determine and maintain a credible nuclear deterrent.
Under the NPT there are five and only five states who, by
treaty, possess nuclear sovereignty: The US, Britain, France,
Russia and China, the five country which, by 1968 when the treaty
became operational, had developed and tested nuclear weapons.
India was not among them, It first tested in 1974 and, as a result,
was classified as non-nuclear weapons state, a state that lacked
nuclear sovereignty.
Japan and Germany, two of the great powers, rely for nuclear
protection on a US nuclear umbrella; it gives them freedom from
what K. Subrahmanyam, a leading Indian security intellectual,
calls “the power of intimidation.”
Lacking nuclear sovereignty, Japan and Germany, Japan
more clearly than Germany, are prone to bandwagon with the US.
Russia and China, states that are nuclear sovereign, can and
do balance against the US.
Britain historically and more intensively during the nine plus
years that Tony Blair has been Prime Minister, has bandwagonned
with the US, more so during George Bush’s than during Bill
Clinton’s presidency. The costs, it seems to me have outweighed
the benefits. Blair’s Britain has had to share the enmity that the US
has generated in the Muslim world and the marginal but increasing
alienation of its Muslim citizens and that alienation’s potential for
57
.
Ghosh, A., “Why Every Country Can’t Have the Bomb,” p. 18.
39
Convention