The countries, who aspire to be in the "have" category, but not certified by USA to claim that status, will have to be intimidated or coerced into "freezing", "capping" and finally "rolling back" their nuclear programmes, if they do not respond to the `carrot' type manipulation or repeated "Thou-shall-not type" hypnotic suggestion to produce a `trance' like state in the target country.

Henry Kissinger rightly states: "Deterrence depends on an intangible factor: the state of mind of the potential aggressor. Deterrence requires a combination of power, the will to use it and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor. A gesture intended as a bluff but taken seriously is more useful as a deterrence than a bonafide threat interpreted as bluff".

II

South Asia presents no different paradigm. India __ the pre- eminent and the predominant actor of the region reflects the same "duality" of approach - the Machiavellian machinations! On the question of morality and politics, the Hindu mind is reflected by PN Haksar who makes it very explicit: "The arena of international relations is not an arena in which conflicts take place between different perceptions of morality. It is an arena of conflict of interests. It may sound wicked, but the foreign policy of no country in the history of humankind has been or is an exercise in the logics of moral postulates. Is then the conduct of international affairs and consequently, the foreign policy completely drained off any moral content? The answer is that morality or immorality of a foreign policy would depend upon how a state perceives and defines its interests."

The "interests" emanate from the deeper recesses of their psyche', which is conditioned by the teaching of Kautilya (fourth Century B.C.) earning him the title of Indian Machiavelli. Every king, as per his advice is a Potential World Conqueror - the Chakravartin; a neighbouring `king' is of necessity an enemy; and a neighbour's neighbour is an ally. He is very candid in giving a prescription for the maintenance of world life. "The means of ensuring the pursuit philosophy, the two vedas and economics is the Rod (wielded by the king), its administration constitutes the science of politics, having for its purpose the acquisition of (Things) not possessed, the preservation of (Things) possessed, the augmentation of (Things) preserved)...."

Maintaining moral duplicity as a way of life, acquisition and exchange orientation, and violence are means to power. Nirad Chaudhry says: "The pacifist ... is without any roots in the Hindu tradition and therefore, without any strength ... At no time in the past did the Hindus show themselves to be pacifistic and anti-militaristic, and even in the epoch of independence they have not showed themselves, to be so in the pursuit of their Real Politik". The hegemonistic `power' is in the Warp and Woof of their mind. In the words of Kushwant Singh: "Indians talk of three parts of India, as the head, the torso and the groins-and-legs of the one entity that is India. They visualize it as Mother India with her head in the snowy Himalaya's, her arms stretched from Punjab to Assam, her ample bosom and middle (the Indian concept of feminine beauty requires a woman to be well stacked in the bosom and the buttocks) resting on the Indo-Gangetic plains and the Deccan, and her feet bathed by the waters of Indian Ocean, with Ceylon as a lotus petalled foot-stool. In 1947, the India sub-continent had, its eastern and wester extremes lopped off to make the two wings of Pakistan, one of which is now Bangladesh. Mother India has assumed the shape of Venus de Milo".

The attitudinal frame of reference makes it easier to understand why is India the only country (beside ofcourse Israel), which has annexed land to its territory after World War II. The perceptions of some of the Indian strategist thinkers are pertinent. On nuclear bomb as a currency of power, Subrahmanyum says: "India will always be regarded as a second rate developing country unless it has its nuclear arsenal. China earned Nixon’s respect when it went nuclear: India should do the same". In conventional weapons, Pakistan is no match to India. Bhargava says: "It would be anomalous to talk of a military balance between two such disperate states as India and Pakistan. Nobody weighs the military strength of Cuba against of the United States. Comparing their military strength will be like weighing apples against onions".

The delusion of grandeur is expressed by Subrahmanyum: "While, no doubt in the international community all states are equal, it is also necessary to bear in mind that the interest of one seventh of humanity which constitutes the Indian population can not be equated objectively with those of a fraction of this population. Nor in the name of equality of nations can the security of one-seventh of humanity be sacrificed. It must be made clear to our neighbours what kind of concessions they can legitimately expect from the big neighbour and what they can not". He also elaborates: "India’s role is not that of a middle power, her area and population rule that out. India will, in the next two or three decades become a major power and if it fails to do that external pressure will break her up. It is extremely unlikely that without adequate power, understood in all its ramifications this country with its 500 million people will stay together at the end of two decades."

