'The Indian Argument Was Opportunist'

Original Interview: August 1998
Please click here for exclusive excerpts  from Countdown. For more writings by and on Amitav Ghosh, please visit his website, amitavghosh.com, where this first appeared

AG. What do you feel is the difference between the NPT and CTBT?

PB: The NPT is a fundamentally discriminatory and unequal treaty—there is a distinction between the 5 nuclearpower states, the 5 as they existed on the 1st of January 1967 and all the rest; and imposes unequalobligations on the 2 categories. In one way it is inevitable that if the starting point is different then yourobligations are different. 

What makes it discriminatory and unjust is the fact that obligations on the nuclear 5 are loose,ineffectual and not subject to any international supervision. They are merely asked to undertake in good faithnegotiations on the elimination of nuclear weapons under Article 6. Whereas the obligations of the non-nuclearstates are effective, immediate, strict and supervised by a multilateral body, the International Atomic EnergyAgency.

There is also another contradiction in the NPT -- a somewhat minor one but one which may interest you --that the bargain in some sense that the nuclear bomb states have offered is that non-nuclear states will beassured of nuclear technology transfer in the civilian field.

The contradiction as big as this is that the civilian program can be the ground work for making nuclearweapons and so the temptation then to divert nuclear materials from civilian to military programmes is notsomething that the NPT can address. We know from experience of the working of the IAEA that the amount ofplutonium or highly enriched uranium that cannot be accounted for in the reprocessing plants in similarfacilities in Europe alone can exceed something of the order of 100 kilos, in a single year which is enough tomake 20. So these are huge quantities which are simply unaccounted for.

The CTBT by contrast is a non-discriminatory and an equal treaty which imposes equal obligations on allstates not to undertake explosive nuclear tests—which means that you measure not only horizontalnon-proliferation but also vertical non-proliferation, that nuclear states cannot further refine them or buildnew designs.

AG: But they can do this with computer simulations ?

PB: No. Well this is the conclusion after a long debate and after a fairly detailed examination of the technicalaspects of the issue—the reason is this, nuclear weapons and nuclear explosions are highly non-linearsystems. So if you change any one parameter like the metal you use or the density of plutonium, the wholesystem changes—unpredictably. 

So you have to generate new computer codes for every minor change you make in one of several dozen scoresof parameters, if you have to verify those codes you have to conduct nuclear tests. So even if you manage todevelop some new codes based on the virtual data that you may have, their validation requires test explosions.

This is true if you talk about the three stages, like 1) the design stage—that you can do on the drawingboard but the second is the validation part which you cannot do without test explosions. Third, which isgetting verifiable, reliable yields and complete control over the behaviour of the nuclear explosion. Which iswhat a General is ultimately going to demand, at least in the nuclear weapon states.

When an American General says that a new weapon is inducted it must perform reliably, at levels ofreliability exceeding 90% and so or that sort of stuff you cannot dream of doing without repeated testing ofthe same design. So it is a barrier against both vertical and horizontal proliferation and therefore answersthe question that countries like India have always made i.e. criticisms of the NPT that it bars horizontalproliferation and not vertical proliferation.

In any case the Indian criticism of the NPT is not something I will go along with because it is in somesense based on highly coloured set of assumptions about nuclear apartheid. The Indian argument was also anopportunist one --  they didn’t want to sign because they wanted to conduct first (PeacefulExplosions). Which the treaty would forbid. 

Even assuming that 1974 was one, which I don’t think was one (i.e. a peaceful explosion) by any stretchof imagination and Ramanna has clarified that it was the bomb, so what are we talking about? But neverthelesstheoretically we have had numerous peaceful explosions by the US and the USSR and then the energy used forbuilding a dam or a reservoir meant what was the point when the whole thing (i.e. the water) was alreadycontaminated?

Anyway, later on, the Indian argument against the NPT served to reject all proposals for nuclear restrainthowever justified, rational and worthy these might be—

In a work I had done in 1982 I showed that over 350 workers at Tarapur got a dose of over 5 rads a yearthat, is excess of the amount stipulated by the Department of Atomic Energy itself.

AG: How did you prove this?

PB: Through documents, records internal to the Department which I had to steal, which people made available to meat great risk to themselves. The story appeared as the lead story in all editions of the Times of India. TheCAC Second Report on the State of India’s Environment has several references to it.

