Abstract
India's Emerging Nuclear Posture
By Ashley Tellis
Rand, 2001
885 pages; $40.00
India: Emerging Power
By Stephen P. Cohen
Brookings, 2001
377 pages; $28.95
The year 2001 did not bode well for the nuclear future of South Asia, as sensationalized fears of loose nukes in Pakistan turned to real alarm over an Indo-Pak nuclear crisis following the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. For those prompted to look deeper into this future, particularly the trajectory of India's nuclear posture, there is no better guide than Ashley Tellis's brilliant book India's Emerging Nuclear Posture. Drawing on years of research at the Rand Corporation and countless interviews with Indian civilian and military officials, he provides a deeper and more thorough analysis of India's strategic priorities and capabilities than the Indian government itself likely has produced. India cognoscenti must read this book; everyone interested in post-Cold War approaches to nuclear deterrence should read it. In his foray through India's nuclear options, Tellis cuts through the jungle of accepted thought about nuclear deterrence and exposes the thin soil on which the Cold War model stands.
Tellis begins by describing the external and internal factors that affect India's nuclear choices. Globally, India aspires to be a great power in a system where the five recognized nuclear weapon states show no interest in relinquishing their nuclear arsenals. Regionally, neighboring Pakistan does not accept the status quo in Kashmir and is steadily improving its nuclear and missile arsenal with help from China, which is busy modernizing its own already superior arsenal. India's nuclear calculus also is affected by its bilateral relations with other major powers: Neither the United States, Russia, nor Japan offers the sort of comprehensive embrace that could substitute for nuclear weapons. Finally, India's nuclear, missile, and space establishments provide a domestic stimulus that neither the majority of political parties nor voters are likely to oppose. But economics is the one potentially vital factor that could slow India's strategic weapons initiatives.
Tellis assesses five alternative nuclear postures. Two involve “denuclearization”: India could unilaterally renounce nuclear weapons with an expectation of Pakistani reciprocity, or it could seek to negotiate a regional nuclear-weapon-free zone. Tellis spends 46 pages seriously weighing these options, concluding that neither would satisfy India's strategic interests. Still, he identifies several benefits of denuclearization that should give pause to nuclear hawks in India and elsewhere.
The three other alternatives involve varying degrees of development, deployment, and operational ambition. Tellis argues that over the next decade or two India will seek a force and operational capability somewhere between a “recessed deterrent” and a “ready nuclear arsenal.” A recessed deterrent would rely on unassembled nuclear weapons numbering in the dozens; a non-provocative program of delivery system research, development, and testing; and an energetic effort to develop an intelligence, warning, and command and control infrastructure. Tellis concludes that this model will appear insufficient to Indian decision-makers. However, the much more ambitious alternative of building and deploying a launch-ready arsenal with significant reach into China will remain beyond India's technological and economic grasp for well into the next decade. Deploying a deluxe arsenal would also raise concerns about diminished civilian control and the country's ability to manage crises, concerns that Indian decision-makers take very seriously.
The author argues that India will favor a “force-in-being” over a recessed or a robust-and-ready arsenal. He fleshes out this concept over 500 pages, making use of numerous tables and charts. India will develop and produce nuclear weapons and delivery systems, he writes, but it will not deploy these elements “in any way that enables the prompt conduct of nuclear operations.”
A force-in-being would combine four principles essential to Indian strategic thinking: its no-first-use policy; its commitment to use nuclear weapons for retaliatory punishment only and not for war-fighting; an assured, although not immediate, retaliatory capability; and the use of countervalue strategy (targeting a country's industrial base and civilian population), which would include “between 8 and 15 target sets in China and Pakistan.”
Tellis thinks that by 2010 India will have a force of between 80 and 150 weapons, most of which will be fission devices with roughly 20-kiloton yields. To achieve an arsenal of 150 weapons, India will have to nearly double its current stockpile of separated weapon-grade plutonium, an option that may be limited by international efforts to constrain fissile material production. Tellis also argues that during its 1998 nuclear tests, India failed to validate its designs for a boosted-fission primary and thermonuclear secondary. To acquire higher-yield weapons, India would have to break an international norm and its own nuclear testing moratorium.
Delivery systems represent the greatest hurdle to India's nuclear ambitions. Indian aircraft–particularly its Jaguar and Mirage fighter-bombers–can put Pakistan at risk, but they are not sufficient to target China. According to the author, India is at best 10 years away from having a reliable missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. To reach Beijing, Shanghai, or other valued targets in eastern China, India will probably have to go beyond the Agni platform and develop and test an entirely new missile system. Although Tellis argues that Indian officials are overly optimistic in their assessment of their country's technological abilities, he overlooks the possibility of Russian assistance, which could rapidly expand India's missile capabilities.
