THE ARMS OF THE OCTOPUS

A1961 warning by outgoing US president Dwight D. Eisenhower contributed an enduring term to the global geopolitical lexicon. The president warned of the “militaryindustrial complex” acquiring unwarranted influence because “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”.

Over a halfcentury later, the complex has morphed into a tentacular creature of far greater power and influence, controlling foreign policy in the corridors of power in Washington, an octopus, as former US Senator Larry Pressler calls it in Neighbours in Arms: An American Senator’s Quest for Disarmament in a Nuclear Subcontinent (Penguin/Viking, Rs 699).

Pressler is no stranger to either the subcontinent or the militaryindustrial complex. One of New Delhi’s oldest friends on the Hill, he worked hard to prevent an arms race in the subcontinent, particularly the eponymous 1990 Amendment, banning arms sales to Pakistan. As the first Vietnam veteran to enter the Senate, he famously resisted a bribe in an FBI sting operation in the late 1970s, but his disarmament course brought him in confrontation with the octopus that relies on a web of lobbyists, thinktanks and arms factories and their beneficiaries, Washington’s politicians.

The US did end up supplying F16s to Pakistan in 2006 and, in less than a decade, managed the astonishing feat of being the largest arms exporter to two adversaries, India and Pakistan. The book title is, in a sense, Pressler’s defeat, his failure to push disarmament in a nuclear subcontinent. The 75yearold senator heads into semiretirement wagging his

finger with an Eisenhoweresque warning. The landmark IndoUS nuclear deal, he reckons, was nothing more than ‘a pathway to justify an escalation in massive US arms sales to India’. Not a single US nuclear power project has broken ground so far. The reasons are not far to see. The ghost of the Bhopal gas tragedy is a major disincentive for US firms to do business here. But it became a blanket sanction for over $10 billion in sales of P8Is, Chinooks, C130 and C17 military transporters and Apache gunships.

Pressler recommends that India and the US get into a superalliance to counter China’s rise. Another suggestion must warm hearts in New Delhi: declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Pressler’s book arrives eerily atop present developments—the US recently voted to impose stiff conditions on arms sales to Pakistan while boosting defence ties with India. Conscious that the octopus is a creature one has to live with, Pressler suggests limiting its powers and also harnessing its energies to revive the frozen nuclear deal. His turn from idealism to pragmatism is not a new one.