Would You Trust a Country That Named Its First Nuke Test ‘Happy Buddha’?

India is surrounded by a Terrorist Country called Pakistan, worlds most dangerous communist nuclear proliferate country called CHINA, unstable countries like Sri Lanka, Bangaldesh and Burma.

China invaded India in 1962, Pakistan invaded India 4 times in 1947, 1965, 1971, 1999, Bangladesh is pushing Pakistani terrorists daily into India.

China has Nuclear weapons, Pakistan has Nuclear weapons.

Now when India is surrounded by so many rogue states, Pakistan sold Nuclear weapons to North Korea, Iran, Libya and China sold Nuclear technology to Pakistan.

India has to have Nuclear weapons to survive. India needs to safeguard its Space assets from China.

People who talk about Hypocrisy should talk about Security Council and NPT and CTBT.

Why and how did Israel acquire nuke power? It got the technology from the West ..US,UK,France,Norway. What was the IAEA and the NPT members doing then? The same thing happened when China transferred the technology to Pakistan , who in turn made deals with Libya,North Korea and Iran like a nuclear walmart. What were the NPT members doing then? Having created the monsters , why feign ignorance and make it appear that it is India has started it all. Preach what you practice. India has told this many times. It is no use talking like a saint , just do your Google search and rewrite an article on , how the NPT failed , because the West refused to play by the rules.

To answer your question, Yes I would. Why would I not trust India?
“Non-Aligned Movement”? Looks like you are still stuck in the cold war mentality.

If China, which is one of the worst profilerators of Nuclear weapons technology (they practically gave nuclear weapons to Pakistan and North Korea) is considered a “responsible” nuclear power, then certainly India is.

Let’s see if the West which already has an adversarial relationship with the Islamic world and China wants one with India also. India’s GDP will be $4.5 Trillion by 2020 and likely $40 Trillion by 2050. I don’t think Western “human rights” organizations will be lecturing India much then, do you? The European ones especially will have their hands full with growing Islamic militant population within their borders. Why is Europe which commited most of the world’s world human rights atrocities in the last few hundered years the loudest proponent of these “human rights” lectures.

Russ Wellen ignores significant issues:

1. The tests were officially named “Shakti I” and “Shakti II”. “Smiling Buddha” was a secret code-name only, which the Western media propagated (possibly to paint India as a rogue state.). Likewise India’s missiles are named “Prithvi” (Earth), “Agni” (Fire), Sagarika (Ocean), etc. Very harmless Sanskrit names.

It is Pakistan, which actually names its nuclear missiles as “Ghauri”, “Ghaznavi” and “Babur”. These are the names of Islamic invaders who massacred Hindus.

What does that say about the relative intentions of each nation?

2. It smacks of intense hypocrisy for others to start sermonizing India that being the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism to not develop nuclear weapons. Does Wellen mean that nations that practice pacific religions are less entitled to nuclear weapons than others?

3. India developing anti-satellite weaponry is highly speculative. However, China has already tested such a system in 2007, introducing 2,317 pieces of space debris. The US too has such a system in place. So if India were developing one (hypothetical), what’s so bad about India’s system alone?

4. India has only 60-80 nuclear warheads, which is smaller than China, UK, Israel and even Pakistan (SIPRI 2010 report). Is that a sign of “belligerence”?

5. Why exactly is India a “rogue”? China and India have similar security concerns, and a large tract of land is in dispute between them. Yet China has conduced 40 nuclear tests, has 240 warheads, proliferated to Pakistan, and not become a rogue? Surely Wellen cannot deny that the NPT is discriminatory.

