Bharat Rakshak

SSridhar wrote:The whole body of deterrence literature grew out of a specific case of USA-USSR Cold War confrontation. Thus, it cannot be assumed as generally applicable to all cases. Moreover, many analysts feel that there were many other factors, apart from deterrence, that stopped war. In the present India-Pakistan deterrence, many aspects are different from the Cold War experience. For example, the Cold War deterrence was ideological in nature, not territorial. In our case, it is both territorial and ideological. Even in this ideological difference, it is only Pakistan that has given it an ideological colour and that too a highly flammable religious colour. In the case of US-USSR, neither side was reckless (in spite of the Cuban Missile crisis) as they knew the horrendous fallout of a nuclear exchange. In our case, Pakistan is certainly reckless because as they are often heard saying that the Muslims love death. Their casual references to using nuclear weapons and even nuclear signalling through blackmail conveyed to Indian Prime Ministers at various times testify to that. The widespread and increasing jihadi fervour present among military personnel adds to the fear of recklessness. Also, the fear of unauthorized access and launch is ever increasing in the case of Pakistan.

SSridhar wrote:In our case, Pakistan is certainly reckless because as they are often heard saying that the Muslims love death. Their casual references to using nuclear weapons and even nuclear signalling through blackmail conveyed to Indian Prime Ministers at various times testify to that. The widespread and increasing jihadi fervour present among military personnel adds to the fear of recklessness. Also, the fear of unauthorized access and launch is ever increasing in the case of Pakistan.

Gagan wrote:,
Massa will NEVER give up munna.

I mean if munna number 1 goes down the drain, munna number 2 will arise and continue to be on our back.
That is the way realpolitik works.

Some day when we are a superpower we too can find some munna of our own to return the favour to the various great powers in the world.

But till then it is a question of minimizing risk by ensuring interdependene with the great powers so that they will have to think twice before they wink at their munnas to hurt us.

perhaps might not occur in the 21st century.

Already munna is held in a tighter leash, some even talk of massa's birds swooping down and taking away munna's crown jewels should they try and use them against India.

So more interdependence with massa is India's first line of defence against munna - political deterrence. Should that break down, our nukes will do the rest.

ramana wrote:sanku, Spend more time reading all those tributes to KSgaru..

NUCLEUS OF THE PROBLEM

BY MANVENDRA SINGH

The visit of the Japanese prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, has yet again underlined the fact that India’s relations with the world have moved out of the orbit of the Pokhran tests of 1998. This was first apparent from the bonhomie generated by the visit of the United States president, Bill Clinton, and has since then been regarded as a declared fact. The word sanctions is now barely audible and the nonproliferation regime is no more the determinant of India’s communication with the rest of the world. Things are happening between India and the world, in the economic and security fields. Businesses are picking up, and there is a certain mood of confidence and achievement in the country. But is that enough to sustain India’s growth engines? And its security interestsvis-à-vis the world community?

The visiting Japanese delegation did mention it, but out of diplomatic politeness, did not place undue stress on it. The fact of the matter, nevertheless, is that India’s accession to the global nonproliferation regime is a matter of concern to the world at large. Despite India’s declared unilateral moratorium on further nuclear testing, there continues to be a demand for New Delhi’s accession to the comprehensive test ban treaty.

Greater awareness of India’s security compulsions does certainly restrain most members of the world community from reducing the accession to the treaty into a zero-sum issue. The dialogue is no more of the “either — or” variety, and this says much for India’s ability to explain its position, and for the world community’s ability to listen, and dovetail, those concerns. In the new millennium that, however, is insufficient.

The fact remains that there are sanctions in place against India for the tests carried out in May 1998. And that those sanctions do prevent India’s access to monies and technologies for the further advancement of its economy and the general wellbeing of its people. These facts are undeniable. And what is also undeniable is that the India conducted the Shakti series of tests in May 1998 for supreme national interests. A point had arrived in the evolution of the Indian nation wherein it could no longer allow its security concerns to be determined solely by external factors while New Delhi remained a hapless bystander.

