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US planned arming India with nukes during sixties

Seeking to offset the power of China and the Soviet Union, the United States considered arming India and other Asian states with nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War, according to a new book.

The book, India's Nuclear Bomb by George Perkovich, provides the most detailed glimpse yet of high-level US debate on such ''nuclear sharing'' in the mid-1960s to counter growing communist might.

China changed the international balance of power when it carried out its maiden nuclear test blast on October 16, 1964. India, caught in territorial disputes with China, was already was debating building a bomb of its own.

Citing declassified US records and interviews with Indian scientists and government officials, Perkovich documents a persistent proposal to help India, first and foremost, acquire a nuclear capability.

''The basic idea was to make arrangements for friendly Asian countries to receive and militarily deliver low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that the United States would provide to them in the event of Chinese aggression,'' wrote Perkovich, director of the Secure World Programme for the Walton Jones Foundation, a Charlottesville, Virginia, philanthropy.

A declassified 1964 US defence department study, for instance, suggested the possibility of making nuclear weapons available to India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Pakistan, Thailand and South Korea.

The study, forwarded to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on December 4, 1964, paid special attention to India, said by its authors to be capable of producing and testing a nuclear device in one to three years of a decision to do so.

The US had two key goals at the time, according to Perkovich. One was to head off an independent Indian nuclear weapons programme in a foreshadowing of current US non-proliferation concerns.

The second was to give Washington the option of ''controlled use of nuclear weapons'' against the communist government in Beijing, while supposedly limiting the risk of touching off a global conflict, Perkovich wrote.

Arming possible US proxies with nuclear weapons could perhaps have avoided a direct clash with the Soviet Union if it went to China's aid in an Asian regional conflict, said the Pentagon study carried out by John McNaughton, then an assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs.

The idea was to try to prevent any future nuclear exchanges from spilling over to US soil, Perkovich said.

''This possibility -- as much as the aim of stemming proliferation in India or other states -- motivated the Pentagon's approach to the problem,'' according to the book, which is subtitled, ''the impact on global proliferation.''

Reuters

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