The chairman of the AEC held a press conference and admitted every single substantial factual point made inthat but said those were not harmful, nothing really happens and we are going to try and reduce theseexposures over the years.

But again it is established that workers in ADA installations—a first class epidemiological study by E.T.Padmanabhan that shows that these workers and their families all victims of excessive exposure to notradiation but radio-nuclides working on particular radioactive chemicals known as (rerads?) used in the paintindustry is a very tiny quantities but processed in a placed called Alwaye, has exposed many to the toxicityof Indian rerads. So you have a huge incidence of Downs Syndrome among their children. And I think that, thatits a conclusive, scientifically proven epidemiological study.

AG: However this one instance is not connected to nuclear establishments.

PB: Rare earths’ is part of the DAE—there is nothing particularly dangerous in the rare earths than is abouturanium mining. There is some evidence which is not complete—it's partial because there is no baseline data-- in the most backward parts of Bihar for example who’s going build a health centre there or gatherinformation on lives and deaths. 

But there is a more scientifically established way of collecting data i.e. through the [stochastic?] method—thatdon’t go by individual exposures but by the overall exposure of a population to a gross total radiation doseand there the International Commission on Radiological Protection has norms which are that gross exposure,irrespective of numbers of individual exposures of 10,000 rads will cause 6 cancer deaths. So if you are goingby that, Tarapur has killed 30 people.

In Pokhran, Reuters reported that people complained that within the first two days of the tests, they hadburning eyes, itching sensations on the skin—suggesting that there was acute early radioactivity exposure. Iwould doubt that very much because  you would then have symptoms of very high levels of exposure,vomiting etc.

I went there 3 weeks after the tests and most of these complaints were no longer being aired. It's seriousthough what needs serious examination and proper study is the charge, the claim that about a decade after thefirst Pokhran tests, the incidence of cancer are rising in Western Rajasthan in particular Jodhpur andJaisalmer districts. Cancer of the bone, abdomen and lung—precisely the kinds of cancers your would see fromradioactivity exposure though specific radioactive nuclides associated with underground testing. STRONIUM 90,PLUTONIUM 239 etc. 

And we have evidence of this from studies by International Physicists in Prevention of Nuclear War. Therewere studies on Kazakhstan which found a deep correlation between these cancers and the radio nuclides I’vejust named. In fact the Kazakh Medical establishment claims now that the numbers of early cancers were aresult of a test site there which became the most important test site in the Soviet Union after the1960s. 

The Kazakh Govt. is now very enthusiastic about a nuclear weapon free zone in Central Asia. There’s onevillage alone, Khetolai in the absence of baseline study is difficult to prove. But this doctor’s study isbased on hard evidence of cancer registers in public hospitals conducted bet ’85 and ’92.

What happens in underground tests is two things. One is that you have some early ventings if there is nocontainment. Containment is done through the laying of huge steel sheets—less than a quarter of theplutonium used in a nuclear fission device actually undergoes fission and is expelled with this tremendousunderground violence and that penetrates very long distances. it can come through the earth’s crust. 

Early venting is routine in sites where there is no containment. It would seem that in the Indian case,containment was most unlikely because it was a secret operation-they wanted to cheat the satellites—so didn’tstart putting huge sheets of steel there. I know that in the ’74 explosions no containment sheets were usedand its very unlikely that they were used in these tests.

Given the considerations for secrecy, the only reason for containment would be safety and I don’t thinkthey are bothered about the safety of those wretched people living in Khetolai. It's not how the DAEworks. 

So, there could be some early venting but the more worrisome thing about testing is the slow steady releaseof these nuclides. So it would be unsurprising if there was. So we need independent study -- an independentcommission -- to monitor radioactivity levels, radio-nuclide levels, not just in the air, but in the water andsoil, vegetation, animals that feed on that vegetation. 

For instance, after the 1974 explosion, the fence that was around the original test site rotted and aftersometime they stopped looking after the site perhaps in the belief that India would not conduct any morenuclear tests in the foreseeable future. So cattle would then stray into the very heart of the test site. Wehad pictures of these, eye witness accounts etc.

We have to look at it very closely and set up a very rigorous scientific study. If this is established thatone of the early effects was cracks in the houses of people and the second was cracks in the wells—thatmeans that the water is liable to be affected We need good reliable data which is independently verifiable.

(AmitavGhosh.Com)