The recent announcements by Madhav Kumar Nepal, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), that Maoists are willing to give up arms and join the mainstream necessitates neighbouring India to have a fresh look at the crisis. According to him the Maoists are ready to lay down their arms under UN supervision if there is a consensus for the election to a constituent assembly.

The Strategic Forces Command of India, which forms part of country’s Nuclear Command Authority, is responsible for the management and administration of strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. Commensurating with the recommendations on national security management, the SFC came in to existence on January 4, 2003. While acknowledging the onerous tasks SFC was undertaking, more transparent measures have been declared recently geared towards clearing certain anomalies and in creating more transparencies on aspects of India’s nuclear policy.

Trends in defence expenditure denote certain clues to assess especially the military component of a state’s comprehensive national power. Components of national power, in turn, are intricately linked to a state’s grand strategy - the latter connotes the desire of a state to achieve its rightful place in the global community. In brief, trends in defence expenditure tend to objectively assess aspects of a state’s military capability, although lacuna still remain as even the very concept of military capability is often value-laden.

With sensors and submarine detection methods getting more sophisticated and advanced, the primary advantage of a submarine, its ability to operate undetected and unobserved, has been getting vitiated because of the need to surface frequently for recharging batteries. Even coming up to snorkel depth, while evading human visual capabilities, is now well within the cognisant ability of advanced ‘eyes in the sky’.

Two piracy attacks in less than a fortnight on Japanese flagged vessels transiting through the Malacca Strait have shaken up the government in Tokyo as also the national shipping agencies. On March 14, armed pirates in three fishing boats boarded a Japanese-flag ocean tug MV Idaten towing a large construction barge Kurooshia, for Myanmar in the Straits of Malacca. They kidnapped the Japanese Master and two engineers. Later, the Royal Malaysian police patrol boats escorted the tug and towed the vessel to Penang.

The East Asian Community has been propagated as the new harbinger of comprehensive security processes. The idea of an East Asian Community got an impetus with the December 2003 Tokyo Declaration between Japan and ASEAN. Although East Asia has witnessed sufficient degrees of ‘regionalization’, ‘regionalism’ still has a long way to go. The former refers to those processes, which come from markets and private investment flows while the latter emerges as a result of intergovernmental dialogues and treaties.

The US Congress has approved a $ 300 million military aid package for Pakistan in November last year, the biggest military aid package to Pakistan since the events of 9/11. President Bush has thus begun his second term by deciding to dole out ‘arms bonanza’ to Pakistan. The $300 million is a part of the foreign military financing programme (H R 4818 Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2005) totaling more than $4.7 billion, a major chunk of which goes to Israel ($2.2 billion) and Egypt (1.3billion).

Containerised cargo system has emerged as the most convenient and cost effective mode of transporting large volumes of goods. It has reduced handling time by minimising break-bulk operations thereby permitting the shipping infrastructure to keep up with increasing volumes of goods to be transported. But it has its own problems that seem to take a back seat particularly with the international maritime shipping system who believe in the philosophy of maximising profits and in most cases at the cost of security.