India's nuclear program - brief history

The Indian nuclear program was started in the mid-forties, around the time it gained independence from over two centuries of British rule, and soon after the United States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both these factors had a powerful impact on Indian leaders, who saw India's technological backwardness and military inferiority as the main causes of colonization over two centuries ago. It was therefore natural that India would also follow the dominant power at the end of the Second World War, the United States, which relied on nuclear technology for energy as well as defense.

  From the very beginning, the Indian nuclear program was ambitious and envisaged having indigenous capability for covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Over the years, apart from nuclear reactors, India also developed facilities for mining Uranium, fabricating fuel, manufacturing heavy water, reprocessing spent fuel to extract Plutonium and, more recently, enriching Uranium. During the early years, though only a part of the infrastructure needed to manufacture nuclear weapons was in place, the program never lost sight of the possibility that the facilities constructed and expertise gained could be used for military purposes. The strategy used, perhaps not intentionally, were remarkably close to something that Robert Oppenheimer said in 1946 while responding to a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons.

  "We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: We would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the production of atomic weapons saying, this is just in case somebody two-times us; we would stockpile uranium; we would keep as many of our developments secret as possible; we would locate our plants, not where they would do the most good for the production of power, but where they would do the most good for protection against enemy attack."

 Several countries, like the U.K., Canada and the U.S., offered technical help to India's fledgling nuclear program. The framework for U.S. aid was the Atoms for Peace program, initiated by Eisenhower to forestall criticism of the use of atomic energy for military purposes and to wean away third world countries from the Soviet Union. As part of this initiative, the U.S. offered $80 million as a low interest loan towards the cost of the first Indian nuclear reactor at Tarapur, constructed by General Electric. As it became clear that China was developing a nuclear bomb, there was even a proposal that the U.S. help India conduct a nuclear test.

In a 1961 memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, George McGhee, Director of the Policy Planning Council, suggested that assisting India to test a nuclear device first was one way to reduce the political impact of a Chinese bomb. Rusk did not approve this idea, in part, because India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was likely to reject it. At the same time as the development of its nuclear infrastructure was going on, India under Nehru also tried to change the world so that it was not necessary to develop nuclear weapons.


As a champion of the non-aligned movement, Nehru had made several disarmament proposals. Prominent among them was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In a proposal dated April 8, 1954, he requested the nuclear weapon states to negotiate: "Some sort of what may be called `Standstill Agreement’, in respect at least, of these explosions, even if arrangements about the discontinuance of production and stockpiling must await more substantial agreements among those principally concerned." The reactions to this proposal from the two superpowers of the day are worth recalling. The Soviet Union said that the proposal made sense only in the context of general and complete disarmament, a linkage that is even more ambitious than the one that India gave when it rejected the treaty in 1996. The United States first said that the proposal was worth of "respectful attention." But Eisenhower, the president at that time, was soon persuaded by Lewis Strauss that a ban on nuclear explosions was not in the US interest.

 Nevertheless, the proposal, coupled with worldwide concern about the dangers of radioactive fallout, galvanized opposition to testing. It resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. India was one of the first countries to sign it. Despite the buildup of nuclear infrastructure, Nehru’s avowed opposition to nuclear weapons as well as India’s recent history of non-violent struggle for independence under Mahatma Gandhi, ensured that there was never any support for developing nuclear weapons.

Three events mark the shift in India’s nuclear program during the early sixties.  
           The first was the completion of a reprocessing plant at Trombay and the CIRUS research reactor, which gave India the ability to extract plutonium and thus to make nuclear weapons. 
           The second was the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. While encouraging the development of a militarily capable nuclear infrastructure, Nehru had always opposed explicit weaponization. 
           The third event was the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964, barely two years after India lost the border war with China. 


