Brahma Chellaney

Presented at the Forum
of the UNESCO International School of Science for Peace on
"Nuclear Disarmament, Safe Disposal of Nuclear Materials, or New Weapons Developments?
Where are the National Laboratories Going?"

Landau Network-Centro Volta,
Villa Erba, Cernobbio-Como, Italy, 2-4 July 1998

India's emergence as a declared nuclear-weapons state has only sharpened its challenges to build a minimal but credible nuclear deterrent. India can build only a very small deterrent force because its stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium and its financial resources are limited. New Delhi will need to have a high level of confidence in the reliability and survivability of its arsenal so that the smallness of the deterrent is not a handicap. Such confidence can come about only by rigorously meeting the technical and policy requirements of a deterrent. Potential adversaries will have to be left in no doubt about the retaliatory prowess of India if it were to come under attack.

The key challenge for India is to adequately deter two hand-in-glove nuclear adversaries, China and Pakistan. India's threat situation is unique: It is the only state in the world to share disputed borders with two closely aligned nuclear foes. India has yet to acquire the deterrent capacity to end China's nuclear threat. It will have to plug this vulnerability at the earliest opportunity.

New Delhi's decade-long policy of rapprochement with Beijing since 1988 has not won it Chinese friendship, but enabled China both to engage and to contain India, with engagement serving as a front for accelerated containment. Covert Chinese transfers have neutralised India's technological advantages over Pakistan. China also has sought to bring India under strategic pressure on another flank by building listening posts on Burmese islands and deepening collaboration with the military junta in Rangoon. Without being able to stand up to China, India will never be able to persuade Beijing to halt its containment of India or its clandestine nuclear and missile transfers to Pakistan.

It took almost 24 years for India to lift the veil of ambiguity from its strategic posture and go overtly nuclear. All it needed was political courage and conviction. By detonating five nuclear devices based on different warhead configurations in a space of less than 45 hours, India sent an unequivocal message to the world: It is determined to secure itself with its own capabilities. Only a secure India can be at peace with itself and its neighbours. The nuclear tests thus will go a long way in shattering India's image as a meek, vacillating nation and in building a safer environment for it to focus its attention on economic modernization.

These tests by a country, which has never committed aggression, were designed to ensure peace through deterrence. Over the centuries, India was repeatedly invaded but never sought to raid or overrun another civilization. From the time of Alexander the Great, it was attacked, plundered and at times even subjugated by foreign invaders, be it the Arabs or Central Asians or Europeans. Even tiny Portugal managed to set up a colony in India. After independence in 1947, India faced four wars in the first 24 years, one with China and three with Pakistan.

The fact that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government detonated five sophisticated devices within two months of assuming office showed that India already had the basic materials, equipment and skills for nuclear deterrence. While independent India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, laid the foundation of India's nuclear programme, his daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, opened up the nuclear option in 1974 and his grandson, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, helped establish a nuclear-delivery capability through the 1989 Agni intermediate-range ballistic-missile test. Mr Vajpayee was the leader India was waiting for to take it over the nuclear threshold.

In one go, India showed its capability to manufacture and test the most modern nuclear weapons — thermonuclear, boosted fission and low-yield types. No country has ever demonstrated such a range of weapon capabilities in one shot. In fact, no nation has conducted multiple tests of the kind India did. This was deliberate. It was intended not only to herald India's arrival as a nuclear-weapons state with deterrent capabilities but also to deal with external pressures. If India had conducted one test at a time to certify its warhead models, it would have come under swirling coercive pressures, possibly hindering its movement forward. By doing five bangs over two days, India gate-crashed the nuclear club, presenting a fait accompli to an astounded world. Nothing can undo this development. Unlike 1974 when a crude fission device was detonated without being configured as a warhead, the 1998 tests all involved warhead prototypes.

The tests were a natural corollary to India's firm opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which was taken through the backdoor to the UN General Assembly for endorsement after India vetoed its adoption at the Geneva negotiations. For the second time since the CTBT veto in 1996, India showed it could stand up for its rights even if it means swimming against the international tide. Sceptics never believed that the Vajpayee Government would take India down the nuclear road, just as they never expected New Delhi not only to oppose the CTBT but to actually veto its adoption in Geneva. By opposing the loopholes-marred CTBT tooth and nail, India had signalled to the world that the testing option was essential for its security. If the Vajpayee Government had not gone ahead, India would have got stuck as a threshold state, bearing the burden of an open option but not reaping the benefits.

India's long-held nuclear-weapons option had come to symbolise its holier-than-thou attitude. The rest of the world had watched India sitting on the nuclear fence for decades, mocking the West self-righteously, but unable to make up its own mind. For more three decades since starting to produce plutonium, India had been debating whether to "go nuclear." Its indecisiveness had given it the distinction of being the only country to openly conduct a nuclear test and yet shy away from a military posture based on deterrence. India had to settle its biggest unresolved issue because it could not go on paying escalating international costs for merely retaining its nuclear option. It had remained a key target of all the export-control cartels. Even if the cumulative costs it had paid were ignored, the international costs over the next decade of its old approach would have exceeded the total costs of building a small, credible deterrent force.

