#3
C O M M E N T A R Y
AMERICA BRAIN-HUNTING FOR NMD

MOSCOW, January 14 /from Dmitri Kosyrev, RIA Novosti political analyst/ - The US Administration dynamically promotes its national missile defence programme, or NMD. Its blueprints, however, still have an illusory look-no one is sure it will really intercept missiles. If it will, there is no certainty about what missiles, and with what points of departure and destination, it will concern.

However vague the programme may be, R&D and international talks which accompany it have reached a scope to tell on the whole world. Illustrating the latter point are US-Indian negotiations, underway in New Delhi this week, on works for an anti-missile network and efforts against illegal proliferation of nuclear technologies.

India is sure to make an emphasis at the negotiation table on an issue essential to it-an US ban, outdated but valid to this day, on civil-oriented nuclear industrial and research partnership with India. Indicatively, the USA has authorised such partnership even for China.

As India has been stressing for a fairly long time, even its problem-obsessed relations with Pakistan are of smaller importance in its contacts with the USA than desired access to nuclear and many other US technologies. India owes the American ban to its refusal to join the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The Bill Clinton Administration made things hot for India after it became a nuclear country in 1998. The George W. Bush Administration is of a contrasting opinion, and regards Indian nuclear arsenals as an Asian deterrence and stability factor, what with similar arsenals in Chinese and Pakistani possession. If partnership in the sphere of anti-missile defence helps to lift the ban, India will meet it with enthusiasm.

The USA started reconsidering its policies in that field just now, as Richard Meserve, head of the nuclear industrial regulation commission, is visiting New Delhi. He has no decision-making authorisation, and is merely to get a dialogue going.

Anti-missile defence is another vital issue on the negotiation agenda. India is, naturally, no less eager than the USA to protect itself -or much more. In fact, there is no impending nuclear threat for America, while India and Pakistan may exchange nuclear blows any day.

The USA has chosen India as its first partner in anti-missile defence negotiations because it is not merely a Great Power but global software leader-even though an average American programmer earns six times as much as his Indian colleague. Software accounts for 1.4% of the Indian gross domestic product-an annual US$10 billion, and the figure is expected to soar up to 80 billion by 2008. Up to 130,000 experts on information technology graduate Indian colleges and universities every year. It is the world's second in that educational field, immediately following the USA. Brain drain is no danger to India. On the contrary, American computer engineers of Indian extraction are ever more often coming back to their ancestral country, and can be of help in America's missile-defence-oriented research.

Yet those are fairly distant goals. Whatever missile-defence talks the USA may be having now with partners close and remote, all are only at an inception stage.

Experts of the Russian military-industrial complex are bearing grudges against the USA. The talks are leaving them under an impression that America is out to borrow Russian technological achievements, whether concerning missile defence or not, but is not at all eager to pay in kind.

True, military experts' opinions have to be taken with a grain of salt-they are an excessively mistrustful lot. But take the USA's contacts with Japan, its long-established ally, who may expect a greater degree of confidence. Shigeru Ishiba, Director-General of its National Defence Agency-an office equal to Defence Minister in other countries, visited Washington, D.C., two weeks ago as on many previous occasions for regular missile-defence negotiations with Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary for Defence, and so his US counterpart. He had similar and separate negotiations with Colin Powell, US Secretary of State.

An US-Japanese programme for a Northeast Asian anti-missile defence system have been at a talking stage for several years now. It is a life-and-death matter for Japan, what with North Korean missiles close by. Yet it remains unclear to this day what the blueprinted system will be like, Japanese experts point out as they are summing up Mr. Ishiba's latest talks. Everything is fine with the general concept but its practical details stay extremely vague. To all appearances, the USA merely wants to get all kinds of experts together in a thinktank, and see what they can do.

So Japan has chosen to wait and see. It will be very careful about anti-missile defence blueprints, and will merely watch US progress as far as missile-defence programs are concerned. At any rate, its own protection from tentative missile strikes will be in the foreground, with smaller importance attached to all other matters, says a high-ranking Japanese government functionary.

That attitude certainly deserves respect, and India may be expected to take a similar stance. Russian-US anti-missile partnership will possibly go on in the same vein. There is another option, however-the world's best minds will gather in the USA to work for it. That appears a tangible prospect, too, when we come to analyse American talks with India, Japan and Russia alike.

BACK TO THE TOP    #240 CONTENTS    NEXT ARTICLE