 In hindsight, the Chinese nuclear test was the most significant since the Chinese nuclear program allowed and has continued to allow the construction of a security rationale for the Indian nuclear program. With Nehru's death the most significant political opposition to an explicit nuclear weapons program had been removed. Following the Chinese test, several influential individuals among the bureaucracy, political parties and intellectuals started arguing for India developing nuclear bombs. The chief arguments for developing nuclear weapons were largely based on the rationales used by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The "bomb lobby" argued that nuclear weapons are required to counter nuclear weapons, they guarantee security, and that they are relatively cheaper than conventional weapons and provide more destructive power. 


The elite in India also identified having a nuclear bomb as a source of international prestige. The first official policy decision shaped by this constellation of factors was at the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1967. After initial attempts to seek security assurances from the nuclear weapon states, India decided to vote against the treaty and argued against the its discriminatory aspects and pushed ahead with its nuclear program. A little over a year after the NPT went into force, India and Pakistan fought their third war. During this war the US Seventh Fleet, led by the USS Enterprise, was sent into the Bay of Bengal. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State at the time, claimed the move was designed not only to 'assist' Pakistan, but also to 'back up the Chinese'.


 For some Indian policy makers, however, the 1971 intrusion was a form of "gunboat diplomacy" – one that was possibly nuclear. This is regarded by some as a factor in the decision to conduct India’s first nuclear test. The first Indian nuclear test was conducted on May 24, 1974. At that time, in order to try and limit negative international reaction, the Indian Prime Minister termed it a "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion." At that time, of course, this term was very much in vogue. The U.S. was still pursuing its own series of PNEs under Project Ploughshares. The Soviet Union also had a similar program. The IAEA conducted several meetings on PNEs. Indian officials and policy makers now admit that the 1974 test was, in part, a bomb and that since then it has always been part of India's security calculus. For a variety of reasons, primarily domestic, India did not proceed with further nuclear tests after this. 


We now know that there were a couple of attempts to carry out a test in the early eighties but they were called off. However, the eighties saw the establishment of a missile program that started delivering its first products around the end of the decade. The decision to induct these missiles into the Indian armed forces was made only in the early nineties. Throughout this period, i.e. ever since the 1974 test, India maintained that it had demonstrated its capacity to build nuclear weapons should the need arise, but had chosen not to manufacture or deploy them. There were calls within the domestic debate, by what can be called the "bomb lobby" to proceed with these activities but they were not particularly popular. It is only in the mid-nineties that we see the first shifts within the debate. This happened on the occasion of the question of what to do with the NPT when it came to the end of its 25 year life in 1995. 


Due to the complete failure of the Nuclear Weapon States to comply with their Article VI commitments under the NPT, the Non Nuclear Weapon-States seemed to be more inclined towards a rolling or definite-period extension. The Nuclear Weapon-States, led by the US, forced through an indefinite extension of the NPT. This provided grounds for a renewed campaign for nuclear weapons by the Indian bomb lobby who argued that the indefinite extension signaled that nuclear weapons were going to be around forever; therefore, India should either develop nuclear weapons or settle for permanent second-class status. To develop militarily use-able nuclear weapons India had to test. Therefore it had to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). 


 In international forums, as well as official circles, two main arguments were used against the CTBT. First, the CTBT was no longer a step towards disarmament as had always been envisioned. Indeed, the Nuclear Weapon-States viewed it as merely a measure that would, in the words of the head of the erstwhile Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the USA, "freeze countries on the nuclear learning curve." Second, the CTBT did not really constrain the weapons development programs of the Nuclear Weapon-States, especially the U.S. The U. S. had started a multi-billion dollar Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program involving the construction of several facilities that could develop new weapons designs. Further, the rationale for the Stockpile Stewardship Program was to ensure the US nuclear arsenal would remain functional for the foreseeable future, thus making it clear that the U.S. was not interested in nuclear disarmament. 