The two decade long illegal and surreptitious transfer of nuclear and missile technology by China and North Korea to countries in the vicinity of India was the final determinant of the decision to test, and exercise the nuclear option. The international nonproliferation regime did nothing to prevent and punish these transfers. Unwilling to repeat the mistakes of the Sixties India went ahead with the tests and the weaponization. These actions are irreversible, and neither is there any such demand for them to be reversed. But what are reversible are the sanctions imposed on India, and for which there are certain responsibilities that fall on New Delhi.

A carefully crafted five-decade long effort to put in place a global nonproliferation regime was destroyed by India’s 1998 tests. This is a fact that does not receive adequate attention in India. Not that it should for the sake of attention, but only so as to fully understand the world’s responses to the tests. And understanding the world’s responses is essential to coming to a conclusion on the future of India’s role, position and responsibilities.

There is no denying the fact that India can no longer continue to exist as though it lived in a vacuum. Being among the most isolated of economies has allowed India to bear the brunt of the sanctions with relative ease. But that is not sufficient for further economic progress since the country needs technologies if it is to improve the lives of its people. These are currently denied on account of the sanctions. And one method of eliminating this problem is by India’s limited accession to the global nonproliferation regime and the signing of the CTBT.

The debate in India on whether or not to sign the CTBT has been mixed up with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty issue. That is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, the CTBT issue has little to do with the discrimination perpetuated by the indefinite extension of the NPT. The CTBT is essentially a continuum of the 1963 partial test ban treaty of which India was a prime moving force. Atmospheric tests were banned with that treaty, and virtually all tests are sought to be banned by the CTBT.

And secondly, India’s isolation from the NPT is the result of a mystifying morality of the Sixties that neither read the writing on the wall, nor allowed science to determine security. Once the most advanced nuclear research programmes in Asia, India could quite conceivably have tested a nuclear device in the Sixties and beaten the NPT deadline of 1968. The world did not disarm, and India did not test. Thus neither was India’s security enhanced nor its morality appreciated.

This moralizing was to be reenacted almost three decades later when New Delhi went into fits trying to sell the saintliness of its decision to sign and ratify the chemical weapons convention. The Congress supported United Front government of I.K. Gujral signed and ratified it when the official Indian position was that it did not possess such weapons and was in principle opposed to such weapons.

Whose morality was served is difficult to discern. And what is more, the chemical weapons convention is a far more intrusive and expensive, treaty for India than the CTBT is ever likely to be. As a party to the convention India has to pay for the destruction of those very weapons that it first spent millions to produce for the protection and promotion of its security. India has also to pay for the inspection visits undertaken by the technical secretariat of Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons.

This inspection regime is an ongoing process and the destruction schedule is stretched over 10 years. Had India unilaterally begun the destruction process it would have saved a semblance of its morality, and a lot of money. It could then have signed the convention as a non-possessor state, and avoided the intrusive inspection regime. The mere suspicion of a chemical weapons facility now allows another country to impose a challenge inspection on India. To prevent challenge inspections from continuing, India needs to garner a three-fourths majority in the 41 member executive council of the OPCW.

The process, as far as the CTBT is concerned is, in fact, the reverse. An on-site inspection for what is suspected to be a nuclear test, not a facility or weapons storage or some such thing, has to be approved by, at the very least, 30 of the 51 members of the executive council of the CTBT organization. And that too after the global network of the international monitoring system detects signs of seismic activity. Accession to the CTBT does not prevent India from modernizing the designs of its nuclear weapons. And it also does not prevent India from conducting sub-kiloton tests for that modernization.

Data recovered from the 1998 tests, processed through the necessary software and high-speed computing, will allow India to continue the modernization of its weapons. Configured into the sub-kiloton variety, these designs can then be tested, legally. Anybody familiar with India’s sixth test in May 1998 will recognize the worth of the expertise available within the country. What is required is some technology, but for that India has to first sign some documents.

Indo-Pak Nuclear Lexicon: An Indian Perspective on Credible Minimum Deterrence


Written by: IPCS



By Tanvi Kulkarni

Why Credible Minimum Deterrence?