Few seem to be aware that India has one of the world's oldest nuclear programmes. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, laid the foundation of that program by setting up the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 to produce "all the basic materials" because of nuclear power's "strategic nature." The Commission was set up with Homi Bhabha as chairman and Nobel laureate C.V. Raman as an adviser.(1) Nehru had said even before assuming office that as long as the world was constituted on nuclear might, "every country will have to develop and use the latest scientific devices for its protection". By the mid-1950s, India had built Asia's first atomic research reactor and set in motion a broad-based nuclear programme.

After the Cirus reactor built with Canadian assistance started up in 1960, Nehru declared, "We are approaching a stage when it is possible for us ... to make atomic weapons." That stage was reached unquestionably in 1964 when India completed a facility to reprocess the Cirus spent fuel, making it the fifth country to be able to produce plutonium.

When the Chinese conducted their first nuclear test in 1964 — almost five months after Nehru's death — India's top nuclear scientist, Homi Bhabha, declared that India could build a nuclear bomb within 18 months if it so decided. China's first nuclear test, barely two years after its invading forces inflicted a crushing defeat on India, sharply heightened New Delhi's insecurity. The following year, Pakistan, taking advantage of India's security travails, infiltrated its army troops into Kashmir, triggering a full-scale war.

It was Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who initiated the Indian nuclear-explosives programme in 1965. But a series of events put a brake on that programme. These included the passing away of Shastri, Bhabha's own death in Europe in a mysterious plane crash, and the political instability triggered by an initially weak government under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When India eventually conducted a nuclear detonation in 1974, it astounded the world. U.S. intelligence was caught unawares, even though Mrs. Gandhi had told Parliament in 1972 that her government was "studying situations under which peaceful nuclear explosions carried out underground can be of economic benefit to India without causing environmental hazards". Earlier in 1970, India had rejected a US demarche against conducting any nuclear explosion.

By conducting the 1974 test, Indira Gandhi gave India a tangible nuclear option. The country broke no legal commitment and had the sovereign right to continue the testing programme. As National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger told U.S. Congress after the Pokharan test, "We objected strongly, but since there was no violation of U.S. agreements involved, we had no specific leverage on which to bring our objections to bear". The test shook the NPT to its very foundation. Had India continued to test, the NPT regime probably would have disintegrated or been seriously damaged. Instead, the U.S.-led regime emerged stronger and with fangs because India, to the great surprise of the rest of the world and its own public, did not go beyond that one single test. It will remain a riddle of history why Mrs. Gandhi did not carry out another test.

One key constraint on India going overtly nuclear was its lack of missile capability. Mrs. Gandhi sought to remedy this by formally instituting a programme in 1983 to develop ballistic missiles. An Indian nuclear-deterrent force has to be centered on missiles since bomber-aircraft cannot reach the heartland of China. India's nuclear-weapons option really opened up in an operational sense only after the Agni intermediate-range missile was flight-tested in February 1994, completing its triumphant three-test developmental phase.

The first Agni test in 1989 was carried out despite, in the words of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, "ambassadors of certain foreign powers" threatening punitive sanctions. "I told them clearly that India would carry out the launch and we would not change our decision under pressure," the son of Mrs. Gandhi and grandson of Nehru said. Agni-type missiles make strategic sense only if they carry a nuclear weapon. While India had demonstrated its delivery capability, it had not demonstrated its ability to build a nuclear warhead for the Agni. That demanded nuclear testing.

India's turning point came when an openly pro-nuclear government took office in March 1998. The new coalition elected to power pledged, in the words of Vajpayee, to "exercise all options, including the nuclear option". The Vajpayee government was determined not to miss India's closing opportunity to test. After legitimizing their nuclear monopoly through the NPT's permanent extension, the five traditional powers (the United States in particular) had begun targeting India through the test-ban treaty and the proposed fissile cut-off treaty.

The point to be noted is that it took India almost a quarter century to shed its nuclear restraint and go overtly nuclear. No nation has exercised such restraint on an indigenously developed country. More importantly, India is the only democracy which debated the issue for years of whether to go nuclear. The other nuclear-armed democracies (the United States, Britain, France and Israel) went down the nuclear path quietly without any real public debate. Even in more recent times, these democracies have tested, produced and deployed new nuclear weapons without hardly any national debate prior to the decisions being made.

In announcing its first round of three simultaneous nuclear tests on May 11, 1998, New Delhi set forth nuclear India's arms-control policy. The statement, dealing with India's stance on nuclear disarmament, export controls, CTBT and the proposed Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, said:

"It is necessary to highlight today that India was in the vanguard of nations which ushered in the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 due to environmental concerns. Indian representatives have worked in various international forums, including the Conference on Disarmament, for universal, non-discriminatory and verifiable arrangements for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. The Government would like to reiterate its support to efforts to realise the goal of a truly comprehensive international arrangement which would prohibit underground nuclear testing of all weapons as well as related experiments described as 'subcritical' or 'hydronuclear'.

