![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
This article analyzes India's nuclear doctrine, finding it to be critically flawed and inimical to strategic stability in South Asia. In pursuing an ambitious triad of nuclear forces, India is straying from the sensible course it charted after going overtly nuclear in 1998. In doing so, it is exacerbating the triangular nuclear dilemma stemming from India's simultaneous rivalries with China and Pakistan. Strategic instability is compounded by India's pursuit of conventional “proactive strategy options,” which have the potential to lead to uncontrollable nuclear escalation on the subcontinent. New Delhi should reaffirm and redefine its doctrine of minimum credible nuclear deterrence, based on small nuclear forces with sufficient redundancy and diversity to deter a first strike by either China or Pakistan. It should also reinvigorate its nuclear diplomacy and assume a leadership role in the evolving global nuclear weapon regime.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Rhyner Washburn for his research assistance. Thanks also to the participants in the conference on Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Center on American and Global Security, Indiana University, March 14–15, 2014.
Notes
1. Two official documents encapsulate the various components of New Delhi's nuclear posture: National Security Advisory Board, “India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine,” Arms Control Today, July/August 1999, <www.armscontrol.org/act/1999_07-08/ffja99>; Ministry of External Affairs, “Cabinet Committee on Security Reviews Operationalization of India's Nuclear Doctrine,” January 4, 2003, <www.mea.gov.in/press-releases.htm?dtl/20131/The+Cabinet+Committee+on+Security+Reviews+perationalization+of+Indias+Nuclear+Doctrine>.
2. The details are recounted in Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
3. On the India-China geopolitical competition, see: “Faceoff: China/India,” World Policy Journal 30 (Winter 2013/2014), pp. 1–51.
4. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
5. By “strategic elites,” I mean the relatively small group of Indians who collectively shape New Delhi's foreign and national security policies. Their numbers include politicians and their advisors; senior and retired civil servants, military officers, and scientists; as well as influential journalists, academics, and think-tank analysts.
6. With respect to both China and Pakistan, India's nuclear doctrine—discussed below—identifies the threat to be deterred as nuclear attacks; but New Delhi naturally hopes that its nuclear arsenal also deters conventional aggression.
7. Immediate deterrence is “highly episodic, associated with crisis and confrontation”; in general deterrence, the “potential attack is more distant and less defined, even hypothetical.” Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 80–81.
8. Gaurav Kampani, “India: The Challenges of Nuclear Operationalization and Strategic Stability,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Abraham M. Denmark, and Travis Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia, 2013–14: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2013), pp. 99–100.
9. International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Global Fissile Material Report 2013: Increasing Transparency of Nuclear Warhead and Fissile Material Stocks as a Step toward Disarmament,” October 2013, pp. 2–3, <http://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr13.pdf>.
10. Nuclear “opacity” refers to a government's clandestine development of nuclear-weapon capabilities combined with its public disavowal of any intention actually to deploy nuclear weapons. For a detailed exploration of the concept, see Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: 1998), pp. 39–62.
11. In contrast, arms control and nonproliferation analysts tend to believe that “secrecy creates uncertainty, mistrust and misunderstandings. Increased transparency would alleviate this potentially dangerous situation.” Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69 (2013), p. 75.
12. Kristensen and Norris, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories,” p. 76.
13. If military strategy is the “art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy,” grand strategy is the art of using all of the state's means—diplomatic, economic, military, clandestine, etc.—for this purpose. The quotation above is from B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 335.
14. Ashley J. Tellis, “No Escape: Managing the Enduring Reality of Nuclear Weapons,” in Tellis, Denmark, and Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia, 2013–14, p. 15.
15. Zachary S. Davis, “Conclusion: Lessons Learned and Unlearned,” in Davis, ed., The India-Pakistan Military Standoff: Crisis and Escalation in South Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 233.
16. Tellis, “No Escape,” pp. 19–20. Also see Feroz Hassan Khan, “Minimum Deterrence: Pakistan's Dilemma,” in Malcolm Chalmers, Andrew Somerville, and Andrea Berger, eds., Small Nuclear Forces: Five Perspectives, Whitehall Report 3–11 (London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2011), p. 69.
17. See Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2010).
18. Federation of American Scientists, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” updated April 30, 2014, <www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html>.
19. Timothy McDonnell, “Nuclear Pursuits: Non-P-5 Nuclear-Armed States, 2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69 (2013), pp. 63, 67.
20. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Nuclear Notebook: Indian Nuclear Forces, 2012,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (2012), pp. 97, 100.
21. Kristensen and Norris, “Indian Nuclear Forces,” p. 97.
22. Ibid., pp. 97–99. The authors point out on p. 99 that “India's first- and second-generation warheads, even modified versions, are relatively heavy compared with warheads developed by other nuclear weapon states that deploy MIRVs. It took the Soviet Union and the United States hundreds of nuclear tests and 25 years of effort to develop re-entry vehicles small enough to equip a ballistic missile with MIRVs.” Also see McDonnell, “Nuclear Pursuits,” pp. 63, 66.