India demanded that the CTBT be coupled to a time-bound program for nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Weapon-States were completely opposed to this. Quoting these reasons, India voted against the CTBT. Despite refusing to sign the CTBT, the last two Indian Prime Ministers belonging to the center-left United Front party did not authorize nuclear tests. This was left to the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The large number of tests with differing designs – a thermo-nuclear fusion weapon, a light weight fission weapon and three sub-kiloton tactical nuclear weapons – suggest that, unlike the 1974 explosion, these tests are intended to develop weapons for military purposes. 


The Indian Prime Minister also stated that a Command and Control system was in place, thus making it clear that it is possible to deploy these weapons.

Army Day 2012: Remembering SAM Manekshaw, Field Marshal and Soldier Extraordinary.

HIS most famous remark was not, strictly speaking, true. On the eve of the war with Pakistan in December 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, asked her army chief, Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, if he was ready for the fight. He replied with the gallantry, flirtatiousness and sheer cheek for which he was famous: “I am always ready, sweetie.” (He said he could not bring himself to call Mrs Gandhi “Madame”, because it reminded him of a bawdy-house.)

Yet General Manekshaw himself recounted a cabinet meeting in Mrs Gandhi’s office in April 1971. To forestall secession, the Pakistani government had already cracked down in what was then East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had crossed the border into India. Mrs Gandhi wanted the army to invade Pakistan. General Manekshaw resisted. The monsoon, he pointed out, would soon start in East Pakistan, turning rivers into oceans. His armoured division and two infantry divisions were deployed elsewhere. To shift them would need the entire railway network, so the grain harvest could not be transported and would rot, bringing famine. And of his armoured division’s 189 tanks, only 11 were fit to fight.

He was not, in other words, ready. But, as he put it, “There is a very thin line between being dismissed and becoming a field-marshal.” Mrs Gandhi rejected the resignation he offered, and acceded to the delay he wanted. His job, he told her, was to fight to win. In December he did, cutting through the Pakistani army like a knife through butter, and taking Dhaka within two weeks. Quibblers later noted that this was not one of his original war aims. He had the most important attribute of any successful general: good luck.

That was not the only time he threatened to quit. Mrs Gandhi once questioned him about rumours that he was plotting a coup. In response, he asked if she wanted his resignation on grounds of mental instability. Yet if she and other politicians were in awe of him as a professional soldier and grateful for his lack of political ambition, his men loved him for his willingness to take on their civilian bosses and stand up for the army’s interests.

He had shown this in the Indian army’s darkest hour, the abject defeat in 1962 by China. Already a general, he had the previous year quarrelled with India’s defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, about national security. He was vindicated when the Chinese army swatted aside Indian resistance and briefly occupied what is now the state of Arunachal Pradesh. Mr Menon resigned. General Manekshaw was rushed to the front to rally the demoralised troops. His first order was: “There will be no withdrawal without written orders and these orders shall never be issued.”

General Manekshaw was able to demand courage from his soldiers because his own was not in doubt. Known as Sam “Bahadur”, or Sam the Brave, an honorific given him by the Indian army’s Gurkhas, the first of his five wars was for the British in Burma, where he was seriously wounded. Assuming he would die, an English general pinned his own Military Cross on Captain Manekshaw’s chest, since the medal could not be awarded posthumously. Another story has it that a surgeon was going to give up on his bullet-riddled body, until he asked him what had happened and got the reply, “I was kicked by a donkey.” A joker at such a time, the surgeon reckoned, had a chance.

The Indians showed their true colors upon the death of this famous soldier. The prime minister, along with the army, navy, and air-force chiefs, all missed his funeral—which was a modest one held in Tamil Nadu in the south, not a grand one in the capital. His friends grumbled that even foreigners such as Lord Mountbatten were afforded greater respect in death. Bangladesh, however, paid grateful tribute to his part in the nation’s foundation.

That was the Indian Army then. What we have is a 'buffoon show' now.

* With historical inputs from 'The Economist' magazine.

The Technocratic Government of India

 

So what exactly is a technocrat anyway?