Russ – I take your points about the bankruptcy of the current non-proliferation regime. It is absolutely true that the Bush administration gutted the NPT as soon as it decided to let India out of the nuclear dog house and secured India’s country-specific exemption from the NSG. After doing that, it makes it much harder to strengthen the NPT or enforce sanctions against Iran. But you misrepresent or elide the real reasons the Bush team did this. And you also miss some crucial differences between India and other “rogue states”:
India, as you say, never signed the NPT. But Iran did. And that is why it is still logically consistent to impose sanctions against Iran and combat its attempt to develop a nuclear program, while allowing India to possess nuclear weapons. (In fact, this is the position that Indian diplomats take on this issue.)
What’s more, even though it never signed the NPT, India – like Israel, but unlike Pakistan or North Korea — has a fantastic record on non-proliferation. There is absolutely no evidence India has ever tried to transfer or sell nuclear weapons technology to a third party. Meanwhile, Pakistan had A.Q. Khan – who was basically selling plans and equipment for an enrichment cycle and bombs to whoever would pay. The Bush people who gutted the NPT did so intentionally not inadvertently and they did so for reasons I will explain in a moment. But India’s actual proliferation record was clearly part of it.
You cite Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana as claiming that the reason the US decided to embrace India as a nuclear power and seek an NSG exemption for them was that U.S. multinationals wanted to use it as a wedge to open India up for further business. But this isn’t the main reason behind the Bush administration’s policy toward India’s nuclear program: instead, its stance was part of a larger effort to position India as a capable, strategic regional rival to China. The idea is that a stronger India would serve as a check on Chinese dominance in the region. And making India more equivalent with China meant creating an India with both nuclear weapons, and a viable nuclear power industry to make sure it has adequate electricity to meet its power and infrastructure develop goals. Also, the good will generated by the nuclear deal, was supposed to drive Delhi into Washington’s embrace, making it a more vital regional ally which could be counted on to support the US both in the region and in international bodies.
Overall, the Bush administration viewed foreign policy not through traditional, realist “balance of power” politics that focuses on state’s “capabilities,” but through a focus on state’s “intentions.” (In this way, it actually borrowed quite a lot from the school of American foreign policy that is usually labeled “idealist.” This is an insight that my friend Peter Scoblic points out to great effect in his indictment of conservative foreign policy, “Us Vs. Them.”)Interestingly, the NPT, while often seen as the achievement of dovish, idealist, peacenicks, actually takes as its premise a hard-headed, realist focus on capabilities. Intentions don’t come into it. The Bush people though, decided that this was one of the reasons the treaty did not work. It lumped India, which had never been guilty of proliferating, in the same camp as Pakistan, which was selling nukes to all comers. And where was the danger of loose nukes ending up in the wrong hands greater: in Pakistan (which is facing a multi-front civil war with various sets of Islamic extremists while the intelligence services work hand in glove with other Islamic terrorists) or in Russia (which is part of the NPT as a nuclear power but which has a lot of unsecured nuclear material and which has a class of under-employed, impoverished, and mercenary scientists and military officials and a huge organized crime problem) or India (where, despite the country’s poverty and sometimes poor security, there is absolutely no evidence of either proliferation on the part of Indian scientists or any evidence that nuclear material is likely to fall into the wrong hands)?
So the Bush administration — one could argue rightly or wrongly — decided to focus on risks and intentions, and not on mere capabilities. I personally see some real downsides to this approach. But I don’t think you strengthen your case Russ by misrepresenting India’s record or the rationale the Bush administration used when it pushed for India’s NSG exemption.
After all, there is something wrong when Russia is considered a good guy when it comes to proliferation and India is considered a bad guy. And when Pakistan and India are held to be equivalent on this issue. (India and Pakistan are great rivals, but this is not some he said-she said, where both sides are equally to blame. Pakistan is by far the more worrisome country and while it is fine to say that Pakistan can never be reformed so long as it sees a threat from India, it is unfair to shift the burden for changing this perception entirely on to India’s shoulders. Pakistan needs to be convinced that it has far more existential threats within its own country than any threat posed by India.) Perhaps it would be better to allow all these “rogue states” to join the NPT as nuclear powers, but then commit the entire world through the NPT to a disarmament program aimed at a true, nuclear-free future. But of course, that would require the US (and China and Russia) to be willing to give up their nuclear deterrent entirely. And that’s not going to happen, is it?

The West is on the decline. Some of the old guard still think they can lecture everyone else. If you still think that, better get it over with in the next couple of decades, because after that no will be listening to you as the global world order goes through a massive transformation.
As for your assertion that India is favored over Pakistan…For decades Pakistan was strongly backed by the U.S. and the West including giving them a huge amount of military aid and a massive quantity of the latest weapons. For this gesture, Pakistan stabbed the West in the back by harboring terrorists and proliferating Nuclear weapons (AQ Khan network). That’s the main reason the West doesn’t support Pakistan anymore. As for India, it was considered a basket case that will “never amount to anything”. Big strategic miscalculation on the part of the West. Even today many Westerners (probably yourself included) don’t think India’s economy will reach it’s full potential. Let’s see who is correct.
If the UN security council stays like it is with declining powers like UK and France, it’s going to look really outdated and may even become irrelevant if states like India are kept out of it.