India's force-in-being, like its current arsenal, will be controlled by central political leadership. While this characteristic is shared by all nuclear-weapon states, Tellis explains that Indian military leaders have played a lesser role in India's nuclear policies and programs than has the military of any other nuclear state.
To ensure the survivability of its deterrent, and guarantee civilian control over nuclear assets, India will “distribute only discrete components of its nuclear ‘arsenal’ across different locations.” The “uniformed military [will be] tasked principally with storing, maintaining, and manning the delivery systems,” while fissile cores will be controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission and non-nuclear weapon assemblies by the Defence Research and Development Organisation.
Dispersing a relatively small nuclear deterrent will force India to maintain a policy of opacity so that potential adversaries (including terrorists) cannot target components. Opacity, however, will limit democratic participation in evaluating India's nuclear policies and make the country less likely to participate in arms control regimes that require transparency.
In overall political-strategic terms, a force-in-being would be operationally “quiescent,” but politically and strategically active. “Its very existence as a potentially complete–but dormant–capability serves as a deterrent to possible adventurism by an adversary: It constantly hovers in an adversary's consciousness, commands its attention, keeps it at bay, and prevents it from attempting anything that would result in risk and hazard to itself.” At the same time, quiescence will help India avoid intense arms racing and military encroachment into nuclear policy-making.
India will need nuclear weapons as long as Pakistan has them. Whether nuclear weapons will deter Pakistan from military adventurism remains to be seen, but more capability than India already possesses will not change the subcontinent's deterrence equation.
China is another matter. Here Tel-lis makes use of years of classified and open research. Since 1962, India has acquired local conventional military superiority over China along their disputed Himalayan frontier. India cannot yet remotely match China's nuclear capabilities, but “there are in fact few circumstances under which China's use of nuclear weapons as war-fighting instruments would be either plausible or advantageous to it in the context of a conventional conflict with India.” He concludes: “There are simply no political issues at stake in the Sino-Indian dispute that would make the loss of even two or three Chinese cities palatable to Beijing, irrespective of what happens to many more Indian cities as a result of the probably asymmetrical nuclear exchange that would unfold between these two competitors.”
In mapping India's plausible future course, Tellis also helps locate the United States and other nuclear weapon states in the post-Cold War nuclear jungle. The requirements of a nuclear deterrent, he argues, “can vary from country to country and, even in the case of the super powers, from epoch to epoch precisely because nuclear deterrence is not an absolute sociophysical phenomenon, but a contingent one that is invariably shaped by the exigencies of political competition at a given point in time and space.”
Tellis is a University of Chicago-trained and government-hardened realist, yet his careful, detailed analysis of India's situation and the nature of nuclear weapons calls into question much of standard Western nuclear strategy. Because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, he argues, sane political adversaries will be deterred by uncertainty that their aggression would not be met with a nuclear response. The certainty of nuclear devastation at the grossly massive level and immediacy prepared for by the Cold War adversaries was and is excessive in the real world in which decision-makers operate.
In India: Emerging Power, Stephen Cohen offers an encyclopedic survey of India's current and prospective position in Asian and global strategic systems. Cohen has had a long and distinguished career as a scholar of and interlocutor with India; this book serves as a friendly guide to readers who may be newly drawn to this increasingly important country.
Cohen expertly discusses India's ambitions to be recognized as a great world power and assesses the origins of this ambition, the various Indian perspectives of the country's place in the world, and its diplomatic and intellectual habits. He then takes the reader on a tour of India's power assets and its key relationships with Pakistan, East Asia, and the United States. The chapter on India's nuclear policies provides as good a summary of this topic as one will find anywhere.
Cohen writes, “India is a paradox, a seemingly impoverished country racked by political instability, yet it is also a rich and powerful country, especially … in terms of gross measures of economic and military capability.” Despite its many failures in trying to sustain robust economic growth or efficient governance or military modernization, India has managed to move its billion-body mass forward. Although the populace experiences “strains and stresses,” these growing pains should be welcomed as long as they “stem from the aspirations and achievements of hitherto ignored and depressed social groups.”
According to Cohen, India's “special role” in the world “is primarily to ‘be India,’ and to address the human security issues that stem from its own imbalances and injustices. By doing that India will make one-quarter of the world more secure, not a trivial accomplishment.”
Democracy is difficult; democracy with a billion relatively poor and ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse people is unimaginably difficult. If India can democratically move its diverse and relatively poor mass forward without trampling on its neighbors or being waylaid by them, that will be one of the greatest collective achievements in history.
Cohen's book provides enough detail and analysis in accessible prose to help readers comprehend the Indian challenge and promise. Now that successive U.S. administrations have pursued a strategic partnership with India, it is reasonable to assume that more people will seek to learn about this complex partner. Stephen Cohen's book is a fine place to start.