Introduction

Abstract

When, in 1974, India exploded her first nuclear device she provoked much anger in the West: in part this was because a leading nation of the Non-Aligned Movement should both want and prove capable of creating a nuclear arsenal of her own; still more, the moral indignation which ensued was in reality outrage that India had dared to break the monopoly of the leading nuclear powers and was not prepared to behave according to the dictates of the North which saw itself then (and even more today) as the power-broker of the world. Most of the relationships existing between the North and the South or the Third World are, more or less overtly, relationships of neo-colonialism: aid is the most obvious example of this relationship but so too are the EC’s Lomé Conventions which link the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries unwillingly to the European economic juggernaut, or the arms selling business. Given the current and growing indifference of the North to the problems of the South and the huge indebtedness of the latter to the former (debt being a cardinal instrument of control) the relationship between North and South gives every indication of becoming even more neocolonial in the future than it is already.