Indian Nuclear Policy

by Harsh V Pant

  1 Details on this committee can also be found in Kennedy (2011) and Perkovich (1999).

  2 Interview with a senior naval officer who was part of this committee, New Delhi, 16 October 2015.

  3 For a comprehensive history of MTCR, see Mistry (2003).

  4 For a discussion on BJP’s nuclear and foreign policy, see Ogden (2014).

  5 Interview with a senior military officer who was member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC), Mumbai, January 2015.

  6 I.K. Gujral was the prime minister of India from April 1997 to March 1998.

  7 On reactions of major powers to India’s nuclear tests in 1998, see Nayyar (2001).

  8 The two interlocutors from the Indian side and the American side were Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott. Both Talbott and Singh later delineated upon their experiences in Singh (2006) and Talbott (2004).

  9 For these changes in Indian policy, see Mohan (2003, 2006).

  10 If nuclear weapons and delivery systems are the hardware of nuclear deterrence, institutionalization of nuclear decision-making, development of organizational capabilities, and operational protocols for nuclear use are its software. As Kampani argues, ‘Operationalization [of nuclear deterrence] entails the development of soft institutional and organizational routines. It refers to command and control mechanisms, coordination procedures between scientific and military agencies, and training protocols in the military to deploy and explode weapons (stockpile to target sequence). If the weapon systems constitute the hardware, operational routines make up the software that enables use of weapons during war’ (Kampani 2014b: 80–1).

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  A Major Nuclear Power

  As India crossed the nuclear rubicon, critics prognosticated a grim future for its nuclear forces and its status as a nuclear weapon state. Claims were made that India would remain a ‘third tier nuclear state’ and ‘a low level nuclear power’ (Gupta 2001: 1044). It was also forecasted that Pakistan would remain the singular focus of India’s nuclear forces and hence, India’s nuclear deterrent at best would be confined to the South Asian region. The reasons behind such assumptions were mainly material: shortage of fissile material; technological incapacity to produce reliable delivery systems; ineffective bureaucratic structures (especially of its scientific enclave); and rudimentary command and control systems. Further, the hostile international reaction to India’s overt nuclearization threatened to restrict or even punish Indian efforts to further develop its nuclear capabilities. Supporters of India’s nuclear tests, on the other hand, made entirely different predictions (Subrahmanyam 1998b). They claimed that since nuclear deterrence required only a few nuclear weapons, India would not enter into an arms race as was the case with great powers during the Cold War. Having managed to enter the ‘mainstream paradigm’ of nuclear weapon states, India can now ‘change the paradigm itself’ by forcefully pursuing the quest for nuclear disarmament (Subrahmanyam 1998b: 53). Lastly, mutual nuclear deterrence between Indian and Pakistan would help the two countries achieve peace.

  India’s nuclear trajectory since Pokhran-II belies all these assumptions. The last two decades have seen India becoming one of the world’s major nuclear powers. It has taken rapid strides in technological advancement of its nuclear forces. It has made substantial inroads into the non-proliferation regime and has been accepted as a responsible nuclear power by the international community. It has increasingly behaved like any other nuclear power in history, privileging non-proliferation over nuclear disarmament, so that it retains the exclusivity of power and prestige which accompanies nuclear weapons. Security competition with Pakistan has only intensified and the nuclear equation between the two countries remains highly unstable. Over the years, China has become the real focus of India’s nuclear deterrent. India’s nuclear trajectory has been remarkably different from what scholars and analysts predicted in 1998. This chapter explains the evolution of India’s nuclear policy since 1998, especially the evolving nuclear threat scenario, its emerging nuclear profile, the debate around its nuclear doctrine, its accommodation in the global nuclear order, and finally, its changing attitude on arms control treaties such as the CTBT and the FMCT.

