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Pakistan’s nuclear programme: Double standards and selectivity
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Pakistan, like Israel and India is not a signatory to the nuclear NPT and neither are its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. Pakistan’s nuclear policy has been overwhelmingly influenced by competition with India. Its refusal to accede to the treaty was a consequence of Indian rejection of the NPT28. It emphasized that for the treaty to gain its adherence, it must be able to prevent all future proliferation. They warned that the treaty must ensure that there was no addition to the five nuclear power club of Britain, China, Russia, France and the United States. Once there was a sixth member there was proliferation29. India’s refusal to join the NPT combined with its 1974 nuclear explosion dramatically increased Pakistan’s effort to acquire nuclear weapons. Pakistan would not commit itself to the NPT unless India did the same. On May 11 and 13 1998 India undertook five underground nuclear tests. Pakistan followed suit the same year, in spite of international calls for her to renounce nuclear competition30. Since India and Pakistan are now fully fledged NWS both states have reached the post-proliferation stage. This however is totally against Article IX section three of the NPT which only recognizes NWS as those which exploded nuclear weapons before January 1 1967.
Pakistan has received assistance for its nuclear program from both NWS and NNWS which is a gross violation of Articles I, II and III of the treaty. The first supplies towards the development of Pakistan’s nuclear capability were from Canada in 1972, Germany in 1977 and 1987 respectively while the 30 high-frequency inverters for controlling centrifuge speeds were from Britain31. China also played a major role in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear manufacture, especially when Western countries’ stringent export controls made it difficult for Pakistan to acquire materials and technology elsewhere32.
This therefore brings to the fore the argument that Pakistan could not have developed a nuclear weapon potential without some nuclear equipment from both the NWS and NNWS parties to the NPT. To a large extent, the increasing dangers of nuclear proliferation caused by nuclear programs of non-members to the NPT were brought on by the very NPT members who assisted them, thus violating the very foundations of the nuclear NPT.
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The Americans are offering assistance to Pakistan to make its nuclear weapons more secure33. Such actions undermine Article I of the NPT. The Obama administration bases its argument on the increased instability in Pakistan which might one day lead to its nuclear weapons and stocks of nuclear explosives going in the wrong hands. Pakistan is also the United States ally in war against terrorism. It offered USA military bases to wedge war against Afghanistan in 2001 and it led the Americans to consider it for nuclear assistance, despite it not being a member of the NPT. Iran is not getting such assistance because it poses a threat to American interests in the Middle East. However, it can be argued that Pakistan is more unstable as compared to Iran and it cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. It therefore implies that the NPT is now being dwarfed by the interests of powerful states. Such actions will in the end erode the efficacy of the treaty in curbing nuclear proliferation in the international system.
Conclusion
This article has looked at the problem of selectivity on nuclear development in the international system. The major problem identified has been the failure of the NPT to stop nuclear proliferation to non-members of the treaty such as Israel, India and Pakistan. It is also very disturbing to note that some parties to the treaty such as Iran are not receiving the benefits provided by Article IV of the treaty which include the inalienable right to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination. These benefits are supposed to be promoted by denying non-parties to the treaty the advantages the NPT parties enjoy under the treaty. Participation in the treaty thus becomes unattractive because nuclear assistance is being sold for commercial profit or awarded as a political prize to prospective friendly states not necessarily NPT members. The on-going problems outside the NPT have rendered it neither the sole element nor the complete solution of all nuclear proliferation problems. The view that the United States of America should rely on a unilateral pre-emptive policy of counter-proliferation using military force when necessary is not an answer to the problem of proliferation of nuclear weapons. Issues of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons need cooperation and thus selectivity and double standards should be avoided.
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