Washington Post

WASHINGTON: The Clinton administration has discovered no carrot, no stick, no argument persuasive enough to pry India and Pakistan loose from the declared nuclear power status they seized last May. After nine months of venting outrage and alarm, America and its allies are settling into a quiet, conditional accommodation of Asia's new nuclear realities.

They do so reluctantly, and outwardly determined to punish India for the damage it does to the orthodoxy of global nonproliferation and for provoking Pakistan into copycat nuclear testing.

The US and India are engaged in a bruising test of wills over the meaning of power in world politics today. India's chauvinistic Bharatiya Janata Party government is determined to reap political influence domestically, regionally and at the United Nations from its new status as a declared nuclear power. The United States is determined to prevent that from happening.

In its private messages to Washington and other capitals, India has clearly stated an absolute determination to move from testing to developing and maintaining "a minimal deterrent'' - that is, a small number of warheads and nuclear-capable missiles. It maintains that these weapons would be trained not on Pakistan but on Chinese cities to deter an attack from America's "strategic partner,'' China.

"We do not seek parity in nuclear weapons with any country, and we do not seek an arms race in our region,'' Brajesh Mishra, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's national security adviser, told European and American defense officials at the Munich Security Conference this month.

European diplomats report that India has put strong emphasis in private as well on the limited military nature of its nuclear strategy. But Mr. Mishra hinted at his country's much broader political ambition by predicting to the Munich audience that "in the 21st century a new security order is likely to arise in the Asia-Pacific region,'' in which India should be granted as much respect and deference by the United States and others as is China today.

India's stress on minimal deterrence has made it easier for Washington to come to terms conceptually with the military implications of the Indian testing. This new mood of accommodation in Western capitals on military essentials is signaled, although not acknowledged, in a forthcoming magazine article by the administration's point man on this crisis, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. He writes in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs: "Having India and Pakistan stabilize their nuclear competition at the lowest possible level is both the starting point and the near-term objective of the US diplomatic effort. ... The Clinton administration does not expect either country to alter or constrain its defense programs simply because we have asked it to.''

Mr Talbott is concentrating on winning agreement from New Delhi and Islamabad to halt testing, to stop producing fissionable material and to refrain from deploying nuclear-capable missiles. "Strategic restraint'' will be rewarded with a further relaxing of US economic sanctions, and other concessions including a long-delayed visit from President Bill Clinton, the article indirectly suggests.

The tone of Mr Talbott's article is much sharper in rejecting suggestions by "some Indians ... that their country's new, self-declared status as a nuclear power enhances its claim to permanent membership on the UN Security Council.'' He adds, "The United States disagrees.'' He then lays out the argument that India must not be rewarded politically in any way for its open defiance last May of the NPT.

New Delhi has already indicated privately that it is willing to formally renounce nuclear testing and to halt the production of fissionable material. But India wants to be satisfied that the West will then recognize, at least implicitly, its right to a minimal deterrent. Mr. Mishra and others say India wants an end to the nonproliferation treaty's hypocrisy of granting a seal of approval to America, Russia, China, Britain and France for developing nuclear weapons before 1968, and denying legitimacy to anyone whose testing came after the treaty was signed.

But the Indian testing is not the only development in this decade that underlines the dysfunctional morality on which the treaty is based. The treaty's ineffective inspection system and toothless enforcement were exposed by the discovery of Iraq's advanced nuclear program. Nor has the treaty deterred Iran, Libya and others from energetically seeking a bomb, or Israel from building a powerful nuclear arsenal that it has not acknowledged.

The growing realization among most other nations that nuclear weapons are too expensive and dangerous for them to maintain has become the true cutting edge of nonproliferation. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have dismantled arsenals or development programs in this decade for reasons of national interest, not because of treaty provisions.

The treaty's own limitations have done as much damage to its noble aims as have India's tests. A crusade to punish India politically for being the messenger of a new and uncertain nuclear era that challenges the established nuclear order may be temporarily satisfying, but it is likely to be as untenable as were the initial US outrage and diktats of last May. (WP Svc)