Busting a myth

India’s nuclear expansion is not just an emerging threat for Pakistan but also for world peace and security

The double standard that exists for India’s nuclear programme is perhaps more real than we assumed. According to Dr Mansoor Ahmed, a post-doctoral fellow at Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard-Kennedy School, a bias in favour of India’s nuclear expansion is palpable. India’s nuclear expansion, as is imagined in our country, is not just an emerging threat for Pakistan but also for world peace and security. India wants to become a major global player for which it is exponentially expanding its nuclear capabilities. The central pillar of that strategy is to produce larger quantities of fissile material stockpiles, which are not covered under IAEA safeguards. This is an emerging threat for developed countries such as China and the United States within the next decade or so.

Dr Ahmed’s report elaborates upon all the arenas in which India’s blatant nuclear development goes largely unnoticed. India is, so far, the only country after the US to have tested a nuclear device made of reactor-grade plutonium, which makes its unsafeguarded civilian nuclear facilities a source of concern for others. Our neighbour is still actively engaged in completing a full nuclear triad and modernising its conventional and strategic nuclear forces to concurrently face the prospect of a two-front war with China and Pakistan. It is also expanding and improving its existing reprocessing capability for its unsafeguarded civilian and military research, power and breeder reactors. India is the only non-NPT nuclear weapon state that is engaged in a large-scale expansion of its reprocessing capacity, primarily rationalised by plans to construct a growing fleet of breeder reactors.

What deserves further scrutiny is that the global focus remains fixated on Pakistan owing to a narrative that it has the world’s fastest growing programme, but Dr Ahmed clarifies that this is simply untrue.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 30^th, 2017.

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