Reassuring and Unnerving India } 743
In mid-1996, Beijing moved to expand nonproliferation with the United
States as part of the effort to normalize Sino-US ties after the confrontations of
1989–1996. Beijing dropped its previous demand that China be allowed to con-
tinue nuclear testing for “peaceful purposes.” Instead, Beijing now informed
Washington that it would suspend nuclear testing by September 1996, when
the CTBT was scheduled to take effect. Achieving a CTBT was a high prior-
ity of the Clinton administration, which was happy that Beijing had shifted
to support it. Beijing became an active participant of the CTBT Conference,
working closely with the United States. China became an advocate of strong
“entry into force” provisions designed to pressure countries like India to join
the emerging CTBT. India tried to block progress by refusing to assent to the
draft CTBT in the UN Disarmament Conference where the negotiations were
being held and whose rules required unanimity. Washington and Beijing
then outmaneuvered New Delhi by referring the draft treaty to the General
Assembly, which operates by majority vote. There the CTBT was approved by
a vote of 158 to 3. Only India, Bhutan, and Libya voted against it.
India was dismayed and outraged by US and Chinese circumvention of
its objections. It was even more dismayed by the reality of PRC-US cooper-
ation against it. India had just lost its Soviet backer and was isolated, while
China and the United States seemed to be moving closer and cooperating to
arrange the security affairs of South Asia. India, without backing from any
major power, faced a China-US condominium trying to force India into a
nonnuclear status, abandoning even the option of a nuclear deterrent against
China, and accepting a nonnuclear status parity with Pakistan. As India’s
representative to the UN said, “a very small group of countries” had tried to
“enforce obligations on India without its consent.” The Indian representative
explained India’s security situation vis-à-vis nuclear China and Pakistan:
Our security environment has obliged us to maintain the nuclear op-
tion. ... Countries around us continue their weapons program either
openly or in a clandestine manner. In such an environment, we cannot
permit our options to be constrained or checked in any manner as long
as nuclear weapons states remain unwilling to accept the obligation to
eliminate their nuclear arsenals.^16
Two years later, in May 1998, a different Indian government, headed by
self-defined realists led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ordered
underground tests of three nuclear weapons. Two days later, two more
bombs were tested, including one hydrogen bomb. On the day of the second
set of tests, Vajpayee—the Indian defense minister who had been caught in
Hangzhou nineteen years earlier when China attacked Vietnam—sent a letter
to US President Clinton and other world leaders. Vajpayee’s letter did not ex-
plicitly name China, but the implication was so clear that it was considered
a major lapse of diplomatic protocol, which typically requires obfuscation of