I write this from Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, where parliamentarians and civil society representatives from over 60 countries have gathered to mark the 25th anniversary of the day (29 August 1991) when newly-independent Kazakhstan voluntarily gave up the fourth-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and closed down the nuclear test site at which the Soviets had conducted 456 nuclear explosions, causing huge environmental damage and producing uncounted numbers of genetically disfigured children who carried through their lives, brief or long, the hideous scars of four decades of enabling the Soviet Union to catch up with the massive death-dealing machines of the United States. At its height, the nuclear arms race had led to the piling up of enough stockpiles of nuclear weapons to wipe every living thing (except cockroaches!) off the face of the earth, not just once but 51 times over.
I am here as co-president of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament principally because I was in the Prime Minister's Office when Rajiv Gandhi launched at the United Nations in 1988 - a last desperate bid to end this madness. The Action Plan for a Nuclear-Weapons-Free and Nonviolent World Order that he presented to the international community remains, 28 years on, the only detailed roadmap ever prepared by a Head of Government to show how, in phases spread over 22 years, the world could move towards a universal, non-discriminatory and verifiable international regime of eliminating weapons of mass destruction. To sustain such a new world order, he urged the establishment of an international security order based on Mahatma Gandhi's principles of Nonviolence - a word he spelled without a hyphen to emphasize that it was not a negative concept but a positive, constructive approach based on the highest values of our Freedom Movement.
The Action Plan sank without a trace and drove Rajiv Gandhi to the path that he had warned about - the inevitable transition of threshold nuclear weapon states like India and Pakistan
over the threshold and on to the other side if nuclear weapon states did not fulfill their treaty obligation (under article VI of the NPT) to cap, reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons from their arsenals. We went nuclear and are now poised on the edge of an abyss: if Lahore were to be destroyed by nuclear bombs, the radiation would hit Amritsar within eight minutes and Delhi within a week. Of course, the American and Russian stockpiles constitute 95 per cent or more of the world's nuclear weapons. So unilateral nuclear disarmament by India or Pakistan or even both would make little difference to the global dangers of this vicious twisting of scientific genius to the technological ability of destroying in a matter of minutes thousands of millions of years of evolution and millennia of civilization. The road forward has to be multilateral disarmament involving all the member-states of the United Nations, including those with nuclear weapons, those who huddle under the nuclear umbrellas of others, those on the edge of becoming nuclear weapon powers, and those who do not at present have the scientific, technological and economic resources to join the club of evil.
That is why so relieved was the world when Obama, at the start of his first term, announced in Prague - albeit in guarded terms - his intention of working towards a nuclear-weapons-free world for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - the first time anyone has been given the Prize for an aspiration, not an achievement. Eight years on, Obama has little to show for his Nobel Prize. Obviously, he has tried to move but been blocked by the military-industrial-political-and-intellectual complex that has hugely profited from the hundreds of billions of dollars spent every year on maintaining and improving America's Weapons of Mass Destruction (which are about ten thousand times larger than Saddam Hussein was alleged to possess).
Obama himself seems aware of his unfulfilled promises. Therefore, hot rumour in informed Washington circles has it that instead of going into a shell in his last few months in office, as has been the usual practice of his predecessors, Obama seems to be preparing to announce a dramatic new "no-first-use" nuclear security doctrine before he demits office. For fear that this will probably be rejected by the Senate or even both Houses of Congress, alternative scenarios are being projected, but none of these is likely to bind his successors. Nevertheless, some progress towards justifying the Nobel Prize is on the cards.
Meanwhile, the UN's Open Ended Working Group, set up to end the years-long impasse in the UN's Conference on Disarmament where Pakistan is blocking any discussion on a proposed Fissile Materials Cut-Off treaty and the US, in retaliation, is refusing to allow discussion on anything else that might be meaningful, has just passed by a huge majority a resolution requesting the UN General Assembly to recommend the commencement of UN-led negotiations by next year at the latest on the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, the Modi government decided to keep out of the Open Ended Working Group, thereby decisively ending the leadership position that India has held in disarmament matters since Independence. The saving grace is that the Modi government is tenuously maintaining the thread of continuity to the Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan. It invoked the RG Action Plan in its defence in the International Court of Justice where India has been arraigned, along with other countries that have conducted nuclear tests, by the Marshall islands (in the Pacific) that the US used as its Kazakhstan for testing out hundreds of nuclear weapons. Also, the BJP representative at the current Astana conference referred to the Action Plan (carefully excluding Rajiv Gandhi's name) in his intervention here.
There is thus the outside possibility that India might yet retrieve itself in the UN General Assembly, convening in New York next month, if we were to play an active and constructive role on the Open Ended Working group's recommendations instead of hanging on to the coat-tails of the United States as Modi is inclined to do.
The most recent issue of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved its "Doomsday Clock" to three minutes to midnight, the closest the world has come since 1983 to nuclear catastrophe. India should be the sentinel waking the world to these dangers and backing Obama (allegedly our "Major Defense Partner" to go by last June's Modi-Obama joint statement) in his bid to not be a "lame-duck" President, but one who makes a decisive difference in his last weeks as President.
Will we rise to the occasion? That is the question.
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is former Congress MP, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.