Pakistan's five nuclear tests announced yesterday are a dangerous escalation of nuclear competition in the South Asian region, but hardly a surprise following India's five tests earlier this month. They pose severe questions to the two states most immediately concerned, to the five existing nuclear states which are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and to the non-nuclear international community concerning how best to proceed now that these facts have been so established. The key issue involved is whether it will be possible to return to the status quo ante without raising the wider relationship between nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament.
There is a great contrast between responses to the tests in India and Pakistan and in the rest of the world. Domestic opinion in both states has been almost uniformly favourable on grounds of national pride and international realpolitik. The established nuclear states have been most condemnatory - several of them among the first to impose sanctions. They warn quite correctly that extending the range of nuclear states makes the world inherently less stable and more dangerous. But they are curiously mute about their own monopoly of nuclear weapons and whether it should continue to exist if these risks are to be diminished.
This continued absence of substantive gestures towards real nuclear disarmament makes it more difficult to argue a strong case that India and Pakistan should desist from their tests and arms race. This was the nub of negotiations when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was renewed in 1995. It gave India the excuse to refuse to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the following year.
Given the refusal of the nuclear states to make a commitment to such disarmament, as advocated by Ireland, South Africa and several Latin American states, the question arose of whether it was better to sign an imperfect agreement or hold out for a more principled one. The Government reluctantly decided at the time to support the Non-Proliferation Treaty as the better option, while pointing out its inherent flaws. This latest crisis underlines the importance of those debates. It should not be forgotten that both France and China conducted a series of tests before signing the agreements in order to ensure they could continue to simulate explosions with computers.
In the meantime, the world community must come to terms with the dangers that flow from these tests. There seem to be two stark options facing all concerned. In one scenario India and Pakistan, having established parity on testing and ostensible deterrent capacity, would proceed to negotiate a stable non-nuclear military balance - but only, presumably, on the basis of a commitment by other nuclear states to do likewise. Alternatively, the escalation will continue, drawing in missile technology, soaking up all too scarce resources in these two populous and still developing states and fuelled by a deeply disquieting escalation of nationalist rhetoric. It is difficult to see a convincing third way, in which a halt would be imposed by sanctions and international pressure, without real gestures from existing nuclear states towards dismantling their own capacity to use these horrendous weapons.