23. Kristensen and Norris, “Indian Nuclear Forces,” p. 99.
24. McDonnell, “Nuclear Pursuits,” p. 67; International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), “Global Fissile Material Report 2013,” p. 14.
25. “India's First Nuclear Power Submarine Ready for Deterrence Patrols from 2015,” Business Standard, February 7, 2014.
26. McDonnell, “Nuclear Pursuits,” pp. 63, 67.
27. IPFM, “Global Fissile Material Report 2013,” p. 14.
28. Rajesh Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence: Lessons from the Indian Experience,” in Chalmers, Somerville, and Berger, Small Nuclear Forces, p. 54 . Also see “Strategic Policy Issues: South Asia's Nuclear Arms Race: Lessons of the Cold War,” Strategic Survey 2013 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2013), p. 37.
29. Kampani, “India,” p. 107.
30. Vipin Narang, “Conventional Balances and Nuclear Strategy: The Sources of Nuclear Postures in India and Pakistan,” paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 3, 2010, p. 9.
31. Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence,” p. 54.
32. Kampani, “India,” pp. 107, 116.
33. Rajesh Basrur, “Indian Perspectives on the Global Elimination of Nuclear Weapons,” in Barry Blechman, ed. Unblocking the Road to Zero, Vol. 2: India and China (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009), p. 6 . Also see McDonnell, “Nuclear Pursuits,” p. 63.
34. George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 293–95.
35. Jaswant Singh, “Against Nuclear Apartheid,” Foreign Affairs 77 (September/October 1998), pp. 41–52.
36. “India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine.”
37. “India's Statement in the CD Plenary,” Conference on Disarmament, United Nations Office at Geneva, August 17, 2010, <www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B8954/%28httpAssets%29/B86B540997EAFB02C1257782004553EF/$file/1193_India.pdf>.
38. “Cabinet Committee on Security Reviews Operationalization of India's Nuclear Doctrine.” Italics added. On the reasoning behind these changes, see Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India: The Logic of Assured Retaliation,” in Muthiah Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 195–97.
39. Tellis, “No Escape,” pp. 16–17.
40. Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence,” pp. 54–55.
41. Kampani, “India,” p. 126. The author's discussion of Indian command-and-control capabilities on pp. 106–09 is excellent.
42. Kampani, “India,” p. 100.
43. “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 37.
44. Scott D. Sagan, “The Evolution of Pakistani and Indian Nuclear Doctrine,” in Sagan, ed., Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 249–50.
45. Douglas Busvine, “India's Modi Says Committed to No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Reuters, April 16, 2014 <http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/16/uk-india-election-nuclear-idUKBREA3F11B20140416>.
46. “Clarifying India's Nascent Nuclear Doctrine: An Interview with Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh,” Hindu, November 29, 1999 (published in Arms Control Today, December 1999) <www.armscontrol.org/act/1999_12/jsde99>.
47. “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 32 . Also see: Davis, “Conclusion,” p. 233; and Sagan, “The Evolution of Pakistani and Indian Nuclear Doctrine,” p. 254.
48. Michael Krepon and Julia Thompson, eds., Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2013), p. 12.
49. See, respectively, Shyam Saran, “Is India's Nuclear Deterrent Credible?,” remarks made at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, April 24, 2013, p. 12, <http://krepon.armscontrolwonk.com/files/2013/05/Final-Is-Indias-Nuclear-Deterrent-Credible-rev1-2-1-3.pdf>; Rajagopalan, “India,” p. 210, Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence,” p. 53.
50. Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence,” p. 54.
51. George J. Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham, “Double Trouble: A Realist View of Chinese and Indian Power,” Washington Quarterly 36 (Summer 2013), p. 134.
52. Kristensen and Norris, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories,” p. 76.
53. Tellis, “No Escape,” p. 19.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid. For another analysis of China's evolving nuclear posture, see: Jeffrey Lewis, “China's Nuclear Modernization: Surprise, Restraint, and Uncertainty,” in Tellis, Denmark, and Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia, 2013-14, pp. 67-96.
56. Lewis, “China's Nuclear Modernization,” pp. 74-77; Kristensen and Norris, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories,” pp. 76-80; “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 34; Kristensen and Norris, “Indian Nuclear Forces: 2012,” pp. 96-100; Kampani, “India,” pp. 111-14.
57. Kampani, “India,” p. 128.
58. Kristensen and Norris, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories,” p. 77.
59. “First-strike uncertainty” refers to “the existence of a kernel of doubt in the minds of the potential attacker's leaders about whether they could destroy all of the opponent's nuclear weapons preemptively.” Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation, p. 191.
