by M. D. Nalapat
Despite the hype about nuclear weapons being created in high school laboratories, the reality is that the fabrication of a usable bomb requires a mix of both talent and infrastructure that is available to few states. In terms of purchasing power parity, India is today the fourth biggest economy in the world. It has tens of millions of trained technicians and an industrial base that dates back to the period when the country was under British rule. However, India struggled for two decades before weaponizing the nuclear device it exploded in 1974. Equally difficult was its missile odyssey. Forty years elapsed before the 1500-kilometer Agni-III was developed from early rockets.
Neither Pakistan nor, to an even greater extent, North Korea, can lay claim to having anything but the most rudimentary indigenous technological base. The domain of Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has as yet proved unable to design and manufacture a truly local high speed lathe, let alone a tractor, while North Korea has not exceeded bicycle manufacturing. Yet both countries have succeeded in "developing" nuclear devices as well as sophisticated missiles that can reach over a thousand kilometers carrying a weapons payload. How such technologically backward countries could reach "university" status without having been able to pass "high-school" is a question rarely heard in discussions of their respective strategic weapons capabilities. Yet that query is essential to understanding the reality behind the current nuclear status of these failed (Pyongyang) and failing (Islamabad) economies.
Both Pakistan and North Korea are examples of what may be termed "proxy" nuclear weapons powers. That is, they are countries that have deliberately been provided with nuclear devices and missiles systems by an advanced country, the People's Republic of China (through agencies directly or otherwise linked to it). It is no accident that Pyongyang acts as a geopolitical pressure point on Japan, as Pakistan does on India. Japan and India, after all, are Beijing's two primary rivals in Asia. As nuclear capable, missile producing states, North Korea and Pakistan--the two proxies--demand the attention of Japan and India, thus lowering the attention that they can pay to China, the source of the proxies' technology. |