Indian endorsement to NMD not misplaced: experts

New Delhi, May 30: The US plan on National Missile Defence (NMD) gives New Delhi a "chance to get suitably accommodated", but is also fraught with the possibility of pushing China into a more alert status and thereby force India to up its defence, security analysts have observed.

"We have not lost strategic autonomy by supporting NMD, said Air CMDR Jasjit Singh (Retd), director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses at a seminar "India and the National Missile Defence" observing that "it does provide a system of accommodation as we were not being accommodated anywhere in Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which had been extended indefinitely."

Singh, however, underlined the importance of examining the proposed new security premise and what it portends for national security. This, he said, was more important than debating whether or not New Delhi acted in haste in reacting to President Bush's May one national security policy statement calling for a unilateral reduction of its nuclear arsenal and moving away from hair-trigger alerts associated with nuclear orthodoxies.

Echoing him, C. Raja Mohan, the strategic affairs editor of The Hindu, noted that: "NMD is based on the premise that NPT is ineffective" arguing that even two years of post Pokhran II negotiations had not yielded much. The outgoing US administration had linked the full potential of the Indo-US relations to the existing nuclear weapons pacts. (PTI)