60. Rajesh Basrur, “India and China: Nuclear Rivalry in the Making,” RSIS Policy Brief, Nanyang Technological University, October 2013, p. 7.
61. “General K. Sundarji: Disputed Legacy,” India Today, May 15, 1988, p. 39.
62. M. Granger Morgan, K. Subrahmanyam, K. Sundarji, and Robert M. White, “India and the United States,” Washington Quarterly 18 (Spring 1995), p. 164.
63. George Perkovich, “A Nuclear Third Way in South Asia,” Foreign Policy 91 (Summer 1993), p. 88.
64. “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 32.
65. Feroz Hassan Khan and Peter R. Lavoy, “Pakistan: The Dilemma of Nuclear Deterrence,” in Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow, p. 226.
66. P. Cotta-Ramusino and M. Martellini, “Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Stability and Nuclear Strategy in Pakistan: A Concise Report of a Visit by Landau Network-Centro Volta,” Pugwash Online Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Como, Italy, January 14, 2002, <www.centrovolta.it/landau/NuclearSafetyNuclearStabilityAndNuclearStrategy.aspx>. Kidwai blurred this already vague doctrinal principle by adding several examples of Indian actions that might provoke a nuclear response by Pakistan if deterrence fails: “a) India attacks Pakistan and conquers a large part of its territory … ; b) India destroys a large part either of its land or air forces … ; c) India proceeds to the economic strangling of Pakistan … ; d) India pushes Pakistan into political destabilization or creates a large scale internal subversion in Pakistan.”
67. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Pakistan's Nuclear Forces, 2011,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67 (2013), pp. 95-96. It bears noting that on the crowded subcontinent, the difference in magnitude between strategic and tactical nukes is modest. The main distinction lies in what is likely to be targeted: cities vs. advancing military formations, respectively . The effects of tactical nuclear blasts would still be enormous in the context of nearby population density, unpredictable climatic and meteorological conditions, uncertain missile accuracy, a dearth of sufficient training for end users, and numerous other variables.
68. Hans N. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons, 2012,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (2012), p. 103.
69. Robert S. Norris and Hans Kristensen, “Nuclear Notebook: Pakistani Nuclear Forces, 2009,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 65 (2009), p. 85.
70. Vipin Narang, “Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability,” International Security 34 (Winter 2009/10), pp. 65-67.
71. Devin T. Hagerty, “The Kargil War: An Optimistic Assessment,” in Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, eds., Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 100-116; Ganguly and Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 167-86.
72. Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang, “Doctrine, Capabilities, and (In)Stability in South Asia,” in Krepon and Thompson, eds., Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia, pp. 94-99.
73. Khan, “Minimum Deterrence,” p. 69.
74. “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 35; Clary and Narang, “Doctrine, Capabilities, and (In)Stability,” p. 97.
75. “Strategic Policy Issues,” p. 36.
76. Clary and Narang, “Doctrine, Capabilities, and (In)Stability,” p. 97; Walter C. Ladwig, III, “A Cold Start for Hot Wars? The Indian Army's New Limited War Doctrine,” International Security 32 (Winter 2007/08), pp. 158-90.
77. Mark Hibbs, “Moving Forward on the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal,” Q&A, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, April 5, 2010, <http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=40491>.
78. Sebastian Rotella, “Militant Affirms Role of Pakistan in Mumbai Attacks,” Foreign Policy, August 9, 2012, <www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/09/militant_reaffirms_role_of_pakistan_in_mumbai_attacks>.
79. “Strategic Policy Issues,” pp. 34-36.
80. Khan, “Minimum Deterrence,” p. 74.
81. “Strategic Policy Issues,” pp. 38-39.
82. Kampani, “India,” p. 122.
83. Basrur, “Low-Profile Deterrence,” p. 54.
84. “India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine,” point 2.7.
85. For an overview of the global nuclear agenda, see the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers (Canberra, 2012).
86. On India's nuclear diplomacy, see Devin T. Hagerty, “The Nuclear Holdouts: India, Israel, and Pakistan,” in Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro, eds., Slaying the Nuclear Dragon: Disarmament Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 219-48.
87. Hamid Ali Rao, “Statement by Ambassador Hamid Ali Rao, Permanent Representative of India to the Conference on Disarmament, at the General Debate of the First Committee of the 64th Session of the United Nations General Assembly,” New York, October 8, 2009, <www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com09/statements/8Oct_India.pdf>.
88. Hamid Ali Rao, “Statement by Ambassador Hamid Ali Rao, Permanent Representative of India to the Conference on Disarmament,” August 17, 2010 <www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/cd/2010/statements/part3/17August_India.pdf>.
89. M.V. Ramana, “India,” in Ray Acheson, ed., Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization around the World (Reaching Critical Will of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 2012), p. 40.
90. See, for example, James M. Acton, Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security (London: Routledge, 2011).