Nuclear disarmament is dominating news headlines again and Obama’s moving speech at Hiroshima and the fourth and final nuclear security summit held in Washington D.C. recently have both given potency to old and new arguments. At the summit, United States Secretary of State John Kerry very pointedly said, India has a key role to play for responsible stewardship of nuclear weapons.

India is the only country to be given a de-facto status as a nuclear power, without it signing the nuclear test-ban treaty and this waiver is a key sticking point. Both Pakistan and Israel do not enjoy this status. The possible use of tactical nuclear weapons and the advent of terrorism have sharpened these debates as the earlier discussions were centred on accidental use of nuclear weapons.

The father of the atomic bomb Robert Oppenheimer’s quote from The Bhagavad Gita, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, should be the prefect contextual backdrop to disarmament discussions. And India, which was once at the vanguard for nuclear disarmament is paradoxically seen now as a disarmament buster. Its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was the first world leader to call for disarmament. In 1955, he had shepherded the partial test-ban treaty, which was the precursor to many other treaties that followed. Ironically, India has stonewalled each one of them.

India’s ambivalence needs scrutiny because it goes to the very heart of nuclear disarmament. Arms control, proliferation, production of fissile material — both covert and overt — and stockpiling of weapons and how much is enough to safeguard national interests are all part of this debate, but disarmament goes beyond that. Sadly, with nuclear weapons seen as the currency for achieving great-power status, this debate has moved away from its central principle, namely the clear and present danger posed by nuclear weapons to mankind.

The US bomb on Hiroshima had affected an area of 13 square miles (21 square km), but today’s thermonuclear weapons have a global reach. Concepts like Mutually Assured Destruction (Mad) and agreements like Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Salt) seem dated in today’s globalised economies. Indeed, climate science shows interdependence as self-evident: El Nino [the climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean that has global impact] does not recognise national boundaries; ditto for the radioactive mushroom cloud that rises from a thermonuclear fireball.

The flip side

India’s Holy Grail is strategic autonomy and this explains much of her ambiguity in nuclear issues and beyond. Nehru’s non-alignment policy is as much about autonomy as is his refrain that nuclear apartheid is morally unacceptable. Nehru’s call for universal disarmament in 1955 and the subsequent declaration by another former prime minister of India, late Rajiv Gandhi, in 1995 for a non-discriminatory global disarmament regime is but the flip side: Strategic autonomy laced with moral arguments centred on universality and non-discriminatory regime of controls.

India’s pontification is doublespeak, but this shifting-sand approach stems from a series of events in its neighbourhood, starting from its disastrous war with China in 1962. China tested its bomb in 1964 and this set in motion a series of counter-measures by India that culminated in the Pokhran 1 and 2 testings of nuclear bombs — which in turn forced Pakistan to respond with its own tests.

India claimed the 1995 Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) as discriminatory and said this forced its hand to test the bomb. Once the CTBT came into force, India would have forfeited its right to test its nuclear devices. Right until then, its position was euphemistically called as nuclear ambiguity. The sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan, the groundbreaking Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 and Pakistan’s grouse that it was singled out and the recent veto by China to disallow India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group have all been discussed threadbare.

Arms treaties, fissile material controls, deterrence threshold, military doctrines like first and second-strike capability and a declaration by India that it will not to be the first to conduct a nuclear strike is missing the woods for the trees. The morality behind using these frightening weapons needs to be the prism through which these debates have to be viewed. And here, there is no better entity to show the way than the world’s sole super power: The US is the only state that has actually used the bomb.

But will the US lead?

Should Donald Trump become the next American president, we may have to evoke T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land and pray, repeating its closing lines: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih”. A loose translation of which, borrowed from the Upanishads, runs something like this: “The peace that passeth understanding”.

Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer, working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.