It may seem hypocritical of the United Nations Security Council to urge India and Pakistan to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty as non-nuclear states when each of the five permanent members of the council are themselves nuclear powers. It might help if they at least made some attempt at nuclear disarmament. However, there is a critical difference between the position of the existing five nuclear states and India and Pakistan. The difference is that India and Pakistan have been to war against each other several times since 1947 and have a 40-year-old territorial dispute over Kashmir.
The other danger is that India and Pakistan are an example to other mid-range powers with long-running disputes with neighbours to go more openly nuclear — notably Israel and North Korea. The end of the cold war has by no means led to the end of the nuclear threat. Indeed, now it seems greater than in most of the cold war days because nations like Pakistan and India have only a few bombs making first strike more important. Destruction is not mutually assured.
This is why the most important part of the Security Council’s resolution is the call for bilateral talks on Kashmir. Indeed, the lesson of last months nuclear testing by India and Pakistan is that greater efforts are needed to settle all of the long running disputes between neighbours around the world, whether on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East or even between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is now too easy for any nation to get the bomb. And it is in the early days of getting it that nations seem more likely to threaten to use it.
It is probably too late to get India and Pakistan to decommission their nuclear weapons, at least until there is a settlement in Kashmir and their governments and people no longer see the need for them.