India's Nuclear Arms Control Quandary

Abstract

While the international community seems ready to move forward on the CTBT, FMCT, and achieving nuclear zero, New Delhi's participation likely will be limited until its leaders believe that they possess a nuclear arsenal capable of minimal deterrence.

Because India continues to produce fissile materials and nuclear weapons, New Delhi will find it increasingly challenging to respond to a variety of arms control initiatives that may gather momentum in the coming years. For instance, President Barack Obama's goal of getting the U.S. Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), if successful and emulated by other countries such as China, would pressure India to do the same. Similarly, Obama's call for a verifiable Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) has raised hopes that the treaty may become a reality sooner rather than later, forcing India to work out its FMCT posture sooner rather than later. Finally, in the long run, if the recently revived enthusiasm for worldwide disarmament eventually brings the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons down into the hundreds, India also will be called upon to stop producing its weapons and, in fact, to start dismantling them.

New Delhi's response to such arms control initiatives will likely revolve around the size and quality of the nuclear arsenal that its decision makers estimate to be the minimum requirement for effective national security. Many things depend on this decision, not just the force level at which India would consider capping its arsenal. The decision also will determine New Delhi's requirements of different fissile materials and their associated production facilities (e.g., unsafeguarded reactors and reprocessing and enrichment units). Additionally, it will impact whether India will perform more nuclear tests and when India may feel ready to participate in worldwide disarmament. In short, it will determine New Delhi's response to the FMCT, CTBT, and assorted global zero initiatives.

The current Indian nuclear doctrine.

Like other nuclear nations when they were at a corresponding stage in their nuclear development, the Indian government does not publicly discuss the size of its desired nuclear arsenal. But, in a major act of transparency, it has released one very important document for public consumption: the “Draft Report of [the] National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine.” 1 Issued in August 1999, a little more than a year after New Delhi conducted a series of nuclear tests, it outlined the motivations, aims, and purpose of India's nuclear policy. Excerpts from the doctrine relevant for estimating the size of the required arsenal include: “India shall pursue a doctrine of credible minimum nuclear deterrence… . The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons by any State or entity against India and its forces. India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.” While no quantitative nuclear arsenal estimates are given to execute this policy, the doctrine later explains that India will respond with “sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict destruction and punishment that the aggressor will find unacceptable.”

After letting the draft document sit in the public space for three years, the government formally adopted its essence in January 2003. 2 The official announcement was a précis of the draft doctrine, and the idea of credible minimal deterrence being the aim of the Indian nuclear force continues to be the basis of official nuclear policy today.

However, this overall policy still does not translate unambiguously into concrete figures for the number and type of nuclear warheads required. Here, many uncertain factors come into play–the accuracy of Indian delivery systems, the country's ability to survive a first strike or antimissile attack, and above all, the government's projections of how much damage would be considered “unacceptable” by an adversary. Consequently, estimates of how many weapons or how much fissile material India may need have varied among nongovernmental experts. I have argued for many years that India already has enough weapons and fissile material to provide credible deterrence against any rational adversary. 3 Yet most analysts in India's nongovernmental think tanks either do not address the issue quantitatively or suggest much larger arsenals, some going up to several hundred weapons. For its part, the government offers no public figures whatsoever. And its prevailing attitude seems to be that the buildup of Indian nuclear forces has just begun.

With the Indian arsenal still numerically below that of the recognized nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) as defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), no one in India appeared to be seriously thinking about the ultimate warhead ceiling until recently. However, negotiations on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which began in 2005, brought about significant changes in this attitude. In effect, the deal lifted decades-old U.S. and Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) sanctions against India in return for several conditions on the Indian nuclear program. Principally, New Delhi had to demarcate which of its nuclear facilities and materials would be deemed “civilian” and brought under safeguards and which would be considered military and thereby not be brought under safeguards. Clearly, material from safeguarded facilities could not be used for weapons. Therefore, the Indian government had to make, if it had not done so already, concrete estimates of the size and quality of the nuclear arsenal it needed, based on its own nuclear policy and the capabilities of its adversaries.

India already has enough weapons and fissile material to provide credible deterrence against any rational adversary. Yet most Indian analysts either do not address the issue quantitatively or suggest much larger arsenals, some going up to several hundred weapons. For its part, the government offers no public figures whatsoever.

The deal also generated vigorous discussion in the Indian news media about the country's nuclear needs. Such public debate was unprecedented. Until then, both the Indian civilian and military nuclear programs had enjoyed considerable freedom from public scrutiny and audit. The deal not only helped sharpen government calculations of New Delhi's nuclear requirements, but also generated enough information in the public domain to enable independent Indian analysts to enter the fray.