  Pakistan’s Nuclear Braggadocio

  After the nuclear tests of 1998, dominant political opinion in India claimed that existence of nuclear deterrence would help India–Pakistan attain stability in their bilateral relations. As Prime Minister Vajpayee argued, ‘Now both India and Pakistan are in possession of nuclear weapons. There is no alternative but to live in mutual harmony. The nuclear weapon is not an offensive weapon. It is a weapon of self-defense. It is the kind of weapon that helps in preserving the peace’ (Karat 1999). Such expectations, however, did not entirely fit Pakistan’s grand strategy. In fact, the cover of nuclear weapons provided Pakistan an enabling environment to push further its proxy war in Kashmir and support terrorism in India. Pakistani calculation was simple: the threat of use of nuclear weapons will deter India from launching a conventional war as a strategy to punish Pakistan for its support of terrorism in Kashmir and beyond.

  This was first put to test in the summer of 1999, when regular Pakistani troops occupied strategic heights in the Kargil sector of Jammu and Kashmir. Presenting it as a fait accompli, Pakistani army generals believed that India will not opt for a major conventional war as it may escalate to a nuclear one. International pressure to cease hostilities between two nuclear-armed adversaries would further restrict India’s choices was another of their assumptions. India, however, responded in force but confined the military action to Kargil, even when voices within the government argued for opening up another front. Pakistan was also quick to issue veiled nuclear threats, creating consternations in the international community which started calling Kashmir as the world’s nuclear flashpoint. Eventually India was successful in flushing out the intruders, but this came at a great cost of men and material. If the Indian armed forces made it difficult for Pakistan to sustain its occupation, India’s deft diplomacy allowed it to garner support of the international community which labelled Pakistan as the aggressor (Riedel 2009). Restraint shown by New Delhi also earned it the label of a responsible nuclear power. Notwithstanding India’s eventual victory, Indian decision-makers learned that Pakistan had become more rather than less risk prone after going nuclear (Government of India 2000: 198). Nuclear weapons provided it a cover to pursue low-level conflict with India.

  This strategy was again on display in December 2001 when a group of Pakistan-based terrorists laid siege to the Indian Parliament. The public mood was vociferously in favour of a military response. Under Operation Parakram, Prime Minister Vajpayee did initiate a massive mobilization of Indian armed forces and over half a million troops were deployed over the western border with Pakistan.1 This coercive military strategy, however, failed because India desisted from initiating a conventional military action against Pakistan. Counter-mobilization by Pakistan, international diplomatic pressure especially from the US, and the threat of nuclear escalation were primarily responsible for India’s restraint. The nuclear revolution in the subcontinent had tied Indian strategy in knots.

  Even though conventionally stronger, India could not bring to bear its power on Pakistan for the fear of nuclear escalation. India’s frustration was rooted in its inability to halt the activities of Pakistan-sponsored militant groups in a way that does not threaten major war with potentially nuclear consequences. It was under these circumstances that Indian defence planners started arguing for the possibility of a limited conventional war as the only resort to punish Pakistan for its sub-conventional adventure (Sidhu and Smith 2000). This resulted in a military strategy which some analysts have termed as the ‘Cold Start’. First propounded in the Indian Army Doctrine (2004), it involves a rapid cross-border conventional attack to hold limited areas of Pakistani territory for bargaining leverage as a response to Pakistan’s continued support to terror.2 That the limited war doctrine of ‘Cold Start’ failed to deliver was evident in India’s resp
onse to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. India, once again, desisted from any military action against Pakistan even when sufficient evidence was available of the links between Pakistani intelligence services and the terrorists.

  Yet, Pakistan, for its part, has used the pretext of the Cold Start doctrine to expand its nuclear arsenal and to introduce new kinds of nuclear weapons in South Asia.3 Pakistan now has the world’s fastest-expanding nuclear arsenal. It is also further refining and miniaturizing its nuclear warheads and has shifted to plutonium-based nuclear weapons compared to its traditional reliance on uranium. Its missile development programme now boasts a capability of targeting the entire Indian territory, including that of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. To preserve its nuclear forces from an Indian conventional attack or a nuclear strike, Islamabad has now started exploring the possibility of emplacing its nuclear weapons in the high seas. It established a naval strategic force command in 2012 and is believed to have placed nuclear-enabled cruise missiles on its conventional submarines. The most dangerous development, however, has been Pakistan’s introduction of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) in South Asia. In 2009, Pakistan first tested a short-range nuclear-capable missile called Nasr. With its 60-km range, Nasr is capable of hosting a small-yield TNW. Pakistan has emphatically declared that this weapon system is its response to any conventional thrust by Indian armed forces into its own territory across the international border.

