The nuclear test ban treaty that President Clinton will soon sign at the United Nations amidst global fanfare may also push India over the nuclear threshold. Wedged between nuclear armed China and nuclear capable Pakistan, India sees its interests as demanding either a global drive to delegitimize and eliminate nuclear weapons altogether or weaponize the nuclear option. PNS commentator Brahma Chellaney, a Professor of Security Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, writes frequently for the International Herald Tribune.

NEW DELHI -- As an elated President Clinton becomes the first world leader to sign the global nuclear test ban treaty, the county which originally conceived the measure is mourning the United States' latest arms-control triumph. India has vowed to block the treaty from ever becoming international law by withholding its signature.

India's official position -- strongly supported by political parties and public opinion at home -- springs from the belief that a measure it once envisioned as a step toward complete nuclear disarmament has been turned into a wily non-proliferation tool directed against it.

India's "not now, not later" pledge on the test ban means the treaty may be left in limbo indefinitely. And if India carries out a nuclear test, it will open a can of worms that would wreck not only the treaty but also the international non proliferation regime built by the great powers.

By implicitly threatening sanctions against any state that holds up its implementation for more than three years, the test ban treaty is expected to push India against a diplomatic wall. Already, it has greatly inflamed Indian nationalistic passions, driving New Delhi to veto consensus agreement on the test ban at the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament. This forced the United States and its allies to secure the treaty's back-door approval by the U.N. General Assembly September 10.

Now the government faces mounting domestic pressure to end the unilateral test moratorium it has observed since conducting its sole nuclear detonation in 1974. A spate of recent articles in the national press urge the government to go overtly nuclear.

Wedged between nuclear-armed China and nuclear-capable Pakistan, India sees its interests as demanding either a global drive to delegitimize and eliminate nuclear weapons or to weaponize its own nuclear option.

After failing to link the test ban to a binding disarmament timetable, India has dismissed the treaty as flawed and riddled with loopholes. The treaty, for example, fails to expressly prohibit the most sophisticated forms of testing -- such as hydronuclear experiments -- that could obviate the need for full scale underground explosions. Nor does it require the closure of existing test sites or ban test-related preparations such as excavation and drilling.

The United States has already unveiled a $40 billion program to maintain nuclear warheads and weapons designers indefinitely by conducting underground "subcritical" tests and building mammoth new machines that would take testing from the physical to the information environment.

India is the only country in history to demonstrate its capability to build nuclear weapons and then withhold weaponization despite pressing security concerns and the continued proliferation of such weapons across its frontiers and around the world. There is no international evidence that it has secretly built nuclear weapons. Its unique self-restraint also extends to the missile field.

However, that restraint is being challenged by China's growing military and economic power and its continuing covert nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan.

In fashioning a credible deterrent, India faces formidable technical challenges. It is the only nuclear-threshold state not to have received tested warhead designs from external powers. (Pakistan reportedly obtained from China the design of at least one missile-deliverable warhead in the early 1980s, while Israel reportedly received warhead technology and computer design codes from France and the United States.)

Moreover, while China can strike India's northern Gangetic plains even with bombers and short-range missiles from Tibet, New Delhi would need missiles with a range of more than 2,000 miles to strike targets in the Chinese heartland. For India to build a reliable missile-based deterrent without testing is almost unthinkable.

The Sino-Pakistan umbilical cord will snap only if New Delhi can stand up to Beijing and the Chinese strategy of building up a countervailing power to tie India down south of the Himalayas. But at present, India does not have even the conventional military resources to deter direct or indirect Chinese threats to its security.

With its real defense spending continuing to plummet since the end of the Cold War, India has not ordered a single major new weapon system in five years. (It was the world's largest arms importer in much of the 1980s.) In the years ahead, India is unlikely to feel secure with a strategy based solely on a conventional defense posture.

The attraction of a nuclear deterrent is thus likely to grow. So far, New Delhi has borne the burden of maintaining its nuclear-weapons option, but reaped no tangible security benefits. The option can be turned into a real strategic asset only if the country that is home to one-sixth of the global population starts addressing its technical and policy imperatives.

Late last year, India was accused by U.S. intelligence of preparing to conduct a nuclear test at the very site of its first detonation. New Delhi denied it, but the test-ban treaty threatens to push it over the nuclear threshold.

The world thus faces the real prospect of a test ban that may never take effect and, worse, could backfire.