N-weapon hasn't enhanced India's security: Aiyar

Posted by Unknown Monday, October 18, 2010

New York: Testing nuclear weapon has not enhanced India's national security, veteran diplomat and Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar has said, noting that Pakistan also acquired the atomic bomb within three weeks after the Pokhran II.

"We had a strong conventional military advantage over Pakistan....the minute we became a nuclear weapon power....it took Pakistan three weeks to become a nuclear weapons power themselves," Aiyar said, who is at the United Nations to speak on the issue of nuclear disarmament.

On the necessity of having nuclear bombs since Pakistan had them, Aiyar told PTI that that India's security hadn't been enhanced by acquiring these weapons.

He said India always remained in the vanguard of the movement for nuclear disarmament but lost its traditional position on the issue in the past 22 years as it had to conform to the voices of other nuclear powers, the Congress leader said.

"Even since we have become a nuclear weapon power ourselves ... there seems to be a certain ambiguity as to how pro-active we should be in regard to nuclear disarmament," Aiyar told agency.

"India always remained in the vanguard of the movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons?it is a position we have tended to lose the past 22 years," he continued.

"We should strive and pro-actively to our traditional position."

Aiyar further pointed out that India was being held back in pursuing its "traditional position" since now it had to conform to the voices of other nuclear powers, which was not the case in 1982 when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi laid down the Action Plan for a Nuclear-Weapons- Free and Nonviolent World Order.

The Action Plan sets 2010 as the date by which the world would have been rid of nuclear weapons, and that is reason Aiyar decided to speak at the UN on that forgotten deadline set 22 years ago.

"Having become a nuclear weapon power there is a desire that our postures in regard to the international discussions on nuclear weapons should be more in conformity with the nuclear weapons powers than asymmetrical to that position," Aiyar said.

"I have continued to take an interest in this matter, which is disproportionate to the interest that the government of India is taking at the moment," he added.

Responding to whether the new US-Russia agreement to cut down their nuclear arsenal would move the world towards fuller disarmament, Aiyar said "It?s good but it's not disarmament."

"It is the reduction of hostility between the two powers who share between them perhaps 90 per cent of the entire nuclear arsenal of the world," he added.

"It is a reflection of the reduction of the danger of nuclear war breaking out between these two major powers."

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