  These developments not only suggest an increasing nuclear capability but also reinforce the Pakistani penchant for nuclear risk-taking (Koithara 2003). Its nuclear philosophy conveys the same. Its thresholds for use of nuclear weapons against India are extremely low. It envisages using nuclear weapons not only in case of a conventional attack but also if New Delhi resorts to economic coercion, such as naval blockade, or foments domestic instability inside Pakistan. To this end, it has now developed a doctrine of full spectrum deterrence: that nuclear weapons will deter all Indian action whether at nuclear, conventional, or sub-conventional level (Tasleem 2016). However, it is the introduction of TNWs in the subcontinent which has been the most destabilizing for nuclear stability on the one hand, and for India’s response to continuous provocation by Pakistan on the other. It would require pre-delegation of authority to the military commanders, thereby increasing the dangers associated with misperceptions and miscalculations. There is also a fear that an expanding nuclear arsenal provides more opportunities for nuclear theft by terrorist organizations active within Pakistan, increasing the threat of nuclear terrorism the world over. However, they also pose a peculiar problem for India insofar it creates complexities for India’s conventional response to Pakistan’s sub-conventional war. As per India’s nuclear doctrine, even a low-level nuclear response from Pakistan would invite a massive nuclear strike from India.

  In the post-1998 period therefore, Pakistan’s nuclear challenge has become only more complex for Indian decision-makers. Its expanding nuclear arsenal, coupled with its risk-prone nuclear strategy, complicates India’s deterrence calculus. Pakistan’s commitment to proxy wars against India also shows no signs of abating.

  The China Challenge

  India is the only nuclear weapon state in the entire world which is surrounded by two hostile nuclear powers. It was the Chinese nuclear test in 1964 that first animated the debate over an Indian nuclear weapons capability. In later decades, China receded into the background of India’s concerns and Pakistan became the most immediate motivation for India to go nuclear. However, China did remain a long-term nuclear threat because of the disputed land border, and also because of Beijing’s political, economic, and military support to Pakistan (Garver 2001). China’s larger strategy in Asia also demanded that India remains embroiled in the South Asian region. A nuclear India was therefore a problem for Beijing.

  Notwithstanding the long-term hostility between the two countries, India’s nuclear equation with China has remained stable, unlike that of Pakistan. Two reasons were primarily responsible for this muted nuclear competition. First, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 tests, India’s nuclear deterrent was too rudimentary to have been a concern for Chinese decision-makers. Whereas China was capable of targeting the whole of Indian territory with its medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, India’s air-delivered nuclear arsenal faced serious vulnerabilities. Second, Chinese military strategy, unlike that of Pakistan, did not depend upon its nuclear forces. China followed, at least at the level of rhetoric, an ‘NFU’ policy with regard to the use of nuclear weapons. Being conventionally superior, there was also no need for China to engage in nuclear coercion against India.

