**Activists fear U.S. will use India tests as excuse to resume Nevada N-tests**
 

The United States should shoulder its share of the responsibility for the series
of nuclear weapons development tests conducted by India this week, says the
West’s oldest activist organization on radiation issues.
 
“Before the Clinton Administration and the Congress rush to vilify India and use
their nuclear tests as an excuse to resume our own testing program in Nevada,
some serious soul searching on our role in and responsibility for India’s tests
is in order,” according to Preston J Truman, Director of Downwinders.  “U.S.
actions, and inaction, are partly to blame for India’s regrettable and
dangerously destabilizing decision to test,” Truman charged.
 
Truman pointed to two recent actions by the U.S. as key provocations that may
have convinced India to proceed with its test series: the deployment of the
B61-11 nuclear “bunker buster” warhead and threats to use this earth penetrating
weapon against Iraq, and a Presidential Directive giving the U.S. the policy
option to respond to chemical or biological weapons use with a nuclear attack
against offending third world nations.

While acknowledging India’s internal politics and threats from China and
Pakistan as critical to India’s nuclear breakout, Truman argued that the U.S.
could have prevented what he called “an end to the Test Ban Treaty, to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, to arms control as we have known it.”
 
“India made a judgment call that (they) can’t trust the nuclear powers who make
treaties they won’t comply with themselves.  India decided that they had no
other choice but to test and go nuclear to protect their sovereignty and their
people.  It’s hard to blame them when they see the example our government has
set on testing, non-proliferation and treaty compliance,” Truman
said.

Downwinders calls reports that the Central Intelligence Agency failed to detect
test preparations and failed to warn key U.S. decision-makers of the impending
blasts a clever but transparent ruse.  “We don’t buy, and world opinion won’t
buy, this garbage that the CIA didn’t know these tests would happen.  It’s
transparent nonsense, as ridiculous as the CIA now investigating itself over its
failure that never occurred.  The Clinton people are scapegoating the
CIA to cover their own monumental policy and diplomacy screw up.   That these
tests were in the works was known by governments throughout the region,
speculated about in the press world-wide, and were a long standing platform of
the ruling BJP in India, could not possibly be missed."

"The CIA didn’t miss this. The Administration is scapegoating the CIA to divert
attention from its own ineptitude and deviousness,” Truman charged.
"The real danger close to home is that the U.S. will exploit this crisis in order
to justify a resumption of full blown nuclear testing in Nevada,"Truman said.
“We have been operating a thinly veiled, $4 billion new nuclear weapons
development program, exploiting “sub critical tests” we insisted comply with
treaty and disarmament goals.  Now that the Indians have called it for the
lie it really is, our government will spin this into a rationale to start testing
again, to create new and more powerful and unnecessary nuclear weapons
against some enemy we can’t define or identify." 

"With the whole hypocritical Nevada congressional delegation calling to resume
the bombing, it’s deja vu all over again for the Downwinders, unless the body
politic and the corporate media pull their pants up and their heads out of the
fence fast,” Truman said.

NEWS RELEASE****FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 1998
Contact: Steve Erickson      E-Mail: slceric@concentric.net 

Additional Resources:

India: Hero, Villain, or Scapegoat?

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