"India would be prepared to consider being an adherent to some of the undertakings in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But this cannot obviously be done in a vacuum. It would necessarily be an evolutionary process from concept to commitment and would depend on a number of reciprocal activities.

"We would like to reaffirm categorically that we will continue to exercise the most stringent control on the export of sensitive technologies, equipment and commodities — especially those related to weapons of mass destruction. Our track record has been impeccable in this regard. Therefore, we expect recognition of our responsible policy by the international community.

"India remains committed to a speedy process of nuclear disarmament leading to total and global elimination of nuclear weapons. Our adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention is evidence of our commitment to any global disarmament regime which is non-discriminatory and verifiable. We shall also be happy to participate in the negotiations for the conclusion of a fissile material cut-off treaty in the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament". (2)

The statement signified a major shift in the Indian position on the much-despised CTBT as well as the FMCT. India has abruptly changed its position on these two arms-control measures at the centre of U.S. non-proliferation diplomacy.

India's nuclear-weapons tests have been widely seen as a major blow to the non-proliferation regime. But those defiant tests could lead to its acquiescence in the very regime it has traditionally opposed tooth-and-nail. New Delhi now supports FMCT negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) and is ready to consider signing the CTBT if its concerns are met. Moreover, it is not insisting on being formally recognized as a nuclear-weapons state, although it has declared itself to be one. This avoids a potential clash with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that defines the nuclear club as consisting of states that exploded a nuclear device before 1967.

It is remarkable that in a very short time India — the principal opponent of the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime — has jettisoned its unyielding opposition to the FMCT and CTBT. In mid-1996, India single-handedly blocked the approval of the CTBT at Geneva, forcing the treaty's proponents to take it to the United Nations General Assembly for endorsement through a back-door route. India vowed never to sign the treaty, which awakened the country to the technical imperatives of its long-held nuclear-weapons option.

India also opposed the FMCT, leading the group of non-aligned nations to successfully block the start of negotiations because of the refusal of the great powers to discuss nuclear disarmament. But after its tests, India, without consulting its non-aligned partners, announced it would participate in the FMCT negotiations, forcing Pakistan and Israel to fall in line and opening the way for negotiations to start. India was in the group of 28 non-aligned member-states at the CD that had linked the start of FMCT talks to the "immediate and concurrent commencement of negotiations and early conclusion of", among other things, a binding non-use convention and a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons. India reckons that by the time an FMCT is negotiated and takes effect, it would have produced enough fissile material for a minimum deterrent against its two closely aligned nuclear neighbours, China and Pakistan.

If India and Pakistan accept the CTBT and FMCT, the United States and the other traditional nuclear powers could contend that far from being undermined, the non-proliferation regime has actually been strengthened. Current diplomatic efforts are thus focused on winning Indian and Pakistani support. India's new willingness to discuss the CTBT and FMCT, however, does not mean a breakthrough is near.

The need to bring India into at least the outer ring of the non-proliferation regime has armed New Delhi with important leverage. India knows that unless it co-operates, non-proliferation cannot credibly remain a global norm. Without wresting important concessions, no government in New Delhi will be able to sell the CTBT or FMCT to Parliament. Before it agrees to extend support to the non-proliferation regime, India can be expected to drive a hard bargain.

It will seek to use its leverage to beat back the rising tide of technology sanctions it has faced since conducting its first nuclear test in 1974. The technology controls were an important consideration in its decision to end almost a quarter century of nuclear restraint and resume testing. After the 1998 tests, it was slapped with limited economic sanctions, some of which have since been suspended by the United States.

New Delhi will also insist on the same privileges enjoyed by the traditional nuclear powers. These powers, for example, have defined for themselves what weapons-related activities they can engage in under (or despite) the CTBT. These include high-tech underground tests at subcritical level and other activities at nuclear test sites, simulated nuclear explosions in laboratories, and the sharing of some data and technologies among themselves. India has reserved the right to begin subcritical tests of its own. New Delhi also intends to push ahead with the necessary steps, including missile tests, to build a credible but petite nuclear deterrent against China, still modernizing its nuclear and missile forces.

It is inconceivable, however, that any Indian government, whatever its political complexion, would unconditionally sign the CTBT. The mounting international pressure does raise some troubling questions for India. Before India's tests under its so-called Operation Shakti (Strength), the great powers had given up hope of persuading India to sign and ratify a treaty which it had rejected with a decisive "not now, not ever" pledge. These powers were looking at legal ways that would bring the CTBT — an important pillar of their NPT regime — into international effect without India. Then the Indian tests occurred, sounding what seemed to be the death knell of the CTBT. Yet, within months, these powers not only resuscitated the treaty but became confident of bringing India to heel.

