WASHINGTON: The possible deployment of the Prithvi missile by India is now beginning to be viewed as the most immediate proliferation threat in South Asia by arms control experts here..
In submissions to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs,
chaired by Senator Hank Brown, which has been soliciting opinion on the dangers of proliferation in the sub-continent to the region as a whole, these experts warned that if the Prithvi were to be deployed it would trigger a highly disconcerting chain reaction. George Perkovich, Director, Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, a think tank and research center that focuses on arms control and strategic studies, told the Senate panel that “the most immediate and specific security challenge in South. Asia stems from the possible Indian. deployment of Prithvi missiles.” Perkovich predicted that such deployments “could trigger an action- reaction cycle in Pakistan, India and other countries in West Asia and North-east Asia, which over a period of time could profoundly undermine the global non-proliferation regime.” Perkovich informed Congress that India also “seems to discount the political bellicosity and military instability Prithvi deployment would prompt vis-a-vis Pakistan.”
He said that it was imperative that Congress consider whether its existing sanctions, “may now contribute to Pakistan’s vulnerability before an unconstrained Indian missile program.”
Perkovich said he did not believe that Senator Larry Pressler “did not intend to render Pakistan militarily vulnerable to India.”
Mitchell Reiss, guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars here, also agreed with Perkovich that “the single greatest near-term threat to strategic stability in South Asia is the possibility that India will mass produce and deploy the nuclear-capable prithvi short- range ballistic missile.”
Article extracted from this publication >> March 31, 1995
