India Deserves World Sanctions

Any suggestion that India underestimated the weight of world contempt by exploding three nuclear devices on Monday was buried Wednesday by its arrogant detonation of two more.

President Clinton wasted no time in deciding to impose economic sanctions on India even before the announcement of the fourth and fifth tests. By law, the president was required to revoke foreign aid to India, except for humanitarian assistance. Military sales, government loans, sales of technology requiring licenses all now are properly banned.

When Clinton meets other leaders of the top industrial nations in England this weekend, the Indian provocation will be on the table. France and some other countries have condemned the tests but opposed sanctions. They should think again. And all big powers should press Pakistan, India’s neighbor and longtime enemy, not to retaliate by testing a nuclear device of its own.

The nationalistic new regime in India clearly intended to put on notice both China, which has nuclear weapons and fought a border war with India in 1962, and Pakistan, believed capable of quickly assembling a nuclear device. But the result in fact has shaken political stability all across Asia, not just on the subcontinent.

New Delhi said its national security demanded the tests, wrongly equating a nuclear capability with security. Better to feed its people, clean its air and rivers, teach children to read. That would bring real, long-lasting security.

Government officials say they were willing to forgo economic aid if necessary in making their decision. That’s brave talk from a country that has been the biggest recipient of World Bank loans over the years--more than $40 billion.

Japan, the only nation with a firsthand taste of the horrors of nuclear weapons, persuaded the World Bank to call off a previously scheduled June meeting to discuss aid to New Delhi. No World Bank loans have been canceled, but if Washington takes the same line with the World Bank, New Delhi could lose billions of dollars, far more painful than losing the relatively small amount of direct U.S. aid.

The Indian explosions exposed a major fault in U.S. intelligence agencies, which spend about $30 billion a year but were still unable to predict the impending tests, in the desert state of Rajasthan on the Pakistan border.

U.S. sanctions on India after its 1974 nuclear test had little effect. The new ones also may be largely symbolic. But they ought to be prompt, and rightfully could include cancellation of President Clinton’s planned fall trip to New Delhi. India should learn there is a price to pay for playing a nuclear card.

India’s best move would be to change course immediately and sign the nuclear test-ban treaty that more than 140 other countries have embraced. Pakistan, too, should sign, without a nuclear test to prove its point. Whatever the new Indian government in New Delhi was thinking has backfired.