Abstract
India's nuclear doctrine and public debate
India's “draft nuclear doctrine,” hailed by Uday Bhaskar (“Squaring The Circle,” November/December 1999 Bulletin), rests on weak foundations. Its weakness stems primarily from the government's exaggerated claim to have mastered nuclear weapons and commercial power technologies.
The self-seeking scientists and politicians in India have not given the Indian people any meaningful opportunity to know the true and complete picture of the status of India's nuclear ventures.
Uday Bhaskar says that India's draft nuclear doctrine “represents the first attempt, however tentative, at articulating new thinking in Delhi.” But every word in the doctrine that conveys a worthwhile concept or construction is borrowed from known foreign sources who labored over the years to coin them in preliminary as well as final form.
Moreover, on the main points one sees nothing new. India has been all along voicing the same points mentioned in the preamble and the body of the doctrine—that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is discriminatory and that there should be global, verifiable, and non-discriminatory nuclear disarmament.
Even though India has yet to make sufficient progress to be counted as a nuclear weapon state, India's government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, declared India a nuclear weapon state after the May 1998 nuclear tests. But this self-proclaimed status does not justify the doctrine's reference to India as having a credible nuclear deterrent. It is common sense that credible nuclear deterrence is an unlikely product of a nuclear establishment whose own credibility is suspect. For that nuclear establishment to hide from the public its lack of credibility by using a veil of secrecy is in fact a criminal offense under the statutory laws prevailing in India and the provisions of the Indian constitution.
The first Indian hydrogen bomb test in May 1998 failed completely, yet it was called a grand success. In response to my articles in The Hindu (May 20, 1998) and in a national magazine, Frontline (June 19, 1998), describing the failure of the hydrogen bomb, questions were raised in Parliament. There were no satisfactory replies.
Other cases also demonstrate the lack of credibility of the Indian nuclear establishment. For instance, three successive designs for the nuclear submarine propulsion plant, developed during 1971-80 by the nuclear establishment, were analyzed by the navy and found to be unsuitable. All three were dropped, one after another. Subsequently, the Indian navy has been prevented from analyzing the nuclear section of the submarine propulsion plant. The nuclear submarine project is now an open-ended project, described as going forward at a pace the navy and the nation are compelled to treat as “affordable.”
Uday Bhaskar is happy to say, “In the 54 years of the Nuclear Age, no [other] nuclear weapon state has ever released a preliminary doctrine in a manner expressly designed to inspire public debate and input.” But if he intends to emphasize the words “public debate” and “input,” he has failed to consider the debate's hollow premises and the doubtful use of the input that may flow from it. Neither does he caution his fellow citizens that the debates in Parliament are in no way suited to pointing out the weaknesses of the nuclear doctrine and the pretensions of the senior nuclear scientists.
The people of India have a constitutional right to know the truth, but their concern over the nuclear status of Pakistan makes them ready to accept even the below-average progress of the nuclear establishment. Probing questions are treated as unpatriotic. And the people of India have yet to realize that the pretense of progress and the lack of accountability of the nuclear establishment and the Defence Research and Development Organisation are the biggest threats to their country's security.
The use of the terms “no-first-use” and “minimum deterrent” in the doctrine also invites comment. The makers of the doctrine, it appears, are not even clear whether “affordable” decides the “minimum,” or if there is an absolute “minimum,” the “affordabili-ty” of which needs national debate. Neither the conduct of Pakistan nor even the relative strength of China will be the sole vector field to decide for India this absolute “minimum.”
The originators of the term “no-first-use” are the Chinese. It is surprising that the Chinese, self-acknowledged pragmatists, should coin and propagate such a meaningless term.
Why is it meaningless? Even if we assume for the sake of argument that every nuclear power agrees to put its signature to a no-first-use agreement, every power also has the right under the U.N. Charter to violate it, because the Charter says it also has the right to take all the steps it considers necessary for its security.
Buddhi K. Subbarao
New Mumbai, India
The DU dispute continues
“After the Dust Settles,” by Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel (November/December 1999 Bulletin), is an interesting but overly theoretical look at the problematic use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions.
In general, the article downplays the possibility that more than a few hundred veterans or civilians could be suffering health problems as a result of inhaling or ingesting dust created by the impact of depleted uranium ammunition. There are several problems with this assessment.
First, there are no reliable dose reconstructions for Gulf War veterans and civilians who climbed on and entered contaminated equipment. For years, the Pentagon asserted that not one Gulf War veteran could have inhaled enough DU dust to cause any health problems, but congressional investigators recently discovered that the Pentagon has no data or research to support its position. The article similarly offers some theoretical inhalation estimates, but this approach fails to take into account the reality of the post-war environment.