Russ, how ignorant of you! Hope you realize it after reading the may comments. What happened to balanced reporting and/or analysis ?
If you claim its not ignorance, then it definitely comes across as a deceitful analysis.

Thank you all for your helpful and informative comments. Will just clarify two issues.

1. You’ve no doubt noticed my mistake in using the phrase “happy Buddha” in the title when it should be “smiling Buddha.” I noticed it right away, but it causes problems for the administrator to change it.

2. I hold all nuclear-weapons states in equal contempt. The United States, for example, is no less blameless than North Korea or Pakistan.

Russ Wellen:

1. Your mistake (“Happy Buddha”) reflects the frivolous way you wrote the above article.

2. You say you hold all nations in “equal contempt”. Unless your past articles reflect that fact, you stand accused of mendacity.

3. One country:
(i) has 5,000 nuclear warheads,
(ii) conducted over 1,000 tests including in a Micronesian island that was rendered inhabitable,
(iii) proliferated to Israel,
(iv) deployed nuclear weapons in other countries,
(v) conducted joint nuclear tests, threatened other nations with nuclear weapons in spite of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in July 1996,
(vi) is the only one to have actually used nuclear weapons in war,
(vii) stands in violation of the spirit of NPT,

while the other country,
(i) maintains a smaller arsenal than even its unstable neighbor in spite of being 7 times the size,
(ii) has yet to develop ICBMs despite having geostationary satellite launching capability, and a mission to the moon,
(iii) never proliferated even the smallest amount of nuclear knowhow,
(iv) has suffered from backbreaking sanctions,
(v) has a declared no-first-use policy,

and you still hold these two nations in EQUAL contempt????

Even Daryl Kimball, George Perkovich and the rest of the nuclear Ayatollah’s would disagree!

Russ,

Strange of you to harp on the phrase “Smiling Buddha” when the original US nuclear test was named “Trinity”.

But more to the point, India has never proliferated nuclear weaponry to anybody, while Pakistan has clearly spread its Chinese-gifted warhead design over to Iran, Libya and North Korea along with nuclear enrichment centrifuges and their designs.

India is a responsible and restrained democracy living next to two belligerent, autocratic and aggressive neighbors – Pakistan and China. The NPT is flawed because it has allowed signatory Iran to busily accumulate nuclear weapons technology right under its nose while planning for the day when it would make a quick all-out dash across the nuclear threshold.

The reason NPT is to blame for this, is because NPT allowed China to be a protected privileged member of the treaty while not being an actual signatory to it or abiding by it. The NPT came into force in 1968, but China only signed it in 1992! Uptil then, China busily proliferated to Pakistan which then proliferated to Iran and North Korea. Meanwhile responsible countries like India which didn’t proliferate were left out in the cold. This is the Original Sin that NPT was born in, and why it was stillborn – you’ve only just now noticed how cold its corpse is.

Furthermore, China has continued to proliferate nuclear and missile tech to Pakistan even after 1992 – as they have with their other client state, North Korea. Notice how both of these client states – both twin fists of China – have ramped up their terror attacks on their neighbors, due to the luxury of being able to hide behind their respective nuclear shields. India is nothing like these rogue states.

“2. I hold all nuclear-weapons states in equal contempt. The United States, for example, is no less blameless than North Korea or Pakistan.”

What Hogwash! Why then is your site not filled with articles contemptuous of the US, or the P5, or even of China who has a clear record of nuclear proliferation?

If you can write one article on India, that too based on incorrect knowledge and dubious logic, the US deserves at least a hundred.

India is just a soft target, and you leftist nutjobs wouldn’t dare criticize your commie friend the PRC.

That’s right. These socialist wannabe do-gooders like Russ Wellen will suck up to China and the Islamic world while dissing American potential ally India and real ally Israel.

China has been stealing nuclear technology including MIRV designs and neutron bomb blueprints from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Sandia National Labs. Do the names Wen Ho Lee and Peter Lee names ring a bell?