Even with this improved transparency, there is still no public information about the number of Indian nuclear weapons. Commentators have offered guesses varying from 40 to 100 warheads. The more reliable estimates, strictly speaking, account for India's fissile material production rather than for assembled warheads. No one outside of the government knows the extent to which the available stock of fissile material has been assembled into weapons. Throughout the rest of this article, I, too, rely on fissile material stocks and production, for which I have calculated up-to-date estimates and infer from that calculation the upper limit on the number of assembled Indian warheads. 4

Current stocks of Indian fissile material.

To clarify, by “current stocks,” I mean the stocks of fissile material produced before the U.S.-India nuclear deal was completed in mid-2008. New Delhi has accumulated a large stock of reactor-grade plutonium that was produced in the spent fuel of its power reactors. There are 22 domestic power reactors altogether: 17 operational and 5 under construction. Of the operational reactors, four involve foreign collaboration, meaning their output of reactor-grade plutonium cannot be used for nuclear weapons. Safeguarding agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for the remaining 13 reactors have been concluded, but the actual safeguarding has not yet started. My calculations based on the electricity generated by these 13 reactors show that they would have produced about 14 tons of reactor-grade plutonium in their spent fuel by the time the U.S.-India nuclear deal became official. 5

No solid information exists on how much of the 14 tons has been separated from the spent fuel rods. The best that one can offer is the following rough estimate: Assuming that the fuel is cooled for three years before it is reprocessed, only the spent fuel generated up to 2005 (at best) could have been reprocessed by 2008–a total of about 2,550 tons of heavy metal. Of the three Indian reprocessing units, the one at Trombay probably has been used predominantly for reprocessing weapon-grade plutonium from the spent fuel produced by the country's CIRUS and Dhruva reactors. The other two reprocessing units, at Tarapur and Kalpakkam, each have the capacity to process 100 tons of heavy metal per year. So together, these two reactors could have processed 3,900 tons of spent fuel if they were operating at 100 percent capacity. In other words, they could have handled the entire spent fuel stock of 2,550 tons.

It has been reported, however, that the Tarapur and Kalpakkam units are operating at very low capacity factors, which obviously would decrease the amount of spent fuel they would have reprocessed. 6 For example, if their average capacity factor has been 25 percent, they only could have reprocessed 975 tons of spent fuel, yielding 3.73 tons of reactor-grade plutonium. At 50 percent capacity factor, the yield of reactor-grade plutonium would have doubled to 7.46 tons. My guess is that roughly 4-8 tons of reactor-grade plutonium already may have been separated.

I should note that although the U.S.-India nuclear deal requires that some currently unsafeguarded reactors be placed under IAEA safeguards, it does not affect the status of the reactor-grade plutonium they have already discharged. That plutonium will remain outside of safeguards for New Delhi to use as it wishes. Therefore, the eventual total of 14 tons of reactor-grade plutonium could be used directly to make nuclear weapons or could be converted to weapon-grade plutonium by unsafeguarded breeder reactors unless an FMCT restricts it. Some analysts point out that certain draft FMCT versions may permit such conversion even after the treaty comes into force. 7

India generates weapon-grade plutonium in its CIRUS and Dhruva reactors, running them at a low burn-up rate of about 1,000 megawatt-day per ton. In this mode these heavy water, natural uranium reactors are expected to produce about 0.9 grams of weapon-grade plutonium per megawatt-day. 8 The 40-megawatt CIRUS reactor has functioned since 1963–save for a break for refurbishment that started in 1997 and lasted until 2003. The 100-megawatt Dhruva reactor has operated at full power since 1988. Both reactors are assumed to have been operating with roughly 70 percent capacity factor.

The main feature of the U.S.-India nuclear deal relevant to the future production of fissile material was the requirement that India identify its nuclear facilities as either civilian or military. What to designate the Indian prototype fast breeder reactor proved to be a major point of contention.

On the basis of these assumptions, they would have produced about 800 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium from their inception until mid-2008. It seems likely that priority would have been given to reprocessing all of the weapon-grade plutonium as soon as the fuel rods cooled in the 50-ton reprocessing unit at Trombay. Thus, about 740 kilograms already should have been separated–about 130 kilograms of which may have been spent on past nuclear tests and research. That leaves a stock today of about 610 kilograms. 9

Lastly, there is the uranium enrichment facility at Rattehalli to consider. Princeton University's M. V. Ramana and the Institute for Science and International Security's David Albright and Susan Basu have analyzed its likely separative work unit capacity and output, and their estimates vary in the range of 5,000-13,000 separative work units per year. 10 However, it is generally believed that the facility was primarily intended to produce uranium enriched to 20-40 percent uranium 235 for an Indian nuclear submarine, not for weapon use. Nevertheless, such fuel does fall in the category of highly enriched uranium, and one of the challenges facing any prospective FMCT would be its status and safeguards.

