DISSOLUTION OF THE DREAM OF DISARMAMENT

While we must maintain our long-term commitment to a world without nuclear weapons, our immediate policies must reflect the grim reality of the 2020s in a neighbourhood of belligerent N-powers

- SHASHI THAROOR

FOR decades, the hallowed halls of the United Nations in New York and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva were the spiritual homes of a specific kind of Indian idealism.

From the moral high ground of the Nehruvian era to the detailed pragmatism of the late 1980s, India was the world’s most persistent advocate of anuclear-weapon-free world.

The peak of this ambition was perhaps June 1988, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stood before the UN General Assembly to propose a ‘New Action Plan’ for universal, nondiscriminatory and time-bound nuclear disarmament. It was a bold, three-stage roadmap to eliminate the world’s most terrifying weapons by 2010. Indian diplomats, many of whom built storied careers on their mastery of these intricate multilateral negotiations, argued that disarmament was not just a moral imperative but a developmental one. The logic was clear: every rupee or dollar not spent on anuclear warhead was a resource freed for schools, hospitals and infrastructure.

Today, as we navigate the mid-2020s, that dream has not just been deferred; it has collapsed. The ‘global zero’ we once championed has been replaced by a ‘global me too’—a lethal scramble for more deadly, more precise and more unpredictable nuclear arsenals. For India, the collapse of this dream is not merely a diplomatic setback; it is a seismic shift in our national security calculus. Disarmament can simply no longer be a priority when the need for rearmament grows apace.

India’s ‘tough neighbourhood’ has morphed into a theatre of permanent instability. To our north, China’s nuclear expansion is no longer a secret. Beijing is rapidly modernising its triad, building hundreds of new missile silos and moving away from its historical ‘minimum deterrence’ posture.