What happened? Principally, India failed to resist the temptation to use the much-despised CTBT for tactical gains in negotiations. As part of negotiating tactics, the country's two most highly respected scientists were expressly ordered to publicly speak out for the treaty to help convince the Americans, before the Washington round of negotiations in September 1998, that India could live up to its side of the bargain. That a bad precedent was being set of using scientists for narrow, short-term political goals was overlooked. Some media analysts, ever so eager to take their cue from officials, were also directed to spread the word that India was "inching towards" signing the CTBT. Such signalling resulted in the Indian government finding itself prematurely pushed towards a path for which it had not built the necessary support within the ruling coalition or the opposition.

Prime Minister Vajpayee's September 25 UN statement that India was prepared to bring its negotiations with key interlocutors "to a successful conclusion so that the entry into force of the CTBT is not delayed beyond September 1999" was thus immediately read as an Indian commitment to sign. But the speech did not contain a promise to sign, but rather a promise not to block the treaty from taking effect. The "not to block" promise was itself pivoted on two conditions set out explicitly in the speech: "Successful conclusion" of negotiations, and signature and ratification "without conditions" by all the other countries on the 44-nation list in Annex 2 of CTBT's Article XIV. (3)

Despite India being one of the 44 countries listed in Annex 2, the CTBT can take effect without India. The 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty provides an example of how a pact can be brought into force provisionally without the specified set of ratifications coming in. In fact, Article 79 of the Geneva Convention on international law specifically permits that. A protocol signed by ratifying states can further ensure that the CTBT stays in force permanently.

After Mr Vajpayee made his UN speech, India's negotiations with the United States got badly stuck. Also, there has been no progress in securing the ratification of key states like China, the United States and North Korea. Nor is it certain that the US Senate, even if it were to ratify the treaty, would resist the appeal to impose conditions of the kind it did while ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Prime Minister has for months been saying that India's bipartisan consensus against the CTBT cannot change unless the United States is willing to make important concessions. Only "matching steps by our interlocutors," in his words, "will help the process of shaping a new consensus in favour of accepting the CTBT". But instead of working to accommodate India's core concerns, Washington has engaged in a series of provocations. New Delhi has during the course of negotiations with the United States been subjected to international indignity, with the Americans blackballing scores of leading Indian private and state-run enterprises and many of their affiliates, restoring Pakistan's but not India's access to long-term development loans from the World Bank, vowing not to recognise India's nuclear-weapons status "even by implication" and publishing a long list of humiliating demands. (4)

The Indian prime minister has no option but to act by political consensus on the CTBT, which is not so much about testing as about verification, including technical espionage by national intelligence assets. If India accedes, it will come under the rigours of the treaty's highly discriminatory verification regime. The 'Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty', by Washington's own admission, is not a comprehensive ban on testing. With the United States set to conduct yet another underground nuclear test at professedly subcritical level, it is not even a 'test ban' since testing by technologically more advanced methods is taking place at the very site of earlier tests. It can, however, become a 'treaty', for whatever its worth, without India being dragged into it.

If most other states want the CTBT to enter into force (EIF), India could keep quiet and not campaign against it. This is what India did in 1995, although under US pressure, when the NPT was permanently extended. Mr Vajpayee's not-to-block promise prompted the Vienna-based CTBT Organisation to state at its October 1998 briefing that the CTBT's "provisional EIF" can be worked out without India. A special conference of ratifying states, as provided by Article XIV, is likely to be held in New York or Vienna in September or October 1999. This conference, if it wants, could give immediate legal effect to the CTBT, although some key states (including China) are unlikely to favour the treaty's implementation without India being on board.

On FMCT, India is likely to adopt a cautious negotiating strategy. It is not in India's interest to see an early FMCT as it will adversely impact on its development of a nuclear deterrent against China. Also, India is aware that it will be affected the most by the FMCT. India is the sole non-NPT nuclear state with a varied and growing fissile material production complex.

The only states capable of and legally not encumbered from producing fissile material for weapons use are the NPT nuclear powers and the three non-NPT nuclear states. Britain, France, Russia and the United States, so awash with plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) that these materials are coming out of their ears, have been forced by their circumstances to declare unilateral moratoria on production. China claims unofficially that it, too, has ceased production, although there is little evidence of that. The five can turn their averred cut-off into a legal undertaking by signing an interim fissban pact among themselves. Predictably, none is interested. With all the five still qualitatively improving their nuclear arsenals, each is eager to preserve its future options and sees merit in a fissban treaty only if it can bring the non-NPT nuclear states under broad international safeguards.

