By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Potential nuclear weapons states, including India and Pakistan, may jump into a big power arms race unless the new US president comes up with “an array of initiatives”, former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott has warned.
Talbott had held a high-level, covert diplomatic dialogue with then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh after India’s second nuclear test in May 1998.
President George W. Bush’s successor will be assuming responsibility for the most difficult, dangerous and complex set of foreign-policy challenges ever to face a newcomer to the White House, said Talbott, now president of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Whatever is then happening in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab-Israel peace process, it is safe to predict Bush will, in each case, be passing on to his successor either a daunting piece of unfinished business or a full-blown crisis, he said.
“To make up for lost time, the next administration should undertake an array of initiatives, starting with one directed to Moscow,” said Talbott in an article titled “Trouble Ahead for the Next US President” in the Financial Times Magazine.
Drastic reductions in American and Russian nuclear stockpiles are important as an example to other countries, he said, suggesting that the US also resume negotiations with Russia on anti-missile missiles.
“Unless the next administration comes up with new, negotiated means of averting an unregulated offence-defence competition, we are likely to see Russia and China respond by deploying additional intercontinental missiles and taking a variety of measures to overwhelm, penetrate and blind US defences,” Talbott said.
There could eventually be a similar trend among potential nuclear weapons states, he said, noting that there are a growing number of countries in that category.
Talbott said: “The 1990s, the first post-cold war decade, could turn out also to have been a prelude to the post-NPT (Nuclear Proliferation Treaty) era, and it will be one of nuclear anarchy.
“Today there are nine countries with nuclear weapons: the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and, presumptively, Israel. Over the next decade or so, though, a dozen or more other countries might blast their way into the club.”
The bilateral animosities that might trigger “small” nuclear wars already include India-Pakistan and North Korea-US, he said. In the relatively near future, that list could include Iran-Israel, Israel-Egypt, Iran-Saudi Arabia, China-Taiwan.
“To make matters worse, the more nations that have nuclear weapons, the greater the risk that some will fall into the hands of sinister non-governmental organisations, or non-state actors such as Al Qaeda.
“Therefore, the NPT needs to be supplemented by new agreements and enforcement agencies that will keep tight control over lethal technology,” Talbott said.
The US should work with all the current nuclear-weapon states to impose a moratorium on the production of fissile material, pending a formal, verifiable, universal and permanent ban, he said.
“To attain that goal, America should join its principal allies and partners in direct, sustained negotiations with Iran and North Korea to bring them back into the NPT as fully compliant non-nuclear weapons states,” Talbott added.
Hard as preventing a spiral of nuclear proliferation may be, it is easy compared with stabilising climate change, Talbott said, noting that the next US president will have less than four years to play a decisive role in the design of an effective successor to the Kyoto treaty expiring in 2012.
The US must do this through diplomacy and by example, he said, noting in order to slow down the rate at which the earth is warming, the US, the European Union, Russia, and nine other countries – the so-called “dirty dozen” that account for 80 per cent of the problem – will have to accept drastic and mandatory cuts in emissions.
Half of the countries on that list are considered “developing”. Under the Kyoto Protocol, they get a pass on binding reductions. The Big Three are India, China – whose giant populations and thriving economies make them major greenhouse gas emitters – and Brazil, the leading source of greenhouse gases produced by tropical deforestation.