India’s nuclear weapons policy is identified with the posture of Credible Minimum Nuclear Deterrence (CMD). The principle entails quite a different interpretation than that understood in the western nuclear lexicon in that western theories and constructs, particularly from the Cold War, cannot be applied effectively to the Indian context. K Subrahmanyam has defended the CMD doctrine by stating that it has been adapted to suit India’s requirements and thinking on nuclear weapons. Bharat Karnad defines it as a self-explanatory, moderate, limited, reasonable and legitimate posture that justified India’s nuclear weapons and missile capabilities after the 1998 tests. The CMD doctrine highlights that India does not seek an open-ended nuclear arsenal and pillars other postures like the second-strike capability and no first use. Both terms, credible and minimum, are important individually and their equation makes for the credible minimum nuclear deterrence policy.

What is the Indian understanding of credibility?

Odd as it seems, as a key feature of nuclear deterrence, ‘credibility’ is a dynamic, ambiguous and controversial concept. A theoretical understanding of credibility often embroils into a political and technical debate and its definition then depends on which decision-making community, school of thought and context one chooses to represent.

The Indian nuclear doctrine looks at credible deterrence as a political-psychological concept and serves as a prime means of communicating to potential adversaries that India maintains the will and capability to inflict unacceptable punishment through retaliation with nuclear weapons. An effective second strike capability and survivability become important elements of credibility. Credibility must be maintained by robust command and control systems, safety and security of arsenal, operational force preparedness, planning and training of forces, research and development and effective conventional military capabilities. The doctrine lends dynamism to the credible deterrent by making it responsive to India’s strategic environment, national security and technological imperatives.

A state’s approach and policy towards strategic weapons as well as the concepts and ideas that define them are affected by the internal politics of the state’s decision-makers. In India, strictly speaking, the political leadership, military and scientific communities do not share the same approach to credible deterrence. The difference is however, to use the words of Professor Rajesh Basrur, a matter of ‘political-technical perspective’.

In an interview to the Hindu newspaper on 29 November 1999, the then Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh stated that “credibility lies in the possibility of retaliation and not its certainty.” The political leadership in India maintains that deterrence credibility lies in its psychological impact on the adversary and on oneself. This neither suggests that the Indian political leaders are averse to sanction new technological developments, nor that the debate within the political class is monolithic. But from the political perspective, credibility has more to do with the effective communication of the threat of retaliation to the adversary – a sentiment echoed in the nuclear doctrine – than with the quality and quantity of weapons.

The psychological approach does not go too comfortably with the Indian military. As a professional entity and the end-user of weapons systems, the military seeks credibility through technical parameters. The size, structure, level of technology, targeting philosophy, degree of acceptability of damage, time component and the temporal and physical reach of weapons systems are factors that decide how credible the deterrent is. The contentious Cold Start Doctrine, which enjoys little political support, is nevertheless reflective of the Indian Army’s understanding of credibility in the operational sense. In a September 2009 television interview, General VP Malik suggested that India’s inability to acquire requisite weapons and missile technology had eroded deterrence. In another USI Journal article in 2008, Gen Malik, who oversaw the Pokhran II tests as the Army Chief, wrote that a credible Indian deterrent would require allaying doubts about India’s thermonuclear weapons capability, fissile weapons policy and the nuclear triad. A similar conception of ‘credible’ runs into a technical debate amongst the Indian nuclear scientific community. Debates on the partial success of the thermonuclear device and the need for further testing, which became even more pronounced against the backdrop of the Indo-US nuclear deal, have divided Indian nuclear scientists. Many scientists may not be as vocal as Dr. K Santhanam, but they would cast doubts on the credibility of India’s nuclear deterrent based on a technical and technological yardstick.

Credible nuclear deterrence as a policy allows a range of diverse interpretations under the conceptual flexibility it provides. There is thus scope for a difference of interpretations among members of a country’s strategic community. In the Indian nuclear strategic community, experts like K Subrahmanyam – a nuclear pragmatist, according to Professor Kanti Bajpai – would strongly advocate the politico-psychological approach towards nuclear weapons as a credible deterrent. On the other, Bharat Karnad – often termed a nuclear maximalist by the pragmatists – argues for a capability credible enough to deter China as the principle adversary.

