India's nuclear weapons program arguably poses a greater threat to the world than anything coming out of Iraq, yet the United States has not moved in any forceful way to stop it. The reason is that India has something the U.S. cannot do without. PNS commentator Andrew Robinson, a freelance writer, worked as a consultant on Internet-related issues in Bangladesh and India for three years.

As the United States continues its war cry over Iraq's ability to develop weapons of mass destruction, India is preparing to test a nuclear missile that can obliterate just about any city in Pakistan in less than two minutes.

The Prithvi SS-350, with a range of 217 miles, is scheduled to be tested sometime around the end of January. Coupled with India's newly developed nuclear warheads, the Prithvi missile system would seem to represent a threat to humanity far more serious than anything Iraq could produce.

President Clinton recently vowed to "restrain" India and Pakistan -- but the fact is, the administration refuses to take serious action, because without India, the information technology (IT) industry -- the largest sector of the U.S. economy -- could be in big trouble.

One-fourth of the world's programmers are Indians, and, according to a recent issue of Migration News Bulletin from the University of California at Davis, one-third of wages paid in IT go to Indians.

Eight months ago, India's Hindu fundamentalist-led government ordered a series of nuclear tests. In response, the Clinton administration imposed economic sanctions "to make clear our categorical opposition" to the tests. But not long after, Clinton decided to support an increase in the quota for Indians who wanted to immigrate -- in response to pressure from high-technology companies and to a U.S. Department of Commerce report which estimated a shortage of over one million programmers.

Within two months of the imposition of sanctions against India, the U.S. congress passed a bill increasing the quota of H-1 work visas from 65,000 to 90,000 this year, and to 115,000 by the year 2002.

In 1996, India exported $1.1 billion worth of software and predicted that figure would rise to $3.6 billion in the year 2000. U.S. demand for Indian programming has become a financial jackpot for the Indian economy.

Compared to such figures, Clinton's withholding $140 million in aid, refusing to export military equipment to India, opposing World Bank loans of, at the most, $1.5 billion, were hardly even a slap on the wrist. In fact, for the Hindu Fundamentalist Bharatia Janata Party (BJP), which took power in the last Indian election and ordered the nuclear tests, the sanctions resembled something like a reward.

The rise of the BJP was in many ways a backlash against American cultural influences -- TV programs, fast food, video game parlors, shorts, T-shirts and extra large bottles of soft drinks that began permeating Indian society under Rajiv Gandhi in the early 1980s, and even more dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As just about everyone in India knew, opposition to World Bank funding and a reduction of U.S. influence were exactly what the BJP had been lobbying for in India. So their nuclear tests gave the BJP-led government a remarkable double-victory.

On top of this, the increased immigration quota was an unexpected godsend. The value of the U.S. dollar compared to the Indian rupee is so high, that a garland of twenty dollar bills draped around one's neck -- a popular photographic pose for Indian taxi drivers in New York City to send to proud parents back home -- would be enough to support many Indians for the rest of their lives.

"Just about every Indian working here sees the hypocrisy," says Srinivas Thummuluri, an Indian PhD student studying computer science in the US. "When America condemns India's nuclear tests, but it lets Indians come into this country and make U.S. dollars to send back home. Were the U.S. government to decide to lock us out because of the tests, the current Indian government would be out of power within a week and there would be no more testing."

Dean R. O'Hare, Chairman of the U.S.-India Business Council, reportedly said during a recent tour of South India that U.S. investors now see "India emerging as a global economic power in the leading growth sectors of the 21st century."

Clearly, software programming from South Asia has become what oil has always been in the Middle East -- something Americans cannot live without. At the same time, observes Bruce Eisenstein, President-elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), programming software is "work that Americans don't really want to do."

If the United States is serious about controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia, it will have to stop patronizing India's software market.

Otherwise, India seems likely to develop into a Hindu fundamentalist led state with weapons of mass destruction aimed at its arch-foe Pakistan, just a few delicate minutes away.