What about the Indians and Pakistanis who together represent one fifth of the world’s population? How hypocritical they will be if their leaders who hold on to their nuclear weapons express concern over the North Korean announcement?

India exploded its first nuclear device in May 1974 in the Pokhran desert.  Was it a coincidence that when India conducted its second nuclear test on the Buddha Purnima day in May 1998? The nuclear programme under the NDA government was later codenamed ‘The Smiling Buddha’ Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam, who was the main architect of the nuclear project, conveyed the success of the test to the then Prime Minister Vajpayee, in these words: "The Buddha has smiled."

Sri Lankans were furious that India had ridiculed Buddha and turned his doctrine of non-violence upside down. But our leaders simply accepted the fact that India was a major power worthy of being a regional superpower and there was no protest over the inadvertent sacrilege to Buddhism, which Sri Lanka is constitutionally bound to protect and promote.

So when Iran, North Korea or any other nation tests a nuclear device, we believe it is none of our business. But it was not the case some three decades ago. In the 1970s, Sri Lanka had been in the forefront of the moves to declare the India Ocean region as a peace zone. The then government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike ran a relentless campaign to realise our pet international project for the sake of world peace. Ms Bandaranaike first made the proposal at the third Non-Aligned Movement summit in Lusaka in 1970. A year later, she was at the UN, addressing its 26th annual sessions. Her diplomacy bore fruit when the General Assembly adopted a resolution recognising the Indian Ocean region as a peace zone.

The UN resolution in effect called upon all states to consider and respect Indian Ocean as a zone of peace from which great power rivalries and competition in the form of Army, Navy or Air Force bases were excluded, making it an area free of nuclear power.

We Sri Lankans were serious about our proposal. We were really concerned about the militarisation of the Indian Ocean region and we identified ourselves with our government’s efforts, although the then opposition leader J. R. Jayewardene, whom the leftists had nicknamed ‘Yankee Dickey’ for his pro-American worldview, had a different interpretation of the peace zone concept. Mrs Bandaranaike was largely concerned about the US build up in the Indian Ocean. She called on the United States to wind up its military base at Diego Garcia, which Britain leased out to the Americans after expelling its original inhabitants in what today’s human rights activists would call a crime against humanity. Sri Lanka also slammed the US military intervention in Vietnam as an "imperialistic" aggression.

But Jayewardene believed the superpower presence in the Indian Ocean indeed enhanced peace in the region.

He was largely concerned about the growing power of India as a regional bully — a role India arrogates to itself under the hawkish Indira doctrine. He believed the presence of the US in the region would help check India.

Sri Lanka was, however, successful in getting resolution after resolution passed in the United Nations and at NAM meetings in the 1970s but these resolutions lacked the force of implementation. We redoubled our diplomatic efforts to win the support of major powers, which are now shedding crocodile tears for world peace while arming themselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons enough to destroy our planet many times over.

Sri Lanka almost achieved success when in 1978 US President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev made some positive moves towards the global disarmament drive. But the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put paid to years of Sri Lanka’s diplomacy to make the Indian Ocean region a nuclear-free zone. It was the same big powers that are today hell-bent on stopping Iran and North Korea from going nuclear that squashed the Indian Ocean peace zone project. Similarly, there is little support today from the same big powers to the Arab world proposal to make West Asia a nuclear-free zone.

If the major powers themselves are armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, then their concern for nuclear proliferation is nothing but hypocrisy. Their concern is more an effort to protect their exclusivity to nuclear weapons and prevent others from joining the nuclear club. This is why, instead of non-proliferation, the UN attention should be focused more on total nuclear disarmament. It should be done and done soon before a terrorist group — or a maverick state — lays its hands on nukes to terrorise the world.