An important piece of the international legal jigsaw that protects the world from nuclear weapons is in danger of falling through following India's formal decision not to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The treaty, under intensive negotiation in Geneva for the last eighteen months, can survive this setback as a formal text; but without unanimous endorsement, most notably by India, one of the three so called threshold nuclear states along with Pakistan and Israel, it runs the risk of being severely spancelled, opening the way to a possible resumption of nuclear tests if international conditions deteriorate. This is, therefore, bad news for those who shad hoped that legal constraints could be used as incremental stepping stones to an eventual nuclear free world.
As in all international negotiations bearing on sovereignty the draft treaty calls for difficult compromises on the part of those states whose interests are most affected by it. The five existing nuclear states - China, Britain, France, Russia and the United States were called upon to make commitments to nuclear disarmament in return for having the existing inequality in the holding of these deadly and powerful weapons recognised by the international community. In the event they refused to give very categorical undertakings along these lines. This is one of the main reasons why the Indians have rejected the draft treaty: bit would consolidate the current distribution of international power by preventing other states from testing nuclear weapons.
More important from India's point of view, the requirement that it, as a threshold nuclear state along with Israel and Pakistan, must sign the treaty before it would come into force, could lock it into a permanent inferiority compared to its nuclear armed neighbours - Russia, China and nuclear capable Pakistan. It is clear that there is more to the Indian refusal to sign than meets the eye. Both Pakistan and Israel may well have been content to leave the running to India, in the knowledge that they would be left freer by a failure to achieve consensus. Iran has in recent days made explicit similar objections by a number of non Western states that the dice were loaded against them in these negotiations. Last year an indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty was pushed through by the West partly based on the promise that it would be capped by a test ban treaty this year. It has not escaped attention that the French and Chinese nuclear tests were explicitly intended to provide the technical wherewithal to continue developing such weapons with computer simulations. There is a suggestion of bad faith because the commitment to nuclear disarmament is so weak among the existing nuclear states.
The danger is now that the alternative procedural means under discussion, other than a unanimous reference of the draft treaty to the United Nations through the Conference on Disarmament, would leave it open to amendment and potential unravelling. A better approach would be to redouble efforts to secure a more clear cut undertaking to nuclear disarmament from the five nuclear states, which might encourage the Indians to think again.