Future fissile material production.

The main feature of the U.S.-India nuclear deal relevant to the future production of fissile material was the requirement that India identify its nuclear facilities as either civilian or military. What to designate the Indian prototype fast breeder reactor proved to be a major point of contention. Washington wanted the breeder reactor to be safeguarded, while New Delhi insisted on keeping the breeder reactor within the military fence. The Indian nuclear establishment explicitly stated–after some initial ambiguity, possibly because it had yet to thrash out its fissile material requirements–that the reactor was essential for “strategic” purposes. 11 In the end, the Indian delegation got its way. The United States agreed to allow the breeder reactor and eight other heavy water CANDU reactors to remain unsafeguarded.

The breeder reactor is still under construction; it may not be fully operational until 2012. Once it is, it should be able to produce about 144 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium annually. 12 The CIRUS reactor is expected to close soon, but the Dhruva reactor will continue to yield 23 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium each year. That puts the total yearly production of domestic weapon-grade plutonium at 167 kilograms, or about 33 warheads per year–a steep increase, by a factor of about five, over the current annual yield of about 32 kilograms.

I should caution that the above estimate is the theoretical maximum that general principles of reactor physics will allow under the assumed operating conditions. In practice, the weapon-grade plutonium yield may be less. Since separating weapon-grade plutonium from the axial uranium blanket of the breeder reactor is harder, it may only be done for the radial blanket. This would yield about 92 kilograms, bringing the total weapon-grade plutonium production down to 115 kilograms annually. 13 The available plutonium may be further lowered if there are periods of especially low load factors in operation at either the breeder reactor or reprocessing units.

Implications for the FMCT.

When the U.S.-India nuclear deal was being negotiated in 2005 and 2006, New Delhi already had nearly one-half of a ton of weapon-grade plutonium that it generated from the Dhruva and CIRUS reactors' spent fuel–about 100 warheads' worth–and a large stock of reactor-grade plutonium. Nonetheless, India's nuclear strategists felt strongly that the existing stocks were not sufficient for minimal deterrence requirements, which is why Indian diplomats pushed so hard to retain more fissile material production capability inside the unsafeguarded sector during the U.S.-India nuclear deal negotiations.

Thus, while the United States, Russia, Britain, and France have declared a moratorium on producing more fissile material, India has done the opposite. In fact, through its negotiations on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, New Delhi has, in effect, announced its intention to enhance its weapon-grade plutonium production capability. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh categorically articulated this intention in a speech he delivered to the Indian Parliament in August 2006: “We are not willing to accept a moratorium on the production of fissile material…. India is willing to join only a nondiscriminatory, multilaterally negotiated and internationally verifiable FMCT, as, and when, it is concluded in the Conference on Disarmament, again provided our security interests are fully addressed.” 14

Therefore, if India were to be confronted with having to sign an FMCT in the very near future, chances are that it would be unwilling to do so. Correspondingly, its overall posture and diplomatic tactics on an FMCT at the Conference on Disarmament will anticipate this potential conflict. The bottom line: While New Delhi will continue to support negotiations toward an FMCT, it is unlikely to push for speedy progress.

Implications for the CTBT.

The issue of nuclear testing also came under serious discussion during the negotiations of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, indicating New Delhi's likely position on the CTBT, should it come to India's shores for signature. Much of the domestic political opposition to the deal was that it deprived India of its “sovereign right to test”; however, these concerns were totally misplaced and factually incorrect. The only agreements India has signed as part of the deal are the safeguards agreement with the IAEA and a “123 agreement” with Washington. And neither of those documents makes any mention of India agreeing not to test. That said, it was clear to all parties from the start that–the 123 agreement notwithstanding–basic U.S. law prohibits nuclear commerce with India if it tests again. In other words, the U.S.-India nuclear deal does not endanger India's right to test, which it can always exercise until it signs the CTBT, but the converse is true. Should India test again, the U.S.-India nuclear deal will be imperiled.

While the United States, Russia, Britain, and France have declared a moratorium on producing more fissile material, India has done the opposite. In fact, through its negotiations on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, New Delhi has, in effect, announced its intention to enhance its weapon-grade plutonium production capability.

