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NUCLEAR weapons are not just another class of weapons in the long history of development of weapons. Nuclear weapons are unique - their impact is primarily on innocent civilian non-combatants, particularly women and children; their radiation effects persist for generations after their detonation; they are intrinsically indiscriminate, largely uncontrollable, and above all, they are instruments of mass murder on a scale unparalleled in human history. This uniqueness of nuclear weapons is now clearly affirmed in an Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice rendered in the month of July 1996. Nuclear weapons have security, political and econ ...
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The debate on nuclear weapons in India have been appropriated by a curious breed called “strategic experts” or “defence analysts”. Hidden under such names is the simple fact that they are primarily military analysts and closely tied to the defence establishment in the country. Thus, Udey Bhaskar, Jasjit Singh, K. Subramanyam and their media progenies are or have been a part of and parcel of the defences establishment of this country and are not independent analysts by any means. The appropriation of the nuclear debate by military experts completely negate the multi-dimensional aspect of nuclear weapons. Weapons of mass destructions which can finish all civilisa ...
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K Subrahmanyam, the former director of Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), recently lamented in a Times of India article that media management of the US government was far superior to that of the India’s. The US Government, he comments, have a host of institutions and academies who legitimise US Government’s positions on security and other matters and this is what shapes the media perception of events. Subrahmanyam’s view on US government’s media management is of course not original. Noam Chomski and Edward Herman gave us the classic on US media in Manufactured Consent which details how the US government manipulates the media or more correctly how th ...
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The technology control regimes have two historical origins. One is to deny advanced technology to those countries that had not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the other is to deny any advanced technology flow to the socialist countries -- the COCOM regime. It has been strengthened now to include missile development and chemical and biological weapons. It targets even those countries that have signed the NPT, but are considered anti-American, for example, Iraq, Libya and Iran. The main thrust of these technology control regimes is that they not only bar specific equipment that could be used in nuclear, missile or military programmes ...
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The current nuclear stand off between India and Pakistan is embedded in a much larger matrix of global relations. Capturing this complexity is not an easy task and this is what Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik attempt in their latest book South Asia on a Short Fuse. Bidwai and Vanaik are well placed to respond to the new scenario as they have written extensively in the past on the issue of nuclear disarmament. Their contribution will certainly enrich the current debate that includes Itty Abraham’s The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, N. Ram’s Riding the Nuclear Tiger and George Perkovich ’s India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation. [i] All these books ...
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