May 28, 1998
CONTACTS: Seema Gahlaut and Gary Bertsch (706) 542-2985,[email protected]
WRITER: Steve Koppes (706) 542-5941, [email protected]
WORKSHOP ON INDIA-U.S. RELATIONS FORESHADOWED NUCLEAR CRISIS
ATHENS, Ga. - This past April 29 and 30, just 10 days before India conducted five underground nuclear tests, the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade and Security (CITS) organized an international workshop to explore the expansion of strategic cooperation between India and the United States.
"Most participants expressed dissatisfaction that the pace of change in the bilateral relationship remained slow even after the end of the Cold War," said Seema Gahlaut, a UGA doctoral student in political science. "Especially prescient was their warning that U.S. policy toward India continues to be essentially crisis-driven, such that both countries must aim to pre-empt such crises and ensure that the channel of communication remains open at all times."
Participating in the workshop were officials from the U.S. departments of State and Defense and from the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as experts from India. Organizing the conference with Gahlaut were Anupam Srivastava, Jyotika Saksena and Milind Thakar, all UGA doctoral students in political science.
India's nuclear tests should have come as no great surprise to the U.S. government, according to CITS Director Gary Bertsch. "The Indians signaled in a number of ways that this could happen," said Bertsch, a UGA political science professor. "We think the time is right to have some serious talks about how to keep the Indians from putting these weapons on missiles. That's what should be avoided and it can be avoided."
The CITS has two India research projects under way. The first, supported by the U.S. Institute of Peace, examines the strategic interests, goals and policies of India and the United States. The second project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, evaluates the economic, political and technological feasibility of initiating Indo-U.S. cooperation in advanced conventional weapons production.
In the past three years, the UGA researchers have made several trips to India to collect data on Indian export controls and weapons of mass destruction. They also have conducted interviews with a range of analysts in the policy community on the prospects of Indo-U.S. and Indo-Russian cooperation on issues pertaining to nuclear, space and defense technologies.
The spring issue of The Monitor, the center's quarterly publication on nonproliferation, demilitarization and arms control, will include a special section on the implications of the Indian nuclear tests.
UGA's India Project web page
The CITS monitors weapons proliferation issues in other parts of the world, as well. Last summer, for example, Cassady Craft found out how easy it was to transport supplies of weapons-grade uranium out of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
"This stuff is leaving the region or leaving Russia and going through the Caucasus,"said Craft, another UGA graduate student in political science. "It's an open road, basically, and it's going straight to Iran."
Craft was among five UGA graduate students from the CITS who fanned out across 10 nations of the former Soviet Union last summer to collect field data on export controls for weapons of mass destruction. Their findings will appear this June in a book on non-proliferation export controls in the former Soviet Union.
Titled "Arms on the Market: Reducing the Risk of Proliferation," the book will be published by Routledge (New York). Co-edited by Bertsch and Suzette Grillot, the center's assistant director, the book includes a foreword by Sam Nunn, former U.S. senator from Georgia who chaired the Senate's Committee on Armed Services.
"You don't see many studies on non-proliferation issues that incorporate the entire former Soviet region," Grillot said. "You really only see focus on the four nuclear inheritors - Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. So Grillot and her colleagues devised an original method for measuring export control development. Then they applied it to the former Soviet region, including several usually left out of such studies.
The book is part of a growing body of CITS research that is helping governments around the globe create effective policies to control the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and related technologies. The problems that beset the Republic of Georgia are typical of the former Soviet states.
When Craft was there last summer, the Republic of Georgia had about 17 1/2 pounds of weapons-grade uranium that would contribute greatly to Iran's nuclear program. At the time the uranium was protected by little more than a brick wall, Craft said. And from personal experience, Craft can attest to the ease of crossing the border: Whenever border guards would stop him and UGA colleague Dmitriy Nikonov, their drivers simply bribed their way through. "All we had to do was pay the equivalent of about $40, and we could have smuggled anything small enough to hide in a car out of the country," Craft said.
The uranium from the Republic of Georgia was airlifted to the United Kingdom for safekeeping several weeks ago, but the situation shows how much things have changed since the end of the Cold War. The Soviet government used to keep a firm grip on its vast nuclear arsenal and weapons industry. That ended with the fall of the Communist government in the early 1990s. "Everyone recognizes that we could be talking about the largest weapons proliferation in human history," said Gary Bertsch, the CITS director.
Keeping the Soviet nuclear capability from terrorist groups or rogue nations in the face of growing economic hardship, crime, corruption and political instability in Russia and the Newly Independent States presented a hazardous proposition. Nations throughout the former Soviet Union -- including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan -- had inherited nuclear weapons, research facilities and scientists.
In Ukraine, the Dnipropetrovs'k missile factory alone once employed 85,000 workers. The late Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev used to brag that Dnipropetrovs'k could produce missiles like sausages in a meat factory. Little internal demand exists today for the products of Dnipropetrovs'k and other critical facilities throughout the Newly Independent States. Many of the scientists who worked there can no longer pursue their specialties at home. "There's a great threat that they could use this technology to make missiles for countries like Iraq and Iran, or allow their missile know-how to be smuggled into these countries," Bertsch said.
Since its inception in 1987, the center has attracted more than $4 million in grants from organizations such as the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. The center received its largest grant ever from the Delta Air Lines Foundation last November. The grant, received jointly with the UGA Center for Humanities and Arts, was used to establish the Delta Prize for Global Understanding.
The late Dean Rusk, former U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, provided the vision that guides the center to this day. Rusk, then a UGA law professor, advised the center to emphasize research that world governments would find useful.
For example, Nunn and Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar consulted CITS scholars, among others around the country, before updating and expanding legislation known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. The program provided incentives that, among other successes, helped dismantle 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
More recently, funds appropriated for the program enabled the United States to buy 21 MiG-29 fighter jets from the former Soviet republic of Moldova. The transaction last November kept the jets, 14 of which were capable of carrying nuclear weapons, out of Iranian hands.
The center also has helped establish non-governmental research institutes in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The institutes work closely with their respective governments to educate privatized enterprises about export control and encourage them to set up their own internal compliance programs.
"When the entire defense industry was state-owned, everything was centrally regulated," said Igor Khripunov, CITS associate director, and a former high-ranking official of the Soviet foreign service. "Now, a considerable chunk of the defense industry is privatized, and enterprises have a lot of freedom in finding partners and negotiating with other countries." Often these enterprises export strategic goods without government knowledge.
The CITS is assessing the proliferation of weapons-related technology in Cuba and China, as well. Doctoral student Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado has visited Cuba four times since January 1996 to study its nuclear program. "I always get funny stares when I say, 'Cuba's nuclear program,' but the Cubans do have an active and diversified program for, as they say, the peaceful exploitation of nuclear energy," Benjamin Alvarado said.
China, meanwhile, could be the most worrisome nation in the 21st century, with its great economic and military potential, according to Bertsch. The CITS is working to establish teams of cooperating researchers in China like the ones the center already has in the former Soviet Union, Japan and other nations. The center's overseas counterparts have played critical roles in helping to document what really happens inside foreign governments regarding export controls.
"It's not a thing that most governments want to write up and put out reports telling all of the details," Bertsch said.
###
RSS