Israel, the only non-NPT state without a nuclear foe in its regional backyard, has already achieved its goal of deploying a nuclear force of a desired size and has no need to sire more fissile material. The fact that its sole fissile-material source, the ageing Dimona reactor, needs to be shut down gives it more room than India to support an FMCT. Pakistan can count on China for continued clandestine transfers, even of fissile material, despite an FMCT.(5) Pakistan's new Khushab plutonium-production reactor has been designed, built and outfitted by China to checkmate India through its client-state. A compact, missile-deliverable nuclear warhead cannot be fabricated with HEU, which Pakistan produces at Kahuta. Khushab seeks to plug the missing link in Pakistan's deterrent plans by arming its Chinese-fathered Ghauri intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a warhead made from plutonium, the material of choice for modern weapons.(6)

China values Pakistan as a military counterweight to India to such an extent that, FMCT or no FMCT, it could give Islamabad any critically needed fissile material to complete its deterrent plans, which after all are founded on Chinese-supplied tested warhead designs. An FMCT thus will not lessen proliferation threats to Indian security. Rather, an early FMCT would force India's deterrent posture to be vasectomised under the treaty's sterilisation provisions even before New Delhi has procreated enough fissile material to secure itself against its two neighbouring nuclear adversaries. Thus, India is unlikely to support an FMCT coming into effect without its bare deterrent needs having been met.

Months after its tests, India established a National Security Council (NSC) to deal with its complex security challenges in a structured, long-term manner. India's emergence as a nuclear-weapons state has deepened its need for an effective policy-making institution such as the NSC. National security demands integrated planning and co-ordinated use of India's political, military, diplomatic and scientific resources.

An NSC thus is an essential institution for the assertive promotion of national interests. India is the only major democracy to lack institutional mechanisms to chart its long-term strategy and blend its various policies into a harmonious national vision. Even some of India's small neighbours in Southeast Asia have set up NSC-type institutions. The growing technology sanctions against India had only increased the need for an NSC.

The newly established NSC will play an important role in nuclear planning, force posture and doctrine. It will, however, be imprudent to see the NSC as a panacea for the ills that afflict India's policy-making system. The NSC cannot overcome the limitations of the country's policy-making processes. Those limitations are rooted in India's colonial-style system of governance. They can be overcome only through radical changes in the way the Indian administration functions and acts. The setting up of the NSC constitutes only a modest effort to deal with some of the challenges Indian policy-making faces. Similarly, the NSC cannot by itself promote inter-ministerial and inter-departmental co-ordination. It can provide a broad and comprehensive approach to national security, but the lack of institutionalised inter-ministerial co-ordination is a problem beyond its possible reach.

Unless the NSC continually evolves a long-term national-security strategy, India cannot pursue farsighted programmes and projects. Even on defence policy, new thinking is required as the ongoing global revolution in military affairs (RMA), spawned by the Information Age, is changing the very nature of war. India has to give up its outdated threat-scenario approach to defence (which puts it in a 'reactive' mode) and shift to capacity-building approach linked to clearly-defined vital interests. Capacities take a long time to be built but threats can emerge suddenly and unexpectedly. Capacity-building, tied to the evolving geostrategic landscape, can effectively daunt the rise of major threats. Lamentably, most of the key Indian ministries lack long-term planning, while the defence policy planning process is warped. The Defence Ministry makes the five-year plan, but the 15-year perspective plan and the annual plan are drawn by the military.

So, while the NSC cannot eliminate all the functional inefficiencies that burden Indian policy-making, it can help manage national security in a more prudent, cost-effective and result-oriented manner. It can help establish institutionalized methods so that policy-making is driven less by personalities and more by long-term integrated planning. The NSC should help blend various policies so that there is overall harmony and commonality of objectives. And in a country where governments come and go in rapid succession, the NSC should be able to ensure policy continuity.

Successive India governments in the 1990s have recognised that the country, with its limited resources, needs an NSC that can maximize efficiency and minimize wastage through systematic, long-term strategic planning. But in seeking to create an NSC as an essential pillar of policy-making, they ran into averred constitutional difficulties as well as the bureaucracy's reluctance to surrender some of its prerogatives. Faced with the same bureaucratic hurdles, the Vajpayee Government simply united existing arrangements and dressed them up in the form of an NSC. The formation of the NSC nonetheless is a welcome development, and improvements in its structure are likely to be part of an ongoing process at better managing security challenges.

The heart of the new NSC will be its multidisciplinary secretariat, comprising the best in-house analysts drawn from various services and departments. The secretariat, which will deal with both military as well as non-military dimensions of national security, will create ideas and proposals for approval by the NSC's Strategic Planning Group, headed by the Cabinet Secretary. The NSC's third wing, the high-sounding National Security Advisory Board comprising outside analysts, will play a role only on the margins of policy-making. The existing NSC structure shows the clout Indian career bureaucrats are going to continue to wield in national security planning, including nuclear planning. Scientists will also play a crucial role in nuclear force planning and doctrine.

The Indian military, in contrast, may remain marginalised in policy-making. India is the only major democracy that has shut out its military from defence policy-making. Uniformed officers are excluded from the Indian defence ministry, which is run by non-specialists from an elite civil service whose members move every few years to a new job, stretching from urban development and social welfare to public health and defence. As a consequence, India has never clearly defined its vital interests.

