India's first nuclear tests - 15 May 1998

I was sitting up in bed in the dark of the morning, as I do, reading a quiet piece datelined from the United Nations. Briefly, it said that Russia and the United States had agreed on a report which the UN's Atomic Energy Agency will publish this summer. Essentially, it says that Saddam Hussein has been a good boy and by the autumn the United Nations will switch to a system of routine monitoring of the nuclear and chemical sites, suspected sites, et cetera.

That's good news, at least it was till a flock of independent nuclear experts raised a cry that the new system will be much more casual and leave Iraq many more loopholes through which to return to its old, wily, obstructionist ways.

Having got so far in this interesting bit of news, I was wondering whether, come the autumn, the whole Saddam nuisance mightn't blow up again, when the daylight came in like thunder. It was the sound of those three nuclear tests in India and the echo of it in the UN was a howl of renewed protests from those same independent experts crying, "You see? We told you so! Imagine what Saddam will be able to do the moment you take your eye off him, if your own CIA has been totally blind to what India has been preparing for two years!" The most pathetic government comment here came from Mr Cohen, the Secretary of Defence. "Well", he said, "We did detect the blast".

The most disgusted comment, delivered in a beguiling Irish way, came from the senior senator from New York, Senator Pat Moynihan. He was once American Ambassador to India and he shocked us all (and must have made the CIA big shots crawl under the bed) by announcing that the last people to see the nuclear tests coming were the American intelligence, you should excuse the word, agents. "Anyone", he said, "who has read the newspapers of New Delhi, in English, for the past two years, could have told you precisely what was on the way". He thought the whole administration, not merely the CIA, was to blame.

So, while we saw pictures of leaping crowds in India letting off firecrackers and jumping for joy, now that India, too, was one of the big boys, the Indian Foreign Minister was saying with a smile that, heretofore, we were known as a soft state no longer. The whole thing, the timing of it, the exposure of unbelievable snoring at the helm, was too much even for the articulate President Clinton. It needed Franklin Roosevelt or Mark Twain to express the proper majestic anger. Mr Clinton can only say he was shocked. And after the encore blasts next day, "This," he said, in the understatement of the century, "This is wrong!"

I suspect his sorrow, more visible than anger, was the reflection of a fear which time alone could fulfil that while it sounds right and proper to punish India with stiff economic sanctions, which America and Japan among others were quick to do, punishing a great nation, short of going to war with it, does nothing but exacerbate, especially in a huge, poor nation, the very conditions – poverty, hunger, inefficiency – your economic aid is meant to cure or, better say, alleviate somewhat.

There was another thought that cruelly teased, indeed mocked, America's anger, and it came from Pakistan. The first telephone call abroad the president made, after he got the first bad news, was to the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And just about the most the president could say was a wish and a prayer that Pakistan would not, as they used to say, follow suit. Mr Sharif replied he was under great pressure to do just that. And a former Pakistani prime minister wondered aloud about America's nerve in taking the high moral ground.

The reason Prime Minister Sharif and other high officials didn't even make a pretence of innocence was the wide-open demonstration in the streets of the capital Islamabad of materiel, machines, tractors, pads, all the equipment of an imminent launching of something. So President Clinton sent off, in indecent haste, what was called a high-level diplomatic team to Pakistan.

What sort of diplomacy they can practise at this late date, it's impossible to guess. They may be in time to report Pakistan's thunderous response to India's big bang, which, so early as Friday we heard, could happen any time this weekend. A moment later, the president had to turn to the possibility of a revolution in Indonesia or, as a starter anyway, the dethroning of Suharto, one dictator the United States has been supporting. If that sentence sounds casual and careless to some people, let's not forget that every nation claiming any influence or customers abroad, every prime minister, more than anyone alive, the President of the United States wakes up in the morning and after a briefing from his chief of staff has to decide today which dictator to embrace and which one to deplore. These affections and enmities are moveable according to the shifting relations, including most trade relations, of one country you need with others.