The context of nuclear deterrence presents us with yet another parameter to assess credibility. Does the level of credibility differ for deterrence against China and Pakistan? Opinions differ. To gauge it technically or politically would also depend on what kind of confrontation is to be deterred, what is to be communicated to the adversary and with what aspect of the adversary’s nuclear identity does one associate the deterrent (a mutual no first use policy with China or the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal?).

How we choose to define credibility further affects the size of the nuclear arsenal and therefore affects the ‘minimum’. This commentary on the interpretations of ‘credibility’ is hoped to be followed by another which would look at how the minimum is debated within India. The number-game is perhaps the most complicated debate for nuclear weapons states.

Tanvi Kulkarni
Research Officer, IPCS
email: [email protected]

Maj. Gen. Ali indicated that Pakistan planned to beef up its nuclear forces sufficient to enable a “counterforce third strike” — a scheme too ambitious not to prompt scepticism. A counterforce third strike essentially means having enough surviving nuclear weapons/warheads and delivery systems to take out Indian nuclear force assets after absorbing an Indian retaliatory hit in response to Pakistan’s first use of nuclear weapons. His impressive confidence notwithstanding, this strategy is unsustainable.

There are two great nuclear deficit areas: In the light of the failed hydrogen bomb test in 1998, the absence of proven high-yield thermonuclear armaments — a condition only further explosive testing can remedy, and curtailed weapon-grade plutonium production capacity.

The stock answers by senior officials to any sensitive questions regarding national security are usually unilluminating counter-questions: “How do you know we are not taking appropriate actions? And, if we are, would we be announcing them?” Alas, excessive opacity hurts nuclear deterrence when there’s little evidence of meaningful measures on the ground.

VikramS wrote:Sometimes I imagine a nightmarish scenario where the TSPA goes for a Samson choice first strike on India with everything they have (50-100-150). The SDRE are so shocked that the response is muted with the Chipanda scooping in to destroy anything which is left, lest the SDRE imagine getting even with the Chipanda. Then the millions of Jehadis who are now running out of land and water, swarm into India armed with the 20 million AKs they have....

1. Spreading the risk does not necessarily mean that the risk to India decreases.
2. The others could decide in favor of letting themselves be blackmailed of even larger sums of money, rather than forcing Pakistan's denuclearization.
3. The others may not have the intelligence and the capacity to denuclearize Pakistan.
4. During the efforts to denuclearize Pakistan, the situation can get out of hand, and in fact our shivering legs get evaporated.

Anujan wrote:Bharat Karnad: Nuclear mind games

Maj. Gen. Ali indicated that Pakistan planned to beef up its nuclear forces sufficient to enable a “counterforce third strike” — a scheme too ambitious not to prompt scepticism. A counterforce third strike essentially means having enough surviving nuclear weapons/warheads and delivery systems to take out Indian nuclear force assets after absorbing an Indian retaliatory hit in response to Pakistan’s first use of nuclear weapons. His impressive confidence notwithstanding, this strategy is unsustainable.

There are two great nuclear deficit areas: In the light of the failed hydrogen bomb test in 1998, the absence of proven high-yield thermonuclear armaments — a condition only further explosive testing can remedy, and curtailed weapon-grade plutonium production capacity.

NRao wrote:Shiv ji,

What is your email id?

I just may have have some pictures for your collection.

Anujan wrote:Bharat Karnad: Nuclear mind games

Maj. Gen. Ali indicated that Pakistan planned to beef up its nuclear forces sufficient to enable a “counterforce third strike” — a scheme too ambitious not to prompt scepticism. A counterforce third strike essentially means having enough surviving nuclear weapons/warheads and delivery systems to take out Indian nuclear force assets after absorbing an Indian retaliatory hit in response to Pakistan’s first use of nuclear weapons.

shiv wrote:

NRao wrote:Shiv ji,

What is your email id?