Seven years after Desert Storm ended, the Pentagon finally admitted that “thousands” of Gulf War veterans might have been exposed to depleted uranium contamination without any respiratory protection. Based on my research, I believe tens of thousands of veterans encountered DU under a wide range of circumstances. Some veterans spent considerable amounts of time on and in contaminated equipment, while others had fleeting exposures that nonetheless involved the re-suspension of depleted uranium dust.
The article oversimplifies DU's hazards by assessing theoretical exposures to the theoretical “standard man.” However, inhaling 20 milligrams of depleted uranium would likely have very different effects on a 250-pound man, a 150-pound woman, and a 50-pound child. Furthermore, the recent revelation that the Energy Department's depleted uranium stockpile and the ammunition made from it is likely contaminated with plutonium and other transuranics adds a dimension to this issue not even considered in the article.
Disappointingly, the article failed to discuss the disturbing findings of military studies of mice implanted with du pellets. Preliminary studies found that the depleted uranium deposited primarily in the kidney and bone, and to a lesser degree, in the brain, testes, lymph nodes, and other organs. Du also crossed the placenta of pregnant female mice and deposited in the fetus. Observed health effects included neu-rocognitive problems and decreased litter size in mice born to DU-implanted females. In vitro studies found du induced mutagenicity and cellular changes that may lead to cancer.
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A study of American male veterans wounded by du fragments found depleted uranium in veterans' semen, abnormal reproductive hormone levels, and neurocognitive problems. Unfortunately, the Pentagon has refused to conduct epidemiological studies to determine the possible relationship between depleted uranium and the health problems affecting tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans.
Another of the article's flaws is its failure to discuss the issue of cleanup. The Pentagon's current policy is to shoot depleted uranium, withhold information and warnings from civilians and relief agencies, and deny responsibility for any cleanup of contamination. Credible reports from Iraq and Kosovo describe children innocently playing on contaminated equipment, from which adults diligently salvage usable parts and scrap metal. The article suggests filling contaminated tanks with concrete and burying them, but the Pentagon refuses to accept any such measure of responsibility for remediation in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Puerto Rico.
The article appropriately derides self-proclaimed du “experts” (in particular the International Action Center), who irresponsibly attribute wideranging cancers and birth defects to depleted uranium. On the other hand, the Defense Department has proclaimed du “extremely safe” and inexplicably denied the possibility that even one American veteran, let alone any Iraqi civilians, could be suffering any health problems as a result of exposure to DU.
In between the extremes of the Pentagon and the International Action Center is a middle ground reality acknowledged in the article: the use of depleted uranium ammunition creates radiotoxic dust that may pose health risks to soldiers and civilians. Unfortunately, the article devotes too much attention to theoretical calculations and spends too little time evaluating medical research and the real-life experiences of the veterans and civilians who were unknowingly exposed to depleted uranium.
Dan Fahey
National Organizer, Military Toxics Project Washington, D.C.
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Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel reply: The purpose of our article was to estimate the magnitude of the DU exposure problem as a response to the hysteria generated by groups such as the International Action Center.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government did not make timely measurements of the exposures of U.S. soldiers. Absent such data, all we can do is make rough estimates. These estimates are good enough to establish that exposures to people who did not enter vehicles struck by DU munitions would not have been large enough to cause the health effects in southern Iraq that have been attributed by some to DU.
We did not disaggregate the population into different weight, gender, and age groups because we found that the doses for people who did not enter struck vehicles were too low for such refinements to make a difference to our conclusions. Moreover, the trace quantities of plutonium and other transuranics that may have been in the DU would not have significantly increased our dose estimates.
As we state in the article, exposures to people in vehicles struck by DU munitions or who entered such vehicles for long periods without respiratory protection and stirred up DU dust could have been high enough to cause some health effects. We do not know how large this population is.
Fahey writes that “tens of thousands of veterans encountered DU under a wide range of circumstances.” If he has evidence that a significant fraction of these exposures were large enough to cause health effects, he should publish it.
Soldiers who were in struck vehicles, and particularly those who have shards of DU in their bodies, are members of an at-risk population that should be monitored. There should also be further research on the ill effects that might be expected and the significance of the effects that have been observed.
If the United States is to continue to stockpile DU munitions, it should understand the risks associated with their use and follow-on activities, set cleanup standards, and train personnel accordingly.