The hypocrisy of US nuclear policy

The United States has a clear policy on nations it does not like acquiring nuclear weapons - zero tolerance. As the world's self-appointed nuclear policeman, it has adopted an approach that is best described as destabilising.

US President George W. Bush created waves in his State of the Union speech in January last year by describing nations ambitious to arm themselves with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons as part of an 'axis of evil'. The term was dramatic, but to disarmament experts, there was nothing startling about the countries he named - Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The three had decades-long histories of seeking nuclear weapons.

While the experts welcomed Mr Bush's vow that these nations would be disarmed, they would have also liked pressure to be applied on India and US allies Pakistan and Israel, which had refused to sign international protocols and gone ahead with nuclear research and testing. Just as inconsistent has been the administration's approach to dealing with the 'axis' members.

After waging war on Iraq and espousing democracy for the Middle East, it has refused to talk to quasi-democratic Iran, yet pushed for multilateral dialogue with dictator-ruled North Korea.

American physicist David Albright said this week Pakistan was the biggest anomaly, and that the way the US was dealing with its military regime was sending worrying signals to other nations - such as North Korea - which believed that acquiring nuclear weapons would deter an attack by rivals.

'The problem with US policy on nuclear non-proliferation is that it has been a hodge-podge,' said Mr Albright, the president and founder of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. 'It's a problem and it makes selling ideas harder because inevitably there's discrimination or hypocrisy.'

Pakistan initiated its atomic programme in the 1950s and decided in the early 1970s to develop nuclear weapons in response to research and a nuclear test by India in 1974. It began acquiring the technology in 1976 and tested its first nuclear device in May 1998, days after a similar test by India. Relations between Pakistan and the US were rocky until the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Throughout the decade-long occupation, Pakistan received American economic aid and military equipment in return for help in curbing the threat on what had become a new cold war frontier.