Well, the high-level diplomatic mission to Pakistan was hardly out the door when Mr Clinton quickly mobilised and packed off another so-called high-level military mission to Jakarta, to try and persuade the Indonesian police or security squads not to beat up the rioting protestors. From the pictures we've seen and the commentaries we've heard, this looks and sounds at the moment like asking the invading plebs, please, to evacuate the Bastille.

Of course, the trouble with Mr Suharto has been brewing for some time though till now the emphasis has not been on him as a bad man but on his government as running outrageous debts and a hopeless tax system.

I happened to say just now, "when the president gets up in the morning" and it made me think back to the vast changes that have come over the presidency and its daily burdens since the first decade of America as a world power, which was in the 1920s. The other week I brought up the wiry, creeping little figure of Calvin Coolidge, the Vermont Yankee who had the luck to ride a great wave of prosperity and optimism right after the end of the First World War. The Coolidge prosperity, it was called.

The United States was the world's creditor nation. It was only just beginning to extend the range of its interests and, therefore, to develop world policies. Calvin Coolidge had only two or three interests. One was telling department heads, usually with some irritation, that American policy was their business not his. And to get on with it. Secondly, he loved to eat cheese in large triangular slices, like pie. Most of all, he loved to sleep. He made a point of sleeping between 11 and 15 hours a day. The White House staff consisted of about two dozen men. Today it's closer to 500.

Jump only 10 years from Coolidge to Roosevelt. In the depth of the Depression, Roosevelt called aides and his Brains Trusters to his bedside in the morning and, as somebody said, didn't need briefing papers: he listened, and took everything in with his antennae. And decided every policy himself and then left the carrying out of it to a small, devoted, brilliant staff of young men, "With", he used to boast, "a passion for anonymity". He did this from dawn to midnight for most of 12 years.

And Kennedy's time. Think of him with his bad back, lying in his bath and getting his morning briefing of the overnight cables from a military aide. He was up by seven and worked on, maybe, till seven in the evening – in the increasing crises of his time, till midnight and beyond. By our time, the first thing the president does in the morning is to check the nuclear code of the day with the United States underground nuclear headquarters which could give the red alert if a missile is on its way. Then he gets down to a score of the most urgent problems. And he must do something about protesting letters and petitions from single-issue patriots, anti-abortion groups, the labour unions, small businessmen, flat taxers, the environmentalists, the tobacco lawyers, the government anti-tobacco missionaries.

What's the latest from New Delhi? The Boy Scouts of Wyoming want to present the president with a special medal. The lady camellia growers of Alabama wonder if he will speak at their 100th anniversary. Please, Mr President, where are we going to bury those hundreds of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste? There are 23 sites picked out but 14 states are objecting strenuously. Not in my backyard! The lettuce growers of the huge Salinas Valley in California want to send a delegation. Since El Nino, they have only one third of the normal crop and prices are ruinous to them. Bad news from the Bangkok Stock Exchange. Should we divert those Pacific naval manoeuvres off Thailand? Oh! You must make three dates next month for Democratic fund rallies! One in Chicago, another in Florida, one, as always, in California. And better add Iowa! Since that state is now the first one to hold its primary, so what Iowa decides in February may have a big effect on whether we can hold the house in November. The special prosecutor says no immunity for Lewinski. And, by the way, your Secret Service guards are probably not going to be exempt from testifying before a Grand Jury. And, oh yes! We hate to tell you how many were killed in those Palestinian riots yesterday over Israel's 50th anniversary, what they call the catastrophe.

Just looking over the president's calendar, the private one and the public one, you have to wonder how to harmonise them and leave him time to eat, sleep and somehow stay fit. And please don't remind him that of the last four secretaries of state, one's had a triple heart bypass, another a quadruple.

One or two of us were sitting around the other evening and asking why does anyone go out or yearn to become president? The usual answer is power. Power, for what? They always say power to affect people for good. Well that, sometimes, maybe quite often, happens. Much less than the retired ones claim. True or not, I believe the big incentive is the feeling, the high. As Lord Acton said, I quote the revised version, "Power corrupts! Absolute power is absolutely delicious!"

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