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The News International July 02, 2004 Steps for nuclear talks by Zia Mian, A H Nayyar, R Rajaraman, M V Ramana It is talking time again. Pakistani and Indian government officials met in New Delhi on June 19 and 20 to talk. The Foreign Ministers met briefly in China on 21 June, the Foreign Secretaries will apparently talk sometime in late July, and there are suggestions of a possible summit meeting between President Pervez Musharraf and India's new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But while talking is better than fighting, it is important to remember the fact that India and Pakistan have met and talked many times since the 1999 Lahore summit, where the Prime Ministers claimed that they shared "a vision of peace and stability between their countries, and of progress and prosperity for their peoples". Leaders on both sides seem to recognise that their nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles cast a dark, potentially fatal shadow over the future of both countries. India's new Foreign Minister Natwar Singh recently declared, "To me personally, the most important thing on our agenda should be the nuclear dimension". President Musharraf claims, "We have been saying let's make South Asia a nuclear-free zone". He also suggested, "If mutually there is an agreement of reduction of nuclear assets, Pakistan would be willing". These are hopeful indications. The two states shared a "positive framework, aimed at taking the process forward, and making them result oriented". The only new measure is another hotline, this time linking the two foreign secretaries, through their respective foreign offices, "to prevent misunderstandings and reduce risks relevant to nuclear issues". There are several hotlines already. J N Dixit, a former Foreign Secretary of India and newly appointed as National Security Adviser reports in his book "India-Pakistan in War and Peace" that in November 1990 Prime Ministers Chandra Sekhar and Nawaz Sharif met during a Saarc Summit in Male, and "decided to establish a direct hotline. They also took a decision to activate the hotline between the offices of the foreign secretaries and the directors of military operations". In Mr Dixit's judgement, "hotline conversations between the director-generals of military operations remain routine and the prime ministerial hotline has seldom been used, as has the hotline between the two foreign secretaries". Both India and Pakistan have emphasised repeatedly that they seek only a "minimum" nuclear arsenal. President Musharraf's remarks about Pakistan's willingness to consider a "reduction of nuclear assets" makes it clear that this threshold has already been crossed. Pakistan and India have been making the fissile material (the nuclear explosive) for their weapons, as fast as they can for decades. The table below shows the casualties that would be inflicted if they each used only five of these weapons against the others cities (assuming each weapon is about the same size as those tested in May 1998). A total of 2.9 million deaths are predicted for these cities in India and Pakistan, with an additional 1.5 million severely injured. The experience of death and destruction on this scale would be beyond imagination for either country. The two countries should stop making more fissile material. And, no more of the existing fissile material stockpile should be turned into nuclear weapons. It is clear that weapons like those tested in May 1998 are destructive enough to kill hundreds of thousands of people in the subcontinent. This has not been enough to stop India and Pakistan continuing with research and development on nuclear weapons. Like other countries with nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan seek to make their nuclear weapons more destructive and compact. In the recent meeting, India and Pakistan repeated their unilateral declarations to conduct no further nuclear weapons tests. At the same time, neither seems willing to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the 1996 international agreement banning explosive nuclear weapons tests - which has been signed by all the other nuclear weapons States (US, Russia, Britain, France and China, as well as Israel), and by 166 other countries. India and Pakistan's reluctance is hard to understand. Their joint statement says each State will refrain from nuclear testing "unless, in exercise of national sovereignty, it decides that extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests". This conditionality is already stated in Article 9 of the CTBT, which allows a state to withdraw from the Treaty, and by implication carry out a nuclear test. Therefore, India and Pakistan would lose nothing by signing this Treaty. By formally joining the Treaty, India and Pakistan would help ensure that the international community is better placed to restrain any nuclear weapons state, or would-be nuclear state, from carrying out a nuclear test. These unimaginably destructive nuclear arsenals killed and injured an uncounted number of people through radioactive fallout and contaminated the environment for centuries to come. It was to stop this that the CTBT was created. Now, even though it is a signatory to the CTBT, US nuclear weapons laboratories and nuclear hawks are seeking new nuclear weapons for use against third world countries. The Lahore agreements and the announcement of the new hotline recognises that despite the best laid plans and supposedly foolproof technology, accidents do happen. In particular, the two governments committed themselves in Lahore to "reducing the risks of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons". The two sides also agreed in Lahore "to notify each other immediately in the event of any accidental, unauthorised or unexplained incident that could create the risk of a fallout with adverse consequences for both sides, or of an outbreak of a nuclear war between the two countries, as well as to adopt measures aimed at diminishing the possibility of such actions or incidents being misinterpreted by the other". The new hotline is meant to address the first part of this agreement. The two States should go on and agree to draw up together a list of all the possible "accidental, unauthorised or unexplained" incidents that they would like the other side to tell them about Advice on nuclear issues, in both India and Pakistan, is dominated by the nuclear weapons complex, the military and the foreign ministries. Because they deal with nuclear weapons, this advice is shrouded in secrecy. Experts they may well be, infallible no one is. To find a way forward, both governments would do well to seek out other perspectives, ask for second opinions outside the government establishments to develop new ideas, and encourage an informed and open public debate. It will be no easy path from our present nuclear-armed confrontation to the "peace and stability, progress and prosperity" promised at Lahore and so far denied. We must walk it together with courage and conviction. The writers are all theoretical physicists - Zia Mian is at Princeton University, USA; A H Nayyar at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad; R Rajaraman at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; and M V Ramana at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore _________________________________ SOUTH ASIANS AGAINST NUKES (SAAN): An informal information platform for activists and scholars concerned about Nuclearisation in South Asia. 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