines that can sail close to our Pacific coast...
...We believe," he said, "assurances of support against threats of nuclear blackmail should be available to nations which have foresworn a nuclear capability of their own...
...policy makers become apparent...
...In Europe the balance of terror was made credible by a politicomilitary pact involving the presence of thousands of American soldiers, many of whom would die if nuclear bombs were dropped...
...For what India has in mind when it speaks of nuclear guarantees, and what the U.S...
...To be effective, a nuclear assurance would have to be credible to two groups of nations: those (such as India) whom we would desire to protect and to dissuade from going nuclear, and those whom we would like to deter (such as China...
...But the danger is real...
...Such a nuclear guarantee would not, however, be an alliance between either the guarantors or the nonnuclear signatories...
...Yet, as a national politician faced with increasingly militaristic pressures, Shastri must bring home a viable alternative to nuclear weapons or suffer the consequences...
...If a non-proliferation treaty were agreed upon today, India would be eager to be one of the first countries to adhere to it...
...President Johnson's assurance following the Chinese test in October 1964 ("Nations that do not seek nuclear weapons can be sure that, if they need United States support against the threat of nuclear blackmail, they will have it") promised unilateral, post factum consideration of nuclear support on a case-by-case basis...
...A nuclear assurance, in its simplest form, would be a pledge by one or more nuclear powers to retaliate against another nuclear power if it used its atomic weapons to attack a non-nuclear country...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 22
