Nuclear Thread - 4

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<b>Scientist reveals India nuke test fizzled</b>

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->But for the rest of the world, Santhanam's bombshell amounts to a colossal preemptive strike against Obama's push for the nations of the world to sign a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by the end of next year — not to mention a potentially debilitating assault on last year's Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear agreement. Already, opponents to the deal have begun echoing Santhanam's call for further testing of India's thermonuclear arsenal, and the lingering doubts about the efficacy of the country's bombs looks likely to tie <b>Manmohan Singh's somewhat fragile coalition government's hands when the time comes to sign Obama's CTBT</b>.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->“We need to test again; it's just a question of when, not if,” said Bharat Karnad, a former member of India's National Security Advisory board and part of the group that drafted India's nuclear doctrine.

<b>Of course, that may not have been true if Santhanam had kept his mouth shut</b>.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Singh government subscribes to the theory that a “minimum deterrent” is sufficient to protect India from its nuclear neighbors, and even though that theory was predicated on the existence of a small number of effective thermonuclear missiles, most observers believe that Singh will not begin preparations of any kind for a resumption of testing. <b>The big question is whether he can sell the country on agreeing to Obama's full-fledged moratorium.</b>
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->And that means Obama and the West have one big bargaining chip left to bring India into the nonproliferation fold: <b>Sign the CTBT, get a seat on the U.N. Security Council</b>. {Sign CTBT, and dangle MMS Nobel Peace Prize offer (not even actually give it) and that should do it. They don't even have to offer UNSC. Frankly, India, under its current leadership, dispensation of people (diffident, uber secularist/liberal, itnernationalist etc) does not deserve a seat on UNSC. After all, whose interests will they protect in UN? Not Indians, much less Hindus...}
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