The question of nuclear disarmament has always given rise to diverse, if not opposite reactions. Commentators have described the positions of different nations (and sometimes within the same nation, as it is the case for India) as oscillating between two extreme: Vision and Realism. The work of the diplomats dealing with the subject in the UN and elsewhere is to build a bridge between the two. Not an easy task!
Take India. Former President KR Narayanan quoted in his memoirs a statement made in 1946 by Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister of the Interim Government. Nehru said: “As long as the world is constituted as it is, every country will have to devise and use the latest scientific devices for its protection. I hope Indian scientists will use atomic power for constructive purposes. But if India is threatened, she will inevitably try to defend herself by all means at her disposal”.
“As long as others have the means to destroy her, [France] will need to have the means to defend itself.” “”Charles de Gaulle
At the same time, the new Indian government, which had championed the principle of non-violence against the British, was keen to show to the world that conflicts could be solved without recourse to force.
The above quoted statement notwithstanding, most of the first leaders of Independent India had, like Nehru, a strong ideological slant towards non-violence.
The following story, reported by General AA Rudra in his memoirs1 gives an insight on the way the Indian Prime Minister considered India’s defence shortly after Independence. General Sir Robert Lokhart, the first Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army had drafted a first paper on the threats to India’s security. The paper contained recommendations for dealing with the newly independent nation’s security and defence policy. When General Lokhart took this paper to Nehru he was told: “Rubbish. Total Rubbish. We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. We foresee no military threats. Scrap the Army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs.2”
According to General Rudra, the Pakistani invasion of Kashmir saved the Indian Army: Nehru was forced to change his mind when Pakistani raiders entered the Valley and started looting and pillaging. Nehru realized that the Prime Minister’s duty was to defend India’s territory and the nation’s borders3.
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This dichotomy remained vis-à-vis the nuclear weapon and it was only 14 years after the ‘China’s War’ that a first test was finally conducted in Pokhran (Rajasthan). During the following years, the Indian government continued to walk the thin path between non-violence (and global disarmament) and regional compulsions4; in other words, between Vision and Realism.
The First Steps in India
The history of nuclear research and development is indeed full of contradicting (and often opposing) actions. In India, the first steps had been taken by Dr Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a closed friend of Nehru in 1944, when he proposed to the Sir Dorab Tata Trust5 to create a nuclear research institute.
“¦the Pakistani invasion of Kashmir saved the Indian Army: Nehru was forced to change his mind when Pakistani raiders entered the Valley and started looting and pillaging.
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was created in December 1945 with Bhabha as its first Director. An Atomic Energy Act was passed on 15 April 1948, opening the way to the establishment the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC).
The attitude of Jawaharlal Nehru was unambiguous, all options should be kept open: “We must develop this atomic energy quite apart from war — indeed I think we must develop it for the purpose of using it for peaceful purposes …Of course, if we are compelled as a nation to use it for other purposes, possibly no pious sentiments of any of us will stop the nation from using it that way.6”
BM Udgaonkar of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in a paper entitled India’s nuclear capability, her security concerns and the recent tests explained: “This note of ambivalence in Nehru’s speech foreshadowed his policies on nuclear research for the next decade. Nehru took a prominent role in international politics, founding the Non-Aligned Movement, and advocating nuclear disarmament. However, he refused to foreclose India’s nuclear option while other nations maintained nuclear arsenals and supported programs designed to bolster India’s weapons potential.7”
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Very early, Nehru knew of the work of the French scientists. Being “anxious to help in every way in developing atomic energy in India”, he decided to send Dr Bhabha unofficially to Paris to enquire about the possibility of collaboration for the peaceful use of atomic energy: “In view of the fact that India possesses very large resources of minerals suitable for the generation of atomic power, India is destined to play an important part in research on atomic energy in cooperation with other countries. We would like to welcome this cooperation, more specially in Great Britain, Canada and France.”
Being “anxious to help in every way in developing atomic energy in India”, he decided to send Dr Bhabha unofficially to Paris”¦
Homi Bhabha had extremely cordial contacts with Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Raoul Dautry, the first heads of the French Atomic Energy Commission8, founded in 1945. At that time, Joliot-Curie was working on two materials: beryllium and thorium. Interestingly, Nehru who advocated the program ‘Atoms for Peace’, saw the nuclear collaboration as discriminatory: “Why should countries with colonial territories use raw material looted in these colonies for their research”, he thought?
In the decades to come, ‘discrimination’ remained the core of the Indian position when the question of disarmament (or signing the NTP) came up in world bodies. It remains a major issue in the nuclear negotiations between the West and Delhi today.
Year 1954
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was the brilliant slogan coined during the French Revolution. Ever since, in the mind of every French person, from successive Presidents to ‘common men’, the triple-mantra has always had a deep resonance.
In France, the first part of the revolutionary slogan, ‘Liberty’ often translated into a fiercely independent foreign policy, whether it was under the Fourth9 or Fifth Republic10.
In 1954, the Indian nuclear program began to move in a direction that would eventually lead to the establishment of nuclear weapons capability.
As early as 1952, some senior French Army officers thought of the atomic bomb as the best tool to win a war or at least to deter opponents to attack France. However, it is only in 1954 that French politicians realized the extent of US control over the NATO Alliance and the consequence for France if it wanted to pursue an independent foreign policy.
An example: in the first months of 1954, while Paris was still attached to its colonies, Washington advocated self-determination for all Asian and African nations. For Paris, this was a real problem. The only issue on which France and the US could see eye-to-eye seemed to be the menace coming from the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950’s with France just recovering its economic autonomy after the destruction brought by WWII, the French perceived themselves as under American dominance.
