While we debate, how much is enough, let us see what this old report from some apparently knowledgable sources say.
India's Nuclear Force Structure
By Gurmeet Kanwal
Americans managed to convince themselves that thousands of strategic warheads and multiple means of delivering them were needed in order to deter the Soviet Union. If, however, one thinks politically instead of militarily, it becomes apparent that not much is needed to deter. What political leader would run the risk of losing even a city or two—and also his position of power—in military pursuit of problematic gains?
— Kenneth Waltz 1
Is Minimum Deterrence a Numbers Game?
Writing in the early-1980s, Bhabani Sen Gupta had said that the entire basis for nuclear weapons is deterrence: 2 "The entire purpose is to deter the enemy, not to fight him... the very existence (of nuclear weapons) is justified on a theoretical base that is gravely limited at best, and outright wrong at worst... it would be better for India to settle the doctrinal issues before going nuclear, instead of first going nuclear and then looking for doctrinal justification." However, India's nuclear policy evolved without major debate on the doctrinal issues and the nuclear weapons research and development programme was shrouded in secrecy. It is only after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests that Indian analysts have begun to wrestle with the complexities of nuclear theology and most of the home truths have had to be re-learnt. It is a universally accepted truism that deterrence is ultimately a mind game. It needs to be achieved during peace to ensure against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons by one's adversaries and for the purposes of coercive diplomacy. The concept of nuclear deterrence first evolved in a US Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum where it was stated that the "threat of the use of atomic bomb would be a great deterrent to any aggressors, which might be considering embarking on atomic war."
"Minimum deterrence is not a numerical definition but a strategic approach. If a country is in a position to have a survivable arsenal, which is capable of exacting an unacceptable penalty in retaliation, it has minimum deterrence as opposed to an open-ended one aimed at matching the adversary's arsenal in numerical terms. Those arsenals in thousands were produced in an era when the strategic establishments believed in nuclear war fighting and did not understand its ecological consequences. Today, sections of the US strategic community argue that the US can discharge its global responsibilities with an arsenal of 200 warheads."
A report by W. P. S. Sidhu in the Jane's Intelligence Review soon after the May 1998 nuclear tests estimated that India's nuclear stockpile contained between 20 to 60 warheads assembled from the weapons-grade plutonium re-processed from the fuel taken from the research reactors located at Trombay. 16 However, according to Sidhu, if the plutonium produced in India's commercial reactors is also taken into account, India would possess adequate fissile material to produce "at least 390 nuclear weapons and as many as 470 weapons." 17 R. Ramachandran writes that it does not make sense to use reactor-grade plutonium "which has a high content of spontaneously fissionable Pu-240 and makes only 'dirty' bombs as against weapons-grade Pu-239 from research reactors." 18 He has calculated that India is likely to have adequate stocks of plutonium for about 30 bombs and that "A good upper band would... be 35." 19 It also needs to be noted that India's fast breeder programme requires reactor-grade plutonium and if it were to be used for making nuclear warheads, it would not be available for the purpose for which it is actually intended. 20 Estimates of the nuclear stockpile in the Indian media have ranged from 25-65 21 warheads to 50-64 22 warheads.
K. Subrahmanyam has written that "... if a country can project an image of having around 500 nuclear warheads, which India can build in twelve to fifteen years time if it were to set out on the programme and disperse them on its vast area, the country will have a credible deterrent." 62 Even after the Pokhran-II tests, while explaining that minimum deterrence is not a numbers game, he wrote: "Whether it is 150, 250 or 300, the Indian deterrent will still be a minimum one compared to others except Pakistan." 63 However, he is known to believe that "... a force of around 60 deliverable warheads could meet adequately India's need for a minimum deterrent."
Jasjit Singh also advocates a minimalist approach and a time period of 15 to 20 years for the Indian arsenal to stabilise. He writes. 67 "The exact size of the arsenal needed at the end-point will need to be worked out by defence planners based on a series of factors. But at this point it is difficult to visualise an arsenal with anything more than a double-digit quantum of warheads. It may be prudent to even plan on the basis of a lower end figure of say 2-3 dozen (survivable) nuclear warheads by the end of 10-15 years.
General K. Sundarji, a former Indian Chief of the Army Staff and a perceptive military thinker, was perhaps the first analyst in India to write about the military aspects of India's nuclear deterrence. He advocated a nuclear force structure of approximately 150 warheads mounted almost entirely on a Prithvi-Agni missile force.
Brigadier Vijay K. Nair has suggested a force level of 132 nuclear warheads of different types, including weapons in the megaton range. 70 For delivery, besides bomber/fighter-bomber aircraft, he recommends five SSBNs (each with 16 SLBMs) and 48 ballistic missiles (12 SRBMs and 36 MRBMs). He writes: "India must ensure adequate reserves to provide fail safe assurance of her strategy and yet maintain an adequate force structure after hostilities cease. An additional reserve of two weapon systems is required for each planed autonomous strike and a minimum of 20 percent of the entire force structure should be available for post-strike security imperatives."
Rear Admiral Raja Menon (Retd.) recommends that India's nuclear arsenal should be based primarily on SSBNs from about 2020 onwards. 71 Till then, he feels that India's nuclear deterrent should be based only on ballistic missiles.