A tight civilian control over the armed forces was intended to preclude any possibility of a military coup. Over the decades, however, the country's mammoth bureaucracy, whose red tape is legendary, has pushed the military further away from the policy-making process. The backslide in the military's role began with the elimination of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet, set up at independence in 1947, and its successor, the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet, which came into being after India's humiliating 1962 defeat at the hands of the invading Chinese army. Those committees, headed by the prime minister, included the chiefs of India's three military services.

In the new NSC, the chiefs of the three military services find a place in the Strategy Policy Group, packed with senior bureaucrats ranging from the Home, Foreign, Defence, Finance Secretaries to the Reserve Bank Governor. The service chiefs have been complaining that "civilian control" over the military has come to mean "civil-services control", with the control exercised not by elected political functionaries accountable to Parliament but by bureaucrats answerable only to other bureaucrats.

Many months after conducting multiple nuclear tests, India has still to bring the military into the nuclear picture. This despite the fact that it has declared itself a nuclear-weapons state. The paradox of a country proclaiming it has a nuclear deterrent without the necessary military underpinnings has created an inherently dangerous situation in which a potential adversary could be tempted to try and call India's bluff. It also highlights the marginalization of one of the world's largest militaries.

Sooner than later, however, India will have to bring its military into nuclear planning. Without the military's involvement, it will not be possible for India to devise and put into operation a nuclear deterrent, which would involve targeting and deployment practices.

India's nuclear doctrine will determine how it copes with its fundamental external-security challenges. Given that its scientists have worked on nuclear-weapons designs for at least a quarter century and that its 1998 tests only unveiled capabilities it already had, India should have followed Israel and developed a nuclear doctrine long ago. That it did not do so is hardly a surprise. India has no strategic doctrine or long-term national security planning, lacks institutional mechanisms to develop a strategic vision or to mould its various policies into a coherent whole, and has yet to enunciate well-defined vital interests. Against this background, it would have been too much to expect India to already have a nuclear doctrine.

Rather than doctrine shaping capabilities in the classical sense, India's capabilities will dictate its nuclear doctrine. Like much else in India, developing this doctrine will be a slow, labourious process. After all, it took India 34 years after acquiring a plutonium-production capability to make up its mind on a nuclear military posture! Many months after declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state, India has yet to take the preliminary steps to integrate nuclear weapons into its defence structure and make its 'deterrent' operational in a doctrinal or military sense.

The failure to involve the military in nuclear planning has resulted in India still being vague about its nuclear doctrine. The only elements of the doctrine made public are that India will practise, in French-style terminology, "credible minimum deterrence", and not be the first to use nuclear weapons. While those objectives are commendable, they only seek to make a virtue out of necessity: India does not have the plutonium or financial resources to exercise more than the barest of minimum deterrence, and is far from having the capacity to carry out a disabling first strike against an opponent. India's minimum deterrence is likely to look in the initial years as no more than counter-city deterrence. While India is going to have a diversified nuclear dyad made up of ballistic missiles and bomber-aircraft, it is still distant from an invulnerable second-strike capability with submarine-launched missiles.

Similarly, the only aspect of India's command-and-control system discernible is that it will be firmly controlled by civilians, with the Prime Minister as the ultimate decision-maker at the head of a yet-to-be-established Strategic Nuclear Command. An effective command-and-control system, of course, can only emerge over a period of time. After all, it took the traditional nuclear powers many years (in the case of the United States more than 15 years) to develop a command-and-control system that provided a degree of self-assurance. Still, shouldn't India by now have initiated the process of designing a command, control, communications, computer and intelligence (C4I) system? Such a system will come neither cheap nor fast.

While it underpins deterrence by meeting the technical-operational requirements, India has to define the central purpose of its nuclear armoury. Is it to deter nuclear threats and blackmail, or aggression in general, including conventional aggression of the kind India has suffered in the past? If it is the latter, French nuclear structure and doctrine based on 'proportional deterrence' will be more appropriate for India. It should not be simplistically assumed that nuclear weapons are only for deterring a nuclear threat, as if it is okay for others to employ conventional force against vital Indian interests. Given the decades-old technology sanctions it has suffered and the way its foreign policy has been seriously constricted, India has had to pay an extraordinarily heavy political price for its nuclear weapons. It should seek to derive the full security value from them, the way the wealthy nuclear powers do.

Indian security planners will also have to decide whether the country should have 'tactical' (threatre or battlefield) nuclear arms, or only 'strategic' (long-range) weapons. According to Pakistan, its nuclear tests involved tactical weapons. China also has such weapons in its nuclear arsenal, including tactical nuclear warheads on short-range missiles and nuclear-tipped artillery shells and mortars. Can India do without tactical nuclear arms by ignoring the fact that its neighbours have them? A pointer to the direction in which India is headed has been given by the 'father' of India's nuclear weapons, Dr R. Chidambaram, who has publicly stated that a tactical weapon is one of three "robust warhead designs" already developed. With capabilities to inspire doctrine, scientists are going to considerably influence nuclear thinking and decision-making.