  However, after the 1998 nuclear tests, India’s nuclear trajectory has been determined by a quest to achieve an effective nuclear deterrent against China (Kampani 2013). This drive to attain a stable nuclear balance with China is driven by a number of factors. First, even when China continues to decouple its nuclear forces from its conventional forces, a large gap in nuclear capabilities between India and China may provide the latter with a capability to blackmail India in case of a serious conventional war (Nagal 2015). India–China boundary dispute along the Himalayas continues to dodge any resolution. If anything, China’s growing economic and military power in last two decades has made it more and not less adamant of its claims on the Indian territory. Second, after a substantial gap, China has started expanding and modernizing its nuclear forces in response to its growing military competition with the US.4 This automatically creates pressure upon India. The most troublesome aspect of Chinese modernization has been its expanding missile capabilities, both conventional and nuclear. Indian military analysts see in this a major missile gap between the two countries as India’s missile capabilities have not yet reached that level of sophistication and maturity. This ‘strategic imbalance’, in the words of a senior Indian military commander, may force India to ‘obtain matching or counter capabilities’ by boosting the growth of its nuclear deterrent (Nagal 2015: 15–16). Third, the modernization of Chinese nuclear forces also provide her with a counter-force capability: to specifically target India’s nuclear forces and infrastructure. These developments in Chinese nuclear infrastructure and thinking engender enormous challenges for India’s nuclear deterrent, especially with regard to minimizing the expanding deterrence gap between the two counties.

  Sino-Pak nuclear nexus in nuclear proliferation also complicates India’s position. China and Pakistan have an extensive record of economic and defence cooperation targeted at complicating India’s rise.5 While the two states do not always act in lockstep when it comes to their defence planning and operations vis-à-vis India, they share a multifaceted and strengthening strategic partnership. This has included substantive nuclear proliferation and ambitious infrastructure and defence projects. Pakistan’s military and civilian nuclear programmes have long benefited from Chinese technological and economic assistance. Such nuclear cooperation continues to this day. China has also invested in Pakistan’s civil nuclear energy programme. Recent developments have included the construction of the Chasma-2 reactor (operational since 2011) and the Chasma-3 and Chasma-4 reactors (under construction since 2011). China is also reportedly helping Pakistan with its nuclear submarine programme. Such extensive nuclear cooperation creates an image that Pakistan and China may at some time coordinate their nuclear strategies to target India. Continued Sino-Pak nuclear nexus may force India to contemplate a two-front nuclear war.

  Expanding Trajectory of India’s Nuclear Forces

  When India declared itself a nuclear weapon state in 1998, its nuclear capabilities were rudimentary.6 The only operational part of its nuclear forces was the air vector based upon a single platform, the Mirage fighter aircraft. Its missile capabilities were growing with three different missiles systems, namely, Prithvi, Agni-1, and Agni-2, that had been at least test-fired but were far from ready to carry India’s nuclear arsenal. A nuclear submarine programme was initiated in the late 1970s but the progress had been haltingly slow. Over the la
st two decades, however, India’s nuclear forces have expanded dramatically.

  Today, India has an extensive fleet of fighter aircraft which can deliver a nuclear payload. Its missile programme has grown substantially with the Agni series of missiles becoming the primary delivery vehicle. With the coming of Agni-5, India now has an intercontinental ballistic missile capability. These missile platforms have been silo-hardened and made road and rail mobile. India is also working on developing the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) technology which will allow its missiles to carry multiple nuclear warheads, increasing the bang for the buck of its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear submarine programme has achieved fruition with the commissioning of the first SSBN,7 INS Arihant. A series of nuclear submarines are now under production.

  The trajectory of India’s nuclear forces in the last two decades has been mainly determined by two factors: credibility of its second-strike capability and the evolving nuclear situation in its neighbourhood. Deterring its adversaries from the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons requires a credible secure second-strike capability. An effective second-strike capability is only ensured when India’s nuclear forces can withstand an initial onslaught of nuclear attack from the enemy and still a formidable force survives for nuclear retaliation.

  This singular requirement has been the most important driver of India’s nuclear force developments. The air vector was the first leg of India’s nuclear delivery. India’s fleet of fighter aircraft which can deliver a nuclear payload has expanded from Mirage fighter aircraft in 1998 to Sukhoi 30-MKIs and Jaguars IS/IB fighter aircraft. The acquisition of Rafael multi-role combat aircraft may also be added to the mix. Yet, this is also the most vulnerable vector of nuclear delivery to pre-emptive attacks by the adversary. It is also highly vulnerable to massive attrition by sophisticated air defence systems while performing a nuclear mission.