Why India and U.S. Agree to Disagree Over Nukes

Nuclear weapons and the danger of renewed hostilities with Pakistan may have been the most pressing of President Clinton's concerns on his India trip, but they were never going to be the issues on which he made substantial progress. Against the backdrop of a massacre of some 40 civilians in Kashmir by suspected Pakistan-backed Islamic militants, India's Prime Minster Atal Behari Vajpayee and President Clinton held talks in New Delhi and pretty much agreed to disagree on matters nuclear, even as they vowed to strengthen their relationship and hold regular summits. Vajpayee reiterated India's policy of maintaining a "minimum nuclear deterrent" but vowed that New Delhi would avoid further bomb testing — although he has no plans to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, just yet — and would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in any conflict. But containing rather than reversing the South Asian arms race may have been about the best President Clinton could hope for, particularly after his own Senate failed last year to ratify the CTBT. India's nuclear weapons are more of a statement of New Delhi's claim on big-power status than they are an example of saber-rattling against Pakistan. India, for example, wants permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, and that status has only ever been conferred on nuclear-armed states.

The latest killings in Kashmir simply highlight the difficulty of managing India-Pakistan relations. While President Clinton said they underlined the need for dialogue with Pakistan, Mr. Vajapayee warned that "we have the will and the means to eliminate this menace." There's considerable pressure in New Delhi to punish Pakistan for the low-key anti-India insurgency it helps sustain in Kashmir. So what Clinton recently described as "the most dangerous region in the world" is likely to stay pretty dangerous, although the President hopes to make the danger more manageable by strengthening Washington's relationship with leaders on both sides. More important, Washington doesn't want those dangers to stand in the way of its relationship with a country that represents the world's fifth largest economy in terms of buying power but accounted for less than 1 percent of world trade in 1998. (Even then, of course, India is emerging as the largest exporter of software and computer know-how to the United States.) In the end, the point of the President's India trip, to borrow Mr. Clinton's '92 campaign mantra, may once again be the economy, stupid.