Indian doctrine has to credibly take on the joint nuclear challenge posed by the country's two linked foes, China and Pakistan. These two countries have a long history of covert nuclear and missile collaboration and anti-India collusion. Minimum deterrence in such a situation intrinsically demands a very high level of confidence in the reliability and survivability of the arsenal. Such confidence can come about only through a vigorous doctrine and rugged capabilities.

Indian doctrine also cannot ignore the hazards posed by a troubled Pakistan, which is beginning to look like a dangerously failing state. If central political authority starts to slip away, there will be a risk that renegade military elements or Taliban-type Islamic militias may try to gain control of nuclear weapons. The Indian doctrine will have to recognise that strategic weapons can have no role when renegade or terrorist elements threaten to use tactical arms.

The building of a long-term Indian nuclear doctrine demands broad political consensus not only on the value of nuclear deterrence as the country's life-insurance policy, but on the modalities of deterrence. There has been hardly any discussion on the latter. Consensus-building has been made difficult by India's raucous and splintered politics in which every issue assumes partisan colours.

India's emergence as a declared nuclear-weapons state has only brought its challenges to build a dependable nuclear deterrent into sharper focus. The national debate in India cannot shy away from the tough nuts-and-bolts issues. India's intellectual Jezebels have conveniently dismissed these issues as products of Western theological thought. They had in the same manner rejected India's testing imperatives until the tests occurred, when they instantly found justification for the detonations! Thinking rationally cannot be made synonymous with thinking Western. The core tasks of nuclear deterrence are not race-specific but common to all.

For years India agonized over whether to build and test nuclear weapons. Having built and tested such weapons, it may now agonize over their deployment and the doctrine. That is why those pressuring India never call it quits but change their goal as soon as it gets overtaken by events. Earlier the U.S. goal was to prevent India from building and testing nuclear weapons; now the goal is to dissuade India from deploying nuclear warheads or mating them with missiles. India has to stop agonizing or getting distracted by diplomacy and take on its challenges.

In the popular elation over their country's emergence as a declared nuclear-weapons state, it has been forgotten by most Indians that the tests were only the first (although most important) step to counter rising regional and extra-regional threats to Indian security from weapons of mass destruction. A lot more has to be done before India can justifiably contend that it can terminate any nuclear threat — a claim prematurely made right after the two rounds of tests in 1998.

India faces three major challenges in achieving its deterrence goals. First, the country's small reserves of weapons-grade plutonium and limited financial resources dictate that it can only have puny nuclear forces. The predetermined diminutive size of the Indian nuclear arsenal imposes high reliability and security standards on New Delhi. Without the luxury of allowing numbers to compensate for quality, India will have to rigorously meet the technical imperatives of its deterrent. Unlike Pakistan and Israel which can draw on China and the United States respectively for continued nuclear-warhead design assistance, India is the only non-NPT nuclear state without an external benefactor.

Two, India has to build a credible minimal deterrent in a global environment openly hostile to further overt weaponisation, particularly by a new nuclear-weapons state. Each new action, such as an Agni 2 test or the commencement of serial production of warheads, will draw adverse international reaction. It is thus vital that the follow-up steps to erect an appropriate deterrent are taken quietly and without the official braggadocio so characteristic of every Indian advance, however small. Classified projects in other democracies are kept under tight wraps, but in India inside information has been leaked out on the nuclear propulsion project and various missiles. Transparency is important in terms of strategic posture, not strategic projects. The United States, for example, released little information on its 1998 missile tests, testing and deployment of the new earth-penetrating B61-11 nuclear warhead, and top-classified Advanced Vortex satellite that blew up atop a failed Titan-4A rocket.

Three, India is still some distance from acquiring the technical capacity to terminate a Chinese nuclear threat and needs to plug this vulnerability on a war footing. A deterrent against Pakistan was never the central mission of Indian nuclear strategy. There is not a single political or military reason for India to build a nuclear deterrent against Pakistan. Nuclearisation of the subcontinent only blunts India's conventional-military advantage over Pakistan, allowing the latter to employ nuclear forces as an equaliser. An Indian deterrent makes strategic sense only in context of China.

India can live with nuclear disparity with China, in the same way Beijing has done with the US. But India cannot live with a nuclear capability that does not provide basic cover against China. Because of a very late start, India will lag far behind China in the foreseeable future. Even if Beijing were to dramatically halt its ongoing nuclear expansion and India were to build nuclear weapons at the maximum rate possible with its present plutonium-production capacity, New Delhi would still not be able to match China's nuclear might even in a quarter century from now. The nuclear test-ban treaty and the planned FMCT will ensure that.