Destined to save our economy and our country, we Indians have been graced with the appearance of a technocratic government since last seven years, where economist Dr. Manmohan Singh (PhD) has been the prime minister. As the hero of our day – the UPA technocratic government - is largely unknown to many of our people, we summon a brief dialogue on technocratic government

Q: What's a technocratic government?

A: To answer this question we first need to be clear about how governments are formed in parliamentary systems. First - in a parliamentary system, the government must be approved by the parliament. Often this will require the agreement of more than one political party, resulting in a coalition of parties to support the government. As part of this "coalition agreement", the heads of ministries (or what are ‘Ministers’) are allocated to the different parties, who place representatives from their parties as the heads of their respective ministries. Moreover, the parties agree on a "Prime Minister" to head the government, usually but not always from the largest party in the coalition. Most of the time, the identity of this "Prime Minister" - conditional on election results - is known during the election campaign.

Q: Ok, so what's really a technocratic government?

A: Technically, a technocratic government is one in which the ministers are not career politicians; in fact, in some cases they may not even be elected members of parliament at all. They are instead supposed to be "experts" in the fields of their respective ministries. So the classic example is that the Finance Minister would be someone with an academic background in economics who had worked for years at the IMF, but has not previously run for elective office or been heavily involved in election campaigns.

Q: Is it required for the Prime Minister also to be a "technocrat"?

A: Not necessarily. You could have a prime minister from a major party who heads a technocratic government (i.e., most of the ministers meet the definition laid out above), or you could have a technocratic prime minister as well. In the current UPA government, the Prime Minister is both a technocrat and an economist. [To be clear: there is nothing in the definition of a technocratic government that requires it be led by an economist!]

Q: Why did the UPA appoint a technocratic Prime Minister, two times in a row?

A: The practical reason is often because a government has lost the support of the people who elect them to parliament, but also for various other reasons (including legal, pragmatic or political). If the parties in the parliament can't agree to form a normal government, then sometimes they can all agree to support a technocratic government. Just to make things even more complicated, it is possible to have a ‘partisan caretaker prime minister’ (which is basically what is going on in India right now), which then would not be known as a technocratic government, but instead is often called a "lame duck government".

Q: So why would elected politicians ever turn over power to unelected technocrats? Doesn't that go against the facts of everything we think we know about politicians: that they are above all else interested in holding elected office for self gain?

A: This brings us to the crux of the matter in terms of current developments. What seems to be going on is that a "received wisdom" is developing that only technocratic governments can carry out the "painful reforms necessary" to save our country. The theory here is that no major party is going to want to pay the costs of instituting painful policies alone. If this is the case, then one way around this predicament is to appoint a technocratic government that is not "of" any party but is supported by all the parties. In this way, blame can essentially be shared, and government can do the right thing, whatever that may be.

Q: Does it work?

A: Does anyone know?. First, politicians are not particularly good at "sharing blame", which will make the temptation for any of a number of major parties to undercut the technocratic government for political gains. Second, even if mainstream parties get behind a technocratic government, that doesn't mean fringe parties will as well. Indeed, a technocratic government supported by all of the mainstream parties seems a perfect recipe for the rise of non-mainstream parties.

Q: OK, but even with those caveats, technocratic government still sounds pretty good! Why doesn't everyone have one?

A: Well, there is this one small problem, which is that in a democracy; people are supposed to elect their rulers. Since, by definition, a technocratic government does not get elected for office, it is hard to call a country with a technocratic government, a democracy. Instead, we have a system where the people only get to vote for people that they send into Parliament; who then get to decide on who the real leaders of the government will be.

Q: Will technocratic governments save India?

A: The UPA made it possible for certain policies to be implemented in the short-term. But India’s longer-term problems are going to need to be solved (or not solved) by India’s elected officials. Democracy is about accountability. While UPA has made it possible to duck accountability, long-term policies are going to have been enacted - or at the very least maintained - by elected officials. The UPA technocratic government has failed miserably on most accounts and will never be an effective Government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

Mumbai's illegal hawkers and the corrupt money economy.

