Pakistan's nuclear tests could represent major failure for Clinton

U of Ideas of General Interest -- June 1998 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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POLITICAL SCIENCE
Pakistan's nuclear tests could represent major failure for Clinton

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Pakistan's nuclear tests on May 28, in apparent response to India's testing earlier in the month, could represent "the biggest foreign policy failure of the Clinton administration," says Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on South Asian security and nuclear issues.

"They have been warned that something like this could happen for the past five or six years, but they pursued a policy of ignoring the region. When they did pay attention to it, they offered sanctions rather than inducements to contain the nuclear arms race," said Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois and member of its Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security.

The administration "is left with a situation that is much worse than any of us had predicted and could well deteriorate further without any American influence in the region," Cohen said, adding that "political instability within both countries is going to make it very hard for either country to manage what appears to be a nuclear arms race. The risk of an accident or miscalculation, which always has existed, is much greater now than before."

Meanwhile, Jeremiah Sullivan, an expert on technologies for arms-control verification, calls Pakistan's reactive testing "a tactical defeat," but the big picture is the most important thing, he said.

"Unless the rest of the international community unites now and puts great attention on this problem, we're heading for a very serious and dangerous situation. We can't undo what has happened in South Asia but we can be much more aggressive in preventing that from spreading elsewhere.

"It makes all the more important that the U.S. Senate gives its advice and consent to the ratification of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and the other nuclear states should do so promptly as well."

Compounding the situation is the confusion surrounding India's tests. The claims and the evidence about the second round of tests "don't add up," said Sullivan, a physics professor at the U. of I, a member of ACDIS and author of a Physics Today lead article on international verification networks.

According to Sullivan, "the fact that the international seismic network did not detect any signals at all on May 13 is incomprehensible. Nearby stations should have picked signals up without any trouble." Sullivan speculates that India's May 13 tests may have been "failures or fakes or had yields far below what Indian scientists reported." It will be weeks before the international academic seismic community "is confident enough to make a clear-cut statement on yields" from both country's tests.

Cohen, who in March led a series of dialogues between leading U.S. and Indian strategic and nuclear experts, argues that if India and Pakistan "proceed to active, overt, declared deployment," U.S. policy "will have to be diverse and flexible, and move away from the 'one size fits all' approach that has recently characterized American non-proliferation policy, and which may have had the consequences of hastening the Indian tests, rather than discouraging them."

News stories about India's tests, and essays and studies dealing with proliferation in South Asia are posted on the ACDIS Web site: http://acdisweb.acdis.uiuc.edu/.

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