India Explodes A Nuke--And Our Illusions

The tremors from India's nuclear explosions had barely subsided before the finger-pointing in Washington began. Where was the CIA? Don't our spooks know anything?

Good questions, but a distraction from the main point: Why are the President and his State Department reduced to head-shaking stupefaction because a rising country of a billion people wants entry into the nuclear club? If India's blast is evidence of an American failure--a dubious proposition--it is a failure not of intelligence but of imagination.

For five years this Administration has been monomaniacally focused on producing, strengthening and expanding treaty after treaty to cure the ills of the world. A signature for every plague--chemical weapons, biological weapons, antiballistic missiles, nuclear tests.

The cure for the latter, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, came in for particularly lavish attention and praise from President Clinton. "The longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in arms-control history," he called it.

John Holum, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, was even more hyperbolic. Less than two months ago, he urged the Senate to ratify the CTBT, calling it a "historic opportunity ... to finally ban nuclear-weapons testing of any size by anyone anywhere forever."

Tell that to India. Holum's view of what parchment can achieve--anyone anywhere forever?--is beyond grandiose. It is silly.

Clinton knew that both India and Pakistan were resisting the treaty. But treaty men are hardly deterred by such realities. The mere act of signing by the big powers and others, Clinton told the U.N. General Assembly, "will immediately create an international norm against nuclear testing, even before the treaty formally enters into force."

Here in pure form is the Clinton doctrine: peace through norms. Build the norm, and they--the recalcitrant of the world--will come. They may not sign, but they will be constrained by the moral force of an international consensus they dare not defy.

What a vision. What an illusion. For countries like India, there are things more important than norms. Power, for example. Better still, thermonuclear power.

But the will to power is a notion utterly alien to the gentlemen and ladies of the Clinton Administration. What a retrograde, common idea. In the world of geoeconomics and globalization, of international community and cooperation, of trade and togetherness, how primitive--how zero-sum--these dreams of power.

Easy for us Americans to say, of course. We already have power, indeed, the pre-eminent power in the world. And we've had it for a half-century. No wonder our elites are so bored with it, so enamored of treaties and conventions and all manner of devices that bind the world into a community of exemplary self-restraint, so contemptuous of mere striving for power and so shocked when that atavistic urge explodes in India, taking their cozy little illusions with it.

To India, there is nothing obsolete about raw military power. It lost a humiliating war to China in 1962. It sees a palisade of Chinese nuclear missiles aimed at India. It sees China clandestinely supplying Pakistan, India's arch-enemy, with nuclear technology. Hence the bomb: to deter China, intimidate Pakistan and generally assert itself as a great power.