As a Secret Report on the French Nuclear Tests (La Génèse de l’organisation et les experimentations au Sahara) put it: “The strategic weight of the United States on the Alliance (NATO) was exorbitant. France could not successfully oppose the German rearmament; [but] an alternative appeared which could favorably help compensating this. The idea was [for France] to develop a force of nuclear deterrence while the same right would be denied to Germany under the terms of the Paris and London Agreements of 1954.”
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On August 20, 1954, Pierre Mendes-France, the French Prime Minister (président du conseil) ordered a report on “the constitution of a nuclear arsenal by the European Army, which would give (Europe) the possibility to play again a main role in the direction of the Alliance”. The title of the report ordered by Mendes-France was “La Guerre Atomique, Etude d’une doctrine des Forces aéroterrestres” (Atomic war: study of a doctrine for terrestrial and airborne forces).
Nehru was in a very sombre mood, and had said to senior members of his delegation that after his talks with Mao, he was pessimistic about relations with China, and foresaw a conflict in the future.
A few days later, the government decided to study the possibility of a ‘national’ nuclear force as the idea of a European Defence Community had just been rejected by the French Parliament11.
On October 2212, the Prime Minister issued a secret decree13 creating the Commission Supérieur des Applications de l’Atome (High Commission for the applications of the atom).
At the end of the year14, an important Cabinet meeting, chaired by Mendes-France took place in Paris. It was decided to go for a French atom bomb. The meeting requested the relevant authorities to prepare a budget and plan for the next steps. This date is still considered as the birth of the French nuclear program for military use.
On 28 December a Bureau d’Etudes Generales (Bureau of General Studies) was created with General Albert Buchalet as head to start the program. In 1955 the Defense Ministry (Ministre des Armées) began transferring funds in large amounts to the program.
Interestingly, it is also during the year 1954 that things took a concrete shape in India. On 3 August 1954, the Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was created with Dr Bhabha as Secretary. This department thereafter answered directly to the Prime Minister; it still continues to do so today. Both the civil and military research was on track.
In 1954, the Indian nuclear program began to move in a direction that would eventually lead to the establishment of nuclear weapons capability.
The Bomb as a Paper Tiger
To complete the panorama of Year 1954, it is interesting to mention an event which may have triggered the announcement of Rajiv Gandhi in the UN in June 1988: it is the visit of his grand-father Jawaharlal Nehru to China in October 1954.
The Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 was far away and seemed unlikely in 1954 in the hey-day of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai.
Several years ago, while reading the memories of Sultan Khan, a former Pakistani Ambassador to China (and later Foreign Secretary), I was greatly intrigued. This visit should have marked the culmination of the Hindi-Chini Bhai-bhai15 policy, but Nehru seemed extremely disturbed during his stay in Beijing. According to Khan: “Sino-Indian relations continued to get closer, and Nehru received a very warm welcome on his visit in 1954. A few days after his visit, the Indian Embassy held a reception at which I overheard an Indian diplomat, who had acted as Nehru’s interpreter, telling some of his colleagues that just before his departure from Shanghai, Nehru was in a very sombre mood, and had said to senior members of his delegation that after his talks with Mao, he was pessimistic about relations with China, and foresaw a conflict in the future. The Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 was far away and seemed unlikely in 1954 in the hey-day of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai. I do not know on what basis Nehru foresaw this.”
Later, when I read The Private Life of Chairman Mao, written by his private physician, I understood Nehru’s ‘sombre mood’.
According to Dr Li Zhisui, Mao blew Nehru’s pacifist mind (and probably broke his heart). Dr Li recalled the encounter during which Mao explained that the atomic bomb was a paper tiger: “I did not immediately understand, because it was so hard to accept, how willing Mao was to sacrifice his own citizens in order to achieve his goals. I had known as early as October 1954, from a meeting with India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that Mao considered the atom bomb a ‘paper tiger’ and that he was willing that China lose millions of people in order to emerge victorious against so-called imperialists. ‘The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,’ Mao told Nehru. China has many people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.”16
Continued…: France & Nuclear Disarmament between vision & realism-II
Notes
- Quoted by K Subrahmanyam in an article in The Times of India (8 May 1997) “Arms & the Mahatma.” This is extracted from the biography on Maj Gen AA Rudra written by Maj Gen DK Palit.
- See http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nehru-wanted-to-scrap-army-former-general/19211-3.html
- Fifteen 15 years later, India was far from being prepared when the Chinese troops attacked and descended the slopes of Thakla ridge on October 20, 1962, but it is another story.
- See letter from Vajpayee to Clinton after Pokhran II. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/VajpayeeLetter.txt.
- Dorab Tata was Bhabha’s uncle.
- See http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/IndiaOrigin.html
- See http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jan25/articles20.htm
- Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA).
- The Fourth Republic was the government of France between 1946 and 1958. France adopted the constitution of the Fourth Republic on 13 October 1946.
- The Fifth Republic is the fifth and current republican constitution of France. It was introduced on 4 October 1958.
- On August 30, 1954.
- It was the day the elected representatives of Pondicherry met and decided on a ‘merger’ with the Union of India. It will be officialized on November 1, 1954 (de facto merger).
- It was not published in the Journal Official (Gazette).
- On December 26, 1954.
- “Indians and Chinese are brothers”.
- Li Zhisui, Dr, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (London: Arrow, 1996), p. 125.
Continued…: France & Nuclear Disarmament between vision & realism-II
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