Last week's succession of five nuclear test explosions near the town of Khetolai, India, near the Pakistani border, was the stuff of front-page news in the U.S., and pompous moralizing from Bill Clinton, who immediately invoked sanctions against India. It's a stunning bit of hypocrisy. He might as usefully sanction himself.

India's tests were a direct response to the U.S. nuclear program, which has most decidedly not been front-page news in recent years, even when, in the last year, two underground nuclear tests were set off in the Nevada desert. During the Clinton years nuclear spending has gone up 20% (in the absence of any post-Soviet threat), with new weapons development--the reason for tests--a big part of it. It's why Hanford is getting fired up again for tritium production, as is the plant at Savannah River, South Carolina. It's being done, in flagrant defiance of both treaties and international momentum for disarmament, under an obscure program called the "Nuclear Stockpile and Stewardship Management" (NSSM) program.

NSSM supposedly maintains the existing U.S. supply of nukes, assuring that they're combat-ready and safe (sic). This is done by testing them. In recent years, the U.S. has developed the technology to use computer modeling, rather than actual explosions, to do the checks--"subcritical" tests.

The catch is that the exact same process can used to develop new weapons. New weapons, after all, are generally improvements on existing ones. And that's exactly what the U.S. is doing at the Nevada Test Site and at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Livermore, Calif., and in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The bunker-busting nukes the U.S. threatened a few months ago to deploy against Iraq, we learned from the media, didn't exist during the Gulf War. They are, therefore, new weapons. The same memory-impaired media then uncritically dismissed India's complaints last week that the U.S. is developing new weapons.

The Indian tests came in the context of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a long-sought disarmament Holy Grail up for U.S. Senate approval this summer. (Slade Gorton is considered a key swing vote.) All "big five" nuclear powers (U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain) and all presumed nuclear powers except India (Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Korea) have signed on. India's objection was, and is, that the Test Ban freezes superiority of the established powers. India conducted its tests last week, and incensed Bill Clinton, for two explicitly stated reasons: to become an official, established nuclear power, so that India would also benefit from the CTBT as written; and to establish a baseline so that it could use the same subcritical technology in the future, to develop new weapons, that the U.S. is now using.

From the Indian perspective, the tests were made necessary by U.S. insistence on pursuing arms development and cooking an international treaty in its own favor. Bill Clinton professed outrage and imposed sanctions on another country for doing what he has himself pursued relentlessly: nuclear superiority.

The irony--that a country, India, with widespread poverty, could be spending huge sums of money on an arms race--is less ironic when one considers how much more the U.S. is spending, even as a percentage of its GNP, on the same stuff, and without immediate borders with unfriendly neighbors. India has Pakistan on one side and China on another, and has had wars with both during its 50 years of independence.

The final (and most local) of U.S. hypocrisies on the matter is Boeing: a company that is promoting the regional arms race in South Asia by selling arms to India and Pakistan--both proud owners of F-16 fighter jets--and, of course, exporting military-applicable technology to China as well. To some companies and people, including one very large company based in Seattle, it doesn't matter how much it costs or how many people die through mis-allocated resources, so long as profits are made. And so long as a self-righteous U.S. President and credulous media can divert folks' attention from the real dynamics at play.