To allay the international community's fears about New Delhi's intentions, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee assured from the sidelines of a September 2008 NSG meeting, “We remain committed to a voluntary, unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. We do not subscribe to any arms race, including a nuclear one.” 15 His statement, made no doubt after consultation with India's nuclear establishment, indicates that the chances of New Delhi wanting to test again in the near future are slim. In fact, there may have been an assessment that India can accomplish weapons design improvements without further testing. Therefore, if the United States and China ratify the CTBT, it is likely that India, as a responsible nuclear power, can be persuaded to sign on.

Implications for worldwide disarmament.

It is true that the U.S.-India nuclear deal has allotted New Delhi the option of producing enough fissile material to make a fairly sizable nuclear arsenal. The prototype fast breeder reactor and Dhruva reactor could yield up to 115-167 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium per year. Even assuming that reprocessed plutonium from the breeder reactor will not be available until 2015, this still would give India a stock of 1,000-1,500 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium by 2020–equivalent to 200-300 warheads. In addition, New Delhi will have the choice of using part of the 14 tons of reactor-grade plutonium generated thus far by its CANDU power reactors, which, in a pinch, can fuel several hundred warheads. If India were to weaponize such a large amount of fissile material, its nuclear stockpile would become larger than Britain's current arsenal and possibly China's arsenal. It could no longer be convincingly described as just a minimal deterrent.

But there is reason to feel optimistic that India will not actually build such a stockpile. For instance, the consensus among independent Indian analysts is that New Delhi's stated nuclear doctrine of developing only a credible minimal deterrent rather than a major offensive nuclear capability still holds. As a result, once the government is convinced that it has enough warheads for minimum deterrence–and a corresponding backup stockpile of fissile material–one can hope that New Delhi would be willing, like the NPT nuclear weapon states, to stop further weapon and fissile material production. At that time, it also may be willing to declare part of its stockpile of reactor-grade and weapon-grade plutonium as “excess” to its military needs.

The key unknown is how many warheads it would take for the Indian authorities to feel satisfied that they have enough weaponry for minimal deterrence. Even a handful of 20-kiloton bombs, if dropped on a couple of major Asian cities, would cause about half a million fatalities. Surely, this is more than enough to deter any rational enemy leadership from embarking on military adventures that could invite such retribution. 16 That would put the Indian stockpile at about one or two dozen warheads, a range that also accounts for some redundancy to offset against failure of various sorts. (Irrational or suicidal adversaries may not be deterred by the above scenario, but they would not be deterred by the prospect of much larger attacks either.)

Needless to say, India's official nuclear strategists do not think such relatively small numbers are sufficient for deterrence. But even if they felt that 100 warheads were necessary, the required weapon-grade plutonium is already available to them in their spent fuel stocks. In that case, it is fair to wonder why New Delhi sought a much larger fissile material production capacity while negotiating the U.S.-India nuclear deal and why it is currently unwilling to halt further production. One reason could be that national security decisions are rarely limited to precisely tailored requirements. It is not unusual for planners to play it safe and stock up with more weaponry than is needed, rather than be guilty of compromising national security. This could have been particularly true of the Indian government during its negotiations with Washington, when it was being repeatedly accused by political opponents of selling out New Delhi's strategic interests. After all, during the height of the Cold War, both the United States and Soviet Union built up absurdly large nuclear arsenals, far beyond what any rational projection of outcomes could have demanded. It took several decades of getting used to those weapons before Washington and Moscow could envisage a process of disarmament.

By these standards, India is a relative newcomer to the nuclear club. Only 12 years have passed since its 1998 nuclear tests, which were greeted with much euphoria inside of the country by all but a small fraction of people. The tests were hailed not just as providing a mighty addition to the Indian military arsenal, but also as symbols of technological maturity, national pride, and international prominence. With so much invested in nuclearization, it clearly will take some time before the Indian public and polity can be persuaded to reverse these notions.

The recent proposals by the Obama administration and U.S. nongovernmental organizations to rid the world of all nuclear weapons are valuable for accelerating this process. But persuading India to start disarming cannot be done from the outside. A public consensus has to be built within India to delegitimize nuclear weapons and to view their possession as a matter of embarrassment rather than pride. Mobilizing public and political opinion toward this end cannot be achieved by New Delhi's strategic experts alone. It will require the full participation of peace activists and anti-nuclear groups, of which there are many in India. Now more than ever, they need to be empowered and supported by the government. Proponents of nuclear zero in U.S. think tanks would do well to co-opt them in their efforts.