All the citizens of Mumbai are fed-up with the growing number of illegal hawkers taking over all the foot-paths and open spaces of Mumbai city. The Municipal Corporation and police and the various political parties seem weak and unable to stop this menace. And it is a menace of huge proportions because most of the hawkers are from Bangladesh.

So, why is the Government so weak and ineffective in front of these illegal immigrants? It’s the money, big amounts of money.


A rather unscientific survey in 2010 – 11, states that Mumbai has more than 8 lakh (800 thousand) illegal hawkers spread over 227 municipal wards. These hawkers pay off the Police, the municipal officers and the local political parties for the right to occupy our city’s foot-paths & open spaces. Payment is either daily (for floating hawkers who move from ward to ward) to weekly payments by those who set up stalls either during rush hours or specific days of the week. Semi – permanent and almost permanent stall owners / operators pay on monthly basis and in some cases of large turnover, on a profit sharing basis.

These amounts of payments range from as little as Rs. 2000 ($ 42) to Rs. 50,000 ($ 1064); on a monthly basis.

Assuming an average amount of Rs 5,000 per hawker per month for 800 thousand hawkers; the monthly corrupt money economy is Rupees 40 Crores ($ 85 million) which works out to Rs 480 Crores ($ One hundred million plus) per year.

This entire amount bypasses the City Treasury and makes its way straight to the pockets of those who are supposed to stop this illegal activity. This is the reason that the illegal hawkers menace is not controlled or stopped by the Government officials. It’s their “super income” and it is fully tax free.

And who are the real culprits behind this menace? We, the People. It is we, the people who buy goods from these illegal hawkers at cheaper than store prices and think that we are being smart. But in reality, we are the idiots who lose a lot, to gain a little.

Congress Party's pathetic attempt towards Censorship... Again

 

Times of India reports that Union Minister Kapil Sibal has been in talks with Internet social media companies to put in place a monitoring mechanism. On Monday (05 Dec), the telecom & IT minister met executives from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to discuss the issue.

The executives were shown content which could allegedly hurt religious sensibilities and obscene images of Indian political leaders.

But the reality seems that Kapil Sibal is more concerned about the negative image of his master(s) Sonia Gandhi & Rahul Gandhi.

The New York Times reported that about six weeks ago Sibal called legal representatives from the top internet service providers and Facebook into his office and showed them a Facebook page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi. "This is unacceptable," he said, reported an executive.

How dare Sibal say that critisism of Sonia Gandhi is unacceptable? Is she above the law or does the Minister think that the law of freedom of expression in India is a slave to the whims & fancies of the Congress party?

Sibal wants the above companies to appoint people to screen content before it is uploaded, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted. THIS IS CENSORSHIP.

Assuming that Minister Sibal is acting on the instructions of his bosses to curtail our freedom of expression, let us respond by a scathing critisism against him & his party all over the internet.

The net cannot be controlled by politicians who want to censor the right to free speech just for their self-survival; and it is time this point was made clear to them in the most direct fashion.

Wal - Mart Overview

 

Wal-Mart, the biggest American retailer, has a huge impact not only on the local economy but on the global one as well. The company’s strategy of having the lowest prices (which is not always necessarily true) seems to have much more implications than people think. The fact is that a low cost for a Wal-Mart customer is actually a higher cost for many other stakeholders, mainly referring to the American economy.

Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to discover and leverage the power of information that is hidden in the barcode of every product on their shelves. The black and white stripes hold an encyclopedia of information, from tracking sales throughout the time to product and inventory information. This gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage, making it an efficiency machine: it allowed to speed up deliveries from plants to shelves (Wal - Mart has a high turnover and low inventories). In this way, Wal-Mart became a world leader in logistics, giving them the edge to change the way goods are produced: a shift from “push production” to “pull production” where the retailer is the one making the decisions– the manufacturer is being told what and when to produce.