Admiral Menon has estimated that the modernised Chinese arsenal would comprise 596 warheads after 2010. Up to 2030, he suggests that an all-missile, land-based force should comprise five regiments of 12 missiles each (with survivability being ensured by concealment and rail-garrison mobility) and fifty percent of them should have up to four independently targetable warheads each. He feels that these would suffice to withstand a first strike by China with the maximum number of warheads that China may decide to launch and yet have enough missiles remaining to inflict unacceptable damage. He feels that some hardened silos may need to be provided "if the rate of degradation of the rail garrison missile force is judged to be too rapid." Against Pakistan, he proposes a force of 200 cruise missiles, 36 of them nuclear tipped, as cruise missiles are the least provocative. He visualises the "handing over of Indian deterrence from the land-based force to the sea-based force... over a ten year period... (to be) completed by 2030" and suggests a nuclear force of six SSBNs, each armed with 12 SLBMs. Each SSBN will carry at least 12 missiles and, in his view, as India has MIRV (multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicles) ambitions, each missile could carry up to ten 250 to 400 Kt nuclear warheads. "Such a force would give India a warhead strength of 216 (6 x MIRV) in a pre-launch scenario and probably 380 warheads in a scenario with adequate strategic warning and with five boats deployed. This could be the entire Indian deterrence till the middle of the 21st century."
Bharat Karnad follows what has been dubbed a 'maximalist' approach to nuclear deterrence and strongly advocates the need for megaton-class thermonuclear weapons in the Indian arsenal. He assumes that the primary and secondary target lists could contain about 60 locations that need to be hit. In order to ensure that each of these targets can be destroyed with an acceptable assurance level so that deterrence is credible, he recommends the targeting of each with four nuclear weapons, each of which has a two mile (approximately three km) CEP (circular error probable—a measure of the accuracy of delivery; it denotes the distance from the point of impact to the centre of the target as the radius of the circle within which, on average, 50 percent of the missiles aimed at the target will fall). Bharat Karnad suggests that India's nuclear arsenal be gradually built up over a period of three decades to a total of 328 nuclear warheads, as given in Table 3: 74
Table 3. Requirement of Nuclear Warheads
Timeframe Maximally Strategic* (Warheads) Minimally Tactical** (Warheads) Total
2000-2010 57 30 87
2010-2020 131 40 171
2020-2030 268 60 328
R.R. Subramanian, a senior analyst at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi, and a physicist by training, is of the opinion that India needs at least 425 warheads if the combined efficiency (accuracy, reliability, in-flight interception) of the delivery systems is taken to be 0.3.
Lieutenant General Pran Pahwa (Retd.) recommends that India's deterrence be based on 182 warheads. 78 He bases his calculations on the assumption that China is likely to employ two warheads each to destroy every Indian warhead and that 20 percent Indian warheads would survive a Chinese first strike which would be essentially a counter force one. He feels that if India had 182 warheads, China would need to fire 364 warheads and, given a Chinese arsenal of 400 warheads, it would be left with 36 to India's surviving 36 warheads. Since the numbers remaining would be matched, China would be deterred from launching a first strike.
It emerges that Indian analysts have widely varying views on the number of nuclear warheads that India needs for its minimum deterrent. The figures vary from the low double digits ("two to three dozen") at the lower end to just over 400 at the upper end.
Despite Mao's assertion that "300 million Chinese would survive" nuclear war, it could be argued that the fear of losing some of its modern showpieces on the eastern coast, combined with the certainty of horrendous civilian casualties due to extremely high population densities, would be adequate to deter China from being the first to begin nuclear exchanges that are bound to escalate to city-busting strikes. The China scholars at IDSA hold sharply divergent views on the number of Chinese cities that need to be targeted to ensure deterrence. Sujit Dutta is of the opinion that China would be deterred if its leadership were convinced that its adversary could destroy even three major cities. 82 M.V. Rappai concurs with this view and argues that the Chinese are taking their economic development very seriously and would not do anything to jeopardise the future of their thriving population and industrial centres. 83 Swaran Singh advocates the targeting of five cities for effective deterrence but feels that rather than the ability to target a number of cities, India's overall nuclear capability should be built up for effective deterrence. 84 However, Srikanth Kondapalli holds the view that perhaps even the credible targeting of 15 to 20 Chinese cities may not be adequate for deterrence as the Chinese would not hesitate to take whatever military action they might consider necessary if, in their view, their national security interests were to be seriously threatened. 85
Recommended Nuclear Force Structure
It is now acknowledged in almost all quarters that successful deterrence does not demand qualitative or quantitative parity in force structures—the ability to inflict unacceptable damage is adequate. However, an adversary confronted with having to worry only about a retaliatory strike, would be deterred only if he was convinced that the nuclear warheads aimed at his cities, military and industrial complexes would, firstly, survive his own first strike in adequate numbers; secondly, they are powerful enough to destroy vital targets and, thirdly, they can be delivered with the required accuracies. The problem of survival can be overcome by building in sufficient redundancies into the force structure, besides dispersion, hardening and concealment. The remaining two, accuracy of delivery and the warhead yield, are directly dependent on each other — greater the CEP of a missile, larger the warhead yield required to cause the same damage for a given assurance level. G. Balachandran's calculations for an assurance level of 90 percent are given at Table 4: 90
aking into account the requirement and the likely availability of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, it would be advisable that India's nuclear force be raised in a phased manner over a period of three decades. Mid-course corrections can be applied based on the availability of new technologies and developments in the diplomatic field. For example, depending on the pace of development in China and whether that country graduates to a democratic form of government, the need to plan to target ten cities and industrial complexes for a counter value strategy, could be reviewed around 2010. In the nuclear era, strategy has never been the sole determinant of force architecture. This, according to Rajesh Rajagopalan is exemplified by the US decision to opt for the MIRV programme as the technology for it was available and it would help them to circumvent nuclear arms reduction negotiations. 95 The technology trajectory will continue to drive nuclear force structures that should therefore be flexible and adaptable. The recommended nuclear force structure is given at Table 5.
The China reference was because China does not have a deployed MIRV vehicle, yet and their miniaturized weapons is reported to be stolen from the US W88 design. That is it, nothing more.