Nehru, while maintaining the pacifistic rhetoric for world consumption, in reality championed the idea: "The real strength of a country develops by industrial growth which implies the capacity to make weapons of war". Pannikar also subscribes to the same notion:

"There are many in India, who looking back on the past, consider that a major threat to India exists, atleast potentially in the Islamic Power which stretches from Morocco to Lahore. But a moment’s consideration would show that this is no more than the fear of a historical ghost ... offensive power is based on technological advancement and in this respect, the Islamic World presents no threat at all". Inder Malhotra is even more enthusiastic "There is no reason why this country cannot have five armoured divisions to put the fear of God into the Pakistan Military commander __ the more so when we are the third world’s largest manufacturer of armaments".

III

Pakistan’s modest nuclear programme cannot be viewed out of the context. The mounting western pressure, and the latent Indian designs have placed Pakistan in a very precarious situation. It is between the "devil" and the "deep sea". In such a predicament, more than what Pakistan has already done by way of voluntary "freeze" of enrichment beyond a threshold most essential for the preservation of "minimal deterrence", would be asking for too much. Itty Abraham in his paper: Pakistan-India and Argentina-Brazil: Stepping back from the nuclear threshold advocates that by "lumping all countries suspected of being proliferators into a homogenous group is a common mistake: this characterization obscures more than it reveals. Carefully distinguishing between the development of nuclear programmes in South America and South Asia permits a far more nuanced understanding of nuclear-related events among these potential proliferators. At the same time, a systematic comparison reveals generalizations about the forces that motivate a country’s decision to "go nuclear". Such a comparison has yet to be systematically performed."

Pakistan’s nuclear motivation, flows from the "followers" category as against the "Initiators". (Argentina and India fall in the later category whereas, Brazil and Pakistan, in the former). Z.A. Bhutto, is reported to have confided to New York paper: "If Pakistan’s security interests are safeguarded, its people felt secure and if they felt that they would not be subject to aggressor, they would not want to squander away limited resources in that direction". In his earlier writing, (Pakistan Builds Anew) he lamented: "If Pakistan had been dismembered by a civil war alone __ tragic though that would have been __ an adjustment to a new order would not have been so hard to achieve. But Pakistan had been the victim of unabashed aggression: her eastern part seized by Indian forces. It was this fact that made it difficult for our people to be reconciled to the fait accompli, more so because the invasion was not an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, it was but the climax of a long series of hostile and aggressive acts by India against Pakistan since the establishment of the two as sovereign and independent states".

India’s massive nuclear piling (100 to 150 twenty kilo-ten atomic weapons) is no longer a secret to the West. Robert A Peck has testified this before the House Sub- committee on Asia and Pacific Affairs: "India has continued to expand its broad-based ambitious nuclear programme, that it operates unsafeguarded nuclear power and research reactors giving it a significant capability of producing unsafeguarded weapons useable fissionable material". Despite all this to insist that Pakistan should roll back its nuclear programme, tantamounts to saying that Pakistan should perform "Harakari" __ which, incidentally, is "haram" according to a Muslim’s faith.

The world, however, must build the moral force, in order to deter the ‘deterrence’ concept of nuclear war. As Keith Suter, in his paper ‘War is a Dying Business’ rightly says: "One nation’s ‘deterrent’ is another nation’s source of fear. The best way for the later to reduce its fear is to increase its own deterrence and this adds to a sense of fear in the other nation. The nuclear arms race is a race without end __ or until something fails". But this would require a humanistic orientation. Morality ought to transcend the narrow confines of "watergate" or "white-water" scandals and must touch upon the core human values. One can not build the infrastructure of democratic polity, and freedom through a super-structured authoritarian world order. It would be wise to ponder upon the Declaration against the use of nuclear arms, drafted by Bertrand Russell and signed by Einstein: "There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest"