Nuclear deterrence is overrated

• The Indian Navy has figured in three recent, global news items.
• The launch of the indigenously developed aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant , expected to be operational by 2018, makes India only the fifth country after the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France to have such capability.
• The diesel-electric submarine INS Sindhurakshak caught fire and exploded, causing the tragic death of 18 crew. In the early hours of August 10, the reactor on the nuclear powered submarine INS Arihant (“slayer of enemies”), with underwater ballistic launch capability, went critical.
• Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, launched the 6,000-tonneArihant in Visakhapatnam on July 26, 2009. In time, it was said, with a fleet of five nuclear-powered submarines and three to four aircraft carrier battle groups, a 35-squadron air force and land-based weapons systems, India would emerge as a major force in the Indian Ocean, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.
• The strategic rationale is to acquire and consolidate the three legs of land, air and sea-based nuclear weapons to underpin the policy of nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, however, the whole concept of nuclear deterrence is deeply flawed.

Desensitised

• Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and hence uniquely threatening to our common security. There is a compelling need to challenge and overcome the reigning complacency on the nuclear risks and dangers, to sensitise policy communities to the urgency and gravity of nuclear threats and the availability of non-nuclear alternatives as anchors of national and international security.
• A nuclear catastrophe could destroy us any time.
• Because we have learnt to live with nuclear weapons for 68 years, we have become desensitised to the gravity and immediacy of the threat.
• The tyranny of complacency could yet exact a fearful price if we sleepwalk our way into a nuclear Armageddon. It really is
• The role of nuclear weapons in having preserved the long peace of the Cold War is debatable.
• How do we assess the relative weight and potency of nuclear weapons, west European integration, and west European democratisation as explanatory variables in that long peace?
• There is no evidence that either side had the intention to attack but was deterred from doing so by the other side’s nuclear weapons. Moscow’s dramatic territorial expansion across eastern Europe behind Soviet Red Army lines took place in the years of U.S. atomic monopoly, 1945–49. Conversely, the Soviet Union imploded after, although not because of, gaining strategic parity.
• Compared to the sophistication and reliability of the command and control systems of the two Cold War rivals, those of some of the contemporary nuclear-armed states are dangerously frail and brittle.
• Nor do nuclear weapons buy defence on the cheap: the Arihant cannot substitute for the loss of theSindhurakshak . They can lead to the creation of a national security state with a premium on governmental secretiveness and reduced public accountability. In terms of opportunity costs, heavy NPT
• The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) has kept the nuclear nightmare at bay for 45 years.
• The number of countries with nuclear weapons is still, just, in single digit.
• There has been substantial progress in reducing the numbers of nuclear warheads.
• But the threat is still acute with a combined stockpile of 17,000 nuclear weapons, 2,000 of them on high alert.
• The NPT’s three-way bargain between non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses is under strain. The Conference on Disarmament cannot agree on a work plan.
• The Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty has not entered into force. Negotiations on a fissile materials cut-off treaty are no nearer to starting. The export control regime was damaged by the India–U.S. civil nuclear agreement.

U N DAY

• The slave trade is said to be among the oldest trades in the world but that it was practised by the Dutch, during their sojourn at Pulicat in Tamil Nadu, from 1609 to 1690, may be news to many.
• Textiles and slaves were the most profiteering “merchandise” exported by the Dutch at Pulicat to their Indian Ocean trade headquarters at Batavia (Jakarta), in exchange for rare spices like nutmeg and mace.
• Slaves were sought for spice and other cash crop plantations in Batavia and also to work as domestic helps for Dutch masters.
• Hence, only those in the age group of eight to 20 were preferred for “export” from Pulicat, the nodal port on the Coromandel Coast.
• On the Coromandel Coast, the Dutch had two means of procuring slaves, either purchasing them from their parents during natural calamities like droughts, poor harvests and famines or capturing them during cultural calamities like invasions.
• During calamities the price of a slave child was 3/4 pagoda (four guilders) whereas in times of good harvest, the price was14-16 pagodas (27-40 guilders), which the Dutch traders said was “uneconomic.”
• The Indian agents of the Dutch often kidnapped passersby in the market place, so that local youth were mortally afraid of frequenting public places in Pulicat and even ran away to the nearby forests.
• Between 1621 and 1665, 131 slave ships were deployed by the Dutch to export 38,441 slaves to Batavia from Pulicat. Apart from the annual quota of about 200-300 slaves, waves of mass exports took place during calamities. For instance, 1,900 slaves were sent from Pulicat and Devanampatnam (near Cuddalore) during the 1622-1623 famine, and 1,839 slaves were sent from Madura during the drought of 1673-1677 to Batavia.
• Small boys and girls from Thanjavur were sent to Ceylon, Batavia and Malacca. Finally, between 1694 and 1696, from Thanjavur, 3,859 slaves were sent to Ceylon. Invasion by the Bijapur sultan during l618-1620 saw 2,118 slaves from Thanjavur, Senji (Gingee), Madura, Tondi, Adirampatnam, Kayalpatnam (near Tuticorin), Nagapatnam and Pulicat exported to Ceylon, Batavia and Malacca.
• Slaves were huddled together in poorly ventilated slave ships and were sanctioned a daily ration of uncooked rice to eat with sea water!
• One-third or even half of such shipments of “pieces of human cargo”, as the Dutch called them, died in transit due to dehydration, gastro-intestinal problems and epidemics. Dutch physicians on board were not familiar with tropical diseases.
• The Portuguese on the west coast of India were the European pioneers in slave trade during the late 15th century. They migrated to Pulicat on the east coast in 1502, a 100 years before the arrival of the Dutch.
• At Pulicat, the Portuguese constructed two churches in Madha Kuppam which still exist. They converted local people to Catholicism and educated them through the Portuguese language.
• Indian slaves lodged in the eastern suburbs of Batavia, called Mardijkers, were said to be Portuguese speaking Catholics, betraying their Pulicat origins.
• The Portuguese, who converted and educated them, would not have exported them as slaves and it was the Dutch in later days that exported them.
• However, Portuguese traders (chatins), in collaboration with the Magh pirates from Arakan (Burma), used armed vessels (galias) to capture Bengali slaves from the Chittagong (Bangladesh) estuaries and exported them to Batavia.
• From the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, a great many stalwarts in England campaigned against slave trade.
• Chief among them were the poet William Cowper (1731-1800); ex-slave Olandah Equiano (1745-1797) from Nigeria; John Henry Newton (1725-1807), former slave trader turned Anglican clergy and author of the popular hymn “Amazing grace”; British MP William Wilburforce (1759-1833); and John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of the Methodist Christian Mission.
• William Cowper wrote in 1785: “We have no slaves at home — Then why abroad? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud. And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And, let it circulate through every vein.”

Sources: Various News Papers & PIB