However, since deterrence does not demand qualitative or quantitative parity, India can still effectively deter China, which has up to 500 nuclear weapons, with less than 100 warheads — the likely maximum size of an Indian armoury if an FMCT is negotiated and brought into effect in the next five years. To ensure this, India needs to do three things. One, focus on building a hardy nuclear force, mobile and widely dispersed, that can survive an enemy first strike and be able to retaliate even if principal Indian command-and-control centres get wiped out. Two, ensure Indian capabilities are not subjected to retarding arms-control fetters before they fully flower. An early FMCT will stunt India's deterrence posture. The great powers employ arms control to enhance, not undercut, their security.

Three, India should strive to prevent the gap with China from continuing to grow. China, with a nuclear arsenal now already larger than that of France and Britain, is engaged in the largest expansion of nuclear and missile capabilities by any state. One way for India to build international pressure on Beijing would be to tie its support to any arms-control venture to visible signs that China has stopped or slowed down its weapons modernisation. By directly raising China's strategic costs, India should also dissuade Beijing from continuing its nuclear and missile aid to Pakistan. Those costs could be increased through strategic assistance to countries that share Indian concerns over China, such as Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The central challenge for India is that, unlike deterrence relationships elsewhere in the world, it has to adequately deter two hand-in-glove nuclear adversaries, China and Pakistan. This is no mean task, considering the fact that India has to reckon with the possibility that one of them could act as a proxy of the other and that the two would closely co-operate in any situation where one seeks to take on India.

India's nuclear self-adulation thus is misplaced. Five tests do not translate into an instant deterrent. If past mistakes are to be avoided, India should not allow its rhetoric to outstrip its capacity or its claims to overtake the reality. India has to put its head down and work with determination and humility on its tasks. While Indian scientists need to be commended for demonstrating in one go a whole range of nuclear-weapons capabilities that no other nation has similarly done, India has still important challenges to meet. Time is not on India's side. Projects that have not delivered results, such as the Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV), need to be revamped under new leadership.

The basic reality is that India, with its modest capabilities and resources, can only pursue the modest path of building a petite, affordable but survivable nuclear force, with a doctrine that eschews both a war-fighting approach and the course of recessed or non-deployed deterrence advocated by the United States and its friends. Since independence, India has been a soft state. Nuclear weapons, however, demand hard decisions. Deterrence requires not only the technical capacity but an unmistakable national will to severely punish a potential aggressor. By keeping the military shut out from the nuclear picture months after proclaiming a "deterrent" and by engaging in a dialogue with the United States on naively optimistic premises, India has not shed its soft-state image. Rather, it has presented itself as willing to enter into several acts of compliance after one act of defiance.

One glaring mismatch India has to tackle is between its economic capacity and security needs. Without economic power, India can have no security, even with nuclear weapons. The way sanctions-hit Pakistan sunk economically after conducting its tests should serve as a lesson to India to accord the highest priority to putting its economic house in order. India should also be cognizant of the danger that nuclear weapons in the hands of a soft state can invite greater insecurity.

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(1) For a detailed discussion, see Chapter 1 in Brahma Chellaney, Nuclear Proliferation: The US-Indian Conflict (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993).

(2) Government of India, Press Statement on the May 11, 1998, nuclear tests (New Delhi: Press Information Bureau, May 11, 1998), pp. 2-3.

(3) In his UN speech, the Prime Minister said: "Mr. President, India, having harmonised its national imperatives and security obligations and desirous of continuing to cooperate with the international community is now engaged in discussions with key interlocutors on a range of issues, including the CTBT. We are prepared to bring these discussions to a successful conclusion so that the entry into force of the CTBT is not delayed beyond September 1999. We expect that other countries, as indicated in Article XIV of the CTBT, will adhere to this Treaty without conditions". "Prime Minister's Address to the UN General Assembly", September 25, 1998, Official Transcript (New Delhi: Press Information Bureau), p. 4.

(4) See, for example, William J. Clinton, Text of a Letter From the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate, November 12, 1998 (Washington, DC: The White House); and Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State, "U.S. Diplomacy in South Asia: A Progress Report", Speech at the Brookings Institution, November 12, 1998 (Washington, DC: Department of State).

(5) Tim Weiner, "U.S. and Chinese Aid Was Essential as Pakistan Built Bomb", International Herald Tribune, 2 June 1998; Leslie H. Gelb, "Pakistan Link Perils U.S.-China Nuclear Pact", New York Times, 22 June 1984; Nuclear Control Institute, Information Pertaining to Possible Chinese Test of a Pakistani Nuclear Device, Backgrounder (Washington, DC: Nuclear Control Institute, September 1985); Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Nuclear Exports to China?", Washington Post, 3 November 1985; and Leonard S. Spector with Jacqueline R. Smith, Nuclear Ambitions (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Oress, 1990).

(6) The Ghauri bears a striking resemblance to China's DF-21. Beijing is finding ingenious ways to circumvent the latest in its long series of broken nonproliferation promises. For the Ghauri, China has been directly providing finance, soft technology and engineering but routing the hardware through North Korea. Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., "DPRK-Pakistan Ghauri Missile Cooperation", Federation of American Scientists (FAS), www.fas.org.