India's Nuclear Proliferation Policy

The Impact of Secrecy on Decision Making, 1980–2010

Gaurav Kampani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000732870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines India's nuclear program, and it shows how secrecy inhibits learning in states and corrodes the capacity of decision-makers to generate optimal policy choices.

Focusing on clandestine Indian nuclear proliferation during 1980–2010, the book argues that efficient decision-making is dependent on strongly established knowledge actors, high information turnover and the capacity of leaders to effectively monitor their agents. When secrecy concerns prevent states from institutionalizing these processes, leaders tend to rely more on heuristics and less on rational thought processes in choices involving matters of great political uncertainty and technical complexity. Conversely, decision-making improves as secrecy declines and policy choices become subject to higher levels of scrutiny and contestation. The arguments in this book draw on compelling evidence gathered from interviews conducted by the author, with interviewees including individuals who were involved in nuclear planning in India from 1980 to 2010, such as former cabinet and defence secretaries, the principal secretary to the prime minister, national security advisors, secretaries to the department of atomic energy, military chiefs of staff and their principal staff officers, and commanders of India's strategic (nuclear) forces.

This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, Asian politics, strategic studies and International Relations.

1
The oddities of Indian nuclear behavior

From the late 1970s until about 2004, India exhibited a pattern of lagging national security responses to unambiguous nuclear threats. Realist theory posits that states confronting protracted power rivalries and lacking the benefits of great nuclear power protection will acquire nuclear weapons.¹ India however bucked that trend until the late 1980s despite the increased threat from Pakistan’s nuclearization and Sino-Pakistani nuclear collaboration. Even after India built nuclear weapons in the 1990s, it neglected to develop the institutional capacities necessary to wield them.

Organizational theorists who maintain that India’s nuclear weapons program is the consequence of advocacy efforts by a “strategic enclave,” the lobby of nuclear scientists and bureaucrats,² have never explained the 24-year gap between its first (1974) and second round (1998) of nuclear tests, or why the scientists and bureaucrats refrained from building a coalition with the Indian military, the surest route to a weapons program.

Similarly, explanations that cite prestige as the reason for not just why India has sought nuclear weapons but also for why it minimized their operational utility³ prior to 1999 are unable to explain why four Indian governments during the 1990s kept the existence of the arsenal secret for a decade. Or why successive Indian governments in the last two decades, in a complete reversal of the logic of prestige, have committed themselves to developing an operational nuclear force even after India won the status of a de facto nuclear weapon power.

From the late 1970s on, Indian decision-makers had clear evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear quest.⁴ Indian national security elites understood that a Pakistani nuclear arsenal would be a game changer in South Asia. It would partly make irrelevant the conventional superiority India had historically enjoyed over Pakistan since their founding.⁵ Of greater concern to them was the negative shift in the “balance of threat”⁶ as evidenced by Pakistan’s attempts at breaking up the Indian union, first by supporting secessionist insurgents in the sensitive Indian border states of Punjab⁷ and later Kashmir.⁸

In the winter of 1986–1987 when India and Pakistan almost came to blows during a crisis triggered by India’s Brasstacks military war games,⁹ Pakistan communicated a nuclear threat through India’s ambassador in Islamabad.¹⁰ India’s response, beginning in the early 1980s, to these adverse shifts in the balance of power and threat was an experimental and disaggregated effort to develop advanced nuclear weapon designs and ballistic missiles.¹¹

Sometime during the spring of 1988, top Indian policy planners and decision-makers received confirming evidence that China had passed on a nuclear weapon design tested in 1966 to Pakistan and that “Pakistan was in possession of at least three nuclear devices of 15–20 kiloton yield.”¹² However, the Indian prime minister waited until the spring of 1989 before authorizing weaponization to formally commence and appointing a lead coordinator within government to oversee that effort.¹³

The late start of weaponization in 1989 had negative downstream effects for India during the decade of the 1990s. When the next Indo-Pakistani crisis blew up over Kashmir in the winter/spring of 1989–1990, India had no ready arsenal.¹⁴ During this crisis, the Pakistani foreign minister delivered what Delhi thought was a veiled nuclear threat.¹⁵ But the prototype weapon under development had until then not even been shown to the air force.¹⁶ Nuclear command and control consisted of the prime minister, his principal secretary and the scientific advisor to the defense minister. Neither had the government done any nuclear contingency planning nor did there exist any institutional guidelines and procedures to help political authorities cobble up a nuclear response.¹⁷

Although many foreign powers assumed that India and Pakistan were nuclear capable in the early 1990s, it is highly unlikely that India achieved the technical capability to deliver nuclear weapons before 1994–1995.¹⁸ But equally germane, the state did not develop the institutional capacity to manage its nuclear hardware in any instrumentally meaningful way in the decade of the 1990s. The term institutional capacity here means the civil–military chain of command, standard operating procedures, practice drills and ground rehearsals to coordinate action among and across the various agencies tasked with responding to a nuclear emergency. It also refers to operational planning in the military’s tactical meaning of the term.¹⁹

This state of affairs briefly continued after India conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 and formally laid claims to nuclear power status, until the summer of 1999 when India suddenly found itself at war with Pakistan over the latter’s unprovoked occupation of the Kargil heights in Kashmir. This was the historical moment when the Indian government initiated nuclear operational planning with the air force.²⁰

Post-1998, India set out to create the ideational and institutional edifice for a “credible minimum deterrent.”²¹ Indian political decision-makers are now committed to taking nuclear capabilities beyond technological symbolism into realizable forces in the field. Between 1998 and 2005, the socialization of the Indian state into the operational practices of nuclear deterrence proceeded slowly leading to the observation that the distinguishing characteristic of the India’s arsenal was operational passivity.²² Thereafter, successive Indian governments have rapidly institutionalized the co-participation of the military in nuclear operational planning and established a semi-independent body led by a senior military officer to oversee the arsenal’s long-term development. Following advice from the military, they also approved new and proactive procedures to enable the rapid mobilization of the arsenal during a crisis.

The effort to improve nuclear operations has now spawned the opposite and alarmist view that India, which was once the exemplar of nuclear restraint, is now an enfant terrible on nuclear steroids.²³ More remarkably, however, this newfound operational proclivity has disabused theories that have long attributed India’s historical nuclear hesitancy to status seeking, symbolism, normative restraint, an absent strategic culture and civil–military distrust.

The research questions and this book’s answer in brief

How did India, a regional power with a proven nuclear capability as early as 1974, end up in a scenario in the 1980s where it was forced to scramble to deal with a Pakistani nuclear threat? Similarly in the decade of the 1990s, despite the history of Pakistani nuclear threats, the high regional political and military volatility, and the threat of war with Pakistan ever present due to the latter’s low-intensity operations in Kashmir, why did not India create...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The oddities of Indian nuclear behavior
• 2 Secrecy and state learning
• 3 A disaggregated nuclear weapons option (1980–1989)
• 4 Behind the veil of nuclear opacity (1989–1998)
• 5 The challenges of nuclear operationalization (1999–2010)
• 6 Conclusion: variations in practices of secrecy and its impact on nuclear outcomes
• References
• Index