An interesting story refers to the relationship between Rubbermaid and Wal-Mart. Changes in the market made Wal-Mart Rubbermaid’s most important customer since it significantly contributed to its growth in a very short period of time. Their relationship went well until the moment when the price of a production material went up. Wal-Mart, a strictly cost focusing company, did not accept the price increase for the Rubbermaid products, which lead to less shelf space for the supplier. This case reflects the risks a supplier takes when focusing too much on a single customer with such a big market share. Having such a high negotiation power, Wal-Mart can always go for the best deal, most of the times bargaining for an amount as low as 20 paise.

Lately, the markets have become more and more competitive among the suppliers in their quest of getting on retailers’ shelves. China, the world’s supermarket for the production market, has a lot to do with Wal-Mart’s strategy to keep costs as low as possible. 90% of Wal-Mart’s suppliers are Chinese. In order to sell in a Wal-Mart, a supplier has to be very competitive in finding ways of cutting costs. In most of the cases, the place where that is possible is actually China.
The bottom line is that Wal-Mart offers consumers a wide range of products at very low prices at the expense of putting local people out of work and lowering living standards.

Promise of a Generation

Our concern is that for the first time since Independence, the next generation will struggle harder to do better than the last. In the past we took it for granted that if we worked hard, if our children worked hard, they would be more prosperous, and have greater opportunities.
But the last few years show that the promise to the next generation, cannot be taken for granted. As a parent, like all parents, we judge Ourself on the opportunities Our children will have, should have and the happiness that can provide. As citizens, we will judge the nation on the opportunities that India should provide for the next generations.

What unites us is that there is too much politics and not enough action. And what is happening to our next generation is those unspoken facts that people know about – but the politicians refuse to discuss. Rampant uneducation and growing unemploment. Parents who don't understand, that despite their hardest efforts – raising their children correctly and giving them every opportunity, their children have no prospects of a successful life. Parents are working longer hours than ever before and spending less time with their family, with no real success in sight.

Our generation is on the road to failure in our duty to the next; to uphold the promise of a Society from which we all should benefit; not only because our elder generation has failed us, but also because we are not willing to take corrective action to change our path to the road of success.

Some of these are big problems that are rooted in the way the country's been changing for years, not just over the decade. And our governments are doing nothing to turn things around. In fact on many issues, they are making the situation worse. Their only benchmark of success is dividing to rule. Our government have, and are, piling debts on our economy; debts will make it far harder for the next generation to start a business or buy a house. It is harder for families to survive, and that's not just bad for them but for the country as well. They have consitantly failed to understand the problems and decline in economy. They will quote statistics and talk about rising GDP, but refuse to accept the growing poverty. They have no ambition to change, no national concern except political survival.

Ask the people if they or their children will find it easier to find jobs, own a home, have a bank balance, have a secure retirement or fulfil their potential and they will tell you by vast majorities that 'the answer is No'. In these circumstances, how could we, the people possibly believe the country is heading in the right direction towards growth and prosperity?

To replace despair with hope will require us, once again, to be a force for major change in India. So the task we must set for our selves and our society is to identify how we can turn failure into success.

First, we need to increase and create jobs for people. We cannot just stand by when nearly 350 million people are out of work. We also have to recognise that seven out of ten graduates who work are not doing jobs for which they studied. In other words they are not being given the opportunity to use the skills for which they have worked so hard. Our ambition has to be to reshape our economy so that Indians can choose a business based on higher skills and higher wage jobs; not in low skill, low wage jobs.

And for those young people who choose not to go to university we need to construct a better route through vocational training, apprenticeships and entrepreneurship which give people fulfilling work and chances to achieve success and their dreams of a secure life. That is why our challenge is not just to open the economy to all our people, but also to change something that politicians hardly talk about – the culture of long working hours, low pay and insecurity at work.

When the time comes, future generations will look to our record just as we look towards those of the earlier generations. We owe a committment to equality, democracy, and freedom; not only to ourself but to our children and their children. A committment of a better and secure future, a promise of a generation.