Opinion Daring to disarm

“To discuss the threshold of damage in any nuclear exchange is to get derailed into how many weapons we should have and what should be their size,what should be India’s second strike capability and so on. This is the path of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD. It is this mad MAD nuclear and missile race that broke the back of the Soviet economy during the Cold War,” it says.

Although it takes at face value Santhanam’s argument that the hydrogen bomb test was a partial success and did not provide its true yield,it disagrees with his suggestion for conducting more tests and points out that the belief that only a successful hydrogen bomb test will put India in some elite club is foolish. “The issue is not more tests,but can India own up to the disarmament view — all countries possessing nuclear weapons must give them up. It is not an altruistic utopian requirement but crucial to the survival of the globe,” it notes.

“India has some tough choices. It can either play ball with the US,accept its junior partner status and sign on the dotted line — in this case the CTBT. In that case it will have to revise its strategic understanding. Or it can break with the US. It can do this the way Santhanam and the nuclear hawks want — test again and go into a nuclear doghouse.

“Or it can put at centre stage the global disarmament agenda. Both these mean breaking with the US,something that this government does not want to do. What we need is that India breaks with the US and also puts global disarmament on the table. This is the only sane course for India and indeed all humanity,” it says.

A red rage

This edition had the CPM’s take on the recent gunbattle between Maoists and CPM cadre in Midnapore West. It quotes state secretary Biman Basu saying that the ‘people had maintained,successfully,the sanctity of a party office above which the Red Flag flutters.’

“They came to loot and burn,and they came to kill. They had to leave in a hurry in the face of stiff resistance,mass resistance,from thousands of rural folk who were determined to defend the Enayetpur CPM office in Midnapore west,” it says.“As soon as the gangs of armed killers approached the CPM office,firing automatic weapons in the air,holding aloft lit torches,and swinging along large jerry cans filled with kerosene,they ran into a solid wall of maybe ten thousand local villagers…It was simply a case of resist or be butchered. The ‘Maoist’ killers,self-styled experts as they are in the criminal act of individual assassination,had not known before what mass fury constitutes.

“After a brief hand-to-hand,close body contact struggle,the ‘Maoists’ and their Trinamuli lackeys ran away. More than thirty of the villagers were left sverely injured. It is also believed that the ‘Maoist’ attackers lost at least eight persons,dragging their wounded and the rest of the dead away,” it says.

Compiled by Manoj C.G.