Antinuclear

The dangers of nuclear hubris, Praful Bidwai Thursday, Jul 25, 2013,   Agency: DNA Nuclear weapons and aggression always go together. So do nuclear weapons, hubris and machismo. Aggressiveness — and readiness to wreak mass destruction or inflict great cruelties upon an adversary’s civilians — lies at the heart of the nuclear weapons rationale, the acceptance and normalisation of their mind-numbing violence, and the development and deployment of such armaments, whether they are used or not.

Nuclear deterrence seeks security through terror, by threatening the enemy with “unacceptable” damage. As the Dr Strangelove film shows, nuclear scientists and experts quintessentially, yet naturally, imbibe deeply cynical, male-supremacist and pathologically aggression-prone attitudes. Many of them personally, literally, exude violence.

This mindset is often expressed in boastful and extravagant claims of nuclear prowess and “achievements”— having bigger and more warheads, more and longer-range missiles, and above all, having them first. This has nowhere been in greater evidence than in South Asia.

Beginning with Homi Bhabha’s famous 1964 broadcast, boasting after the Chinese nuclear test that India could develop a nuclear-weapons capability in 18 months, through Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s 1972 expression of resolve that Pakistan would “eat grass” but still get the Bomb, to the headlines of 1974 announcing India’s entry into the world’s “Nuclear Club”, composed of its most scientifically and technologically “advanced” nations, such claims and counter-claims have been integral to the often raucous strategic rhetoric exchanged between the two states.

The claims became particularly coarse and gross with Abdul Qadeer Khan’s 1987 revelation to Kuldip Nayar that Pakistan has the Bomb: “go tell them we have it………….. Both the Indian and Pakistan nuclear weapons programmes have liberally borrowed, bought or stolen imported technology and materials.