I just may have have some pictures for your collection.

Just drop a line to bennedose at hotmail.com

Anujan wrote:Bharat Karnad: Nuclear mind games

Maj. Gen. Ali indicated that Pakistan planned to beef up its nuclear forces sufficient to enable a “counterforce third strike” — a scheme too ambitious not to prompt scepticism. A counterforce third strike essentially means having enough surviving nuclear weapons/warheads and delivery systems to take out Indian nuclear force assets after absorbing an Indian retaliatory hit in response to Pakistan’s first use of nuclear weapons. His impressive confidence notwithstanding, this strategy is unsustainable.

There are two great nuclear deficit areas: In the light of the failed hydrogen bomb test in 1998, the absence of proven high-yield thermonuclear armaments — a condition only further explosive testing can remedy, and curtailed weapon-grade plutonium production capacity.

Indeed, with the decommissioning of the CIRUS reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, courtesy the nuclear deal with the United States, a third of the weapon-grade plutonium production capacity was lopped off.

From the dawn of the nuclear age, it has been the task of nuclear strategists to "think the unthinkable" and speculate about the dynamics of nuclear war. The foundations of this analysis rest on the works of 1940s US strategists Bernard Brodie and Herman Khan, and fellow pioneers, whose work was so brilliantly parodied in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove" and so incisively deconstructed in Fred Kaplan's "Wizards of Armageddon".

The ideas of these individuals, and later revisionists such as Robert Jervis, have effectively structured the thinking of all the states that have followed the US into the nuclear weapons club. The nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan has, as a result, been almost exclusively analyzed through the US and cold war-centric lens. While many of the differences between the US-Soviet and the contemporary India-Pakistan contexts have been noted, and to some extent explored, these have not persuaded strategic analysts of South Asia to question either the fundamentals or the specificities of relying on nuclear ideas forged in the cold war USSoviet context to provide strategic guidance in South Asia. Perhaps part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that so many of India and Pakistan's leading strategic thinkers have been educated or trained in the US.

In the case of Pakistan, however, nuclear strategic analysis faces an anomalous state with which it has yet to come fully to terms. In three important respects Pakistan differs from every other nuclear state that has emerged to date. First, in Pakistan it is the military and not the civilian government that controls nuclear weapons and it is military analysts (mainly within the Strategic Plans Division and Strategic Command) rather than civilian analysts that control the nuclear discourse.

Second, Pakistan is the only nuclear weapons state that hosts and backs sub-national terrorist and insurgent groups as instruments of security policy, greatly complicating the calculus of state-to-state dynamics and of nuclear escalation pathways as was evidenced in the Kargil crises of 1999, the military stand-off of 2001-02 in the wake of the attack on the Indian Parliament, and in the wake of 26/11.

Third, and most importantly, Pakistan is a revisionist and irredentist state, which accepts neither its own borders nor the regional status quo. As a consequence, nuclear weapons in Pakistan have a different meaning and a different purpose from those held by other nuclear weapons states. For Pakistan, nuclear weapons are a tool to challenge the status quo and are subordinated —as are all other instruments of state policy —to that end. Thus, while the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, India and Israel seek to use nuclear weapons to maintain durable stability, Pakistan seeks to use nuclear weapons to maintain instability because to agree to durable stability is to accept the status quo. This does not mean that Pakistan is necessarily an irresponsible nuclear weapons state, but it does mean that it is not searching for nuclear stability but for a managed nuclear instability. The purpose of this instability is to keep India off balance, to resist agreement, to underpin uncertainty, and to generate ambiguity. This is the basis on which Pakistan's nuclear behaviour needs to be understood and it is rather different from that envisaged —before Pakistan even existed —by Brodie, Khan and others.

Viewed in this way, some of the key ideas in nuclear strategy are placed in doubt, none more so than the "stabilityinstability paradox", which has been the focus of so much analytic attention in South Asia. Somewhat simplified, this argues that agreements or deterrent realities that create stability at the nuclear level (because both parties fear nuclear war) may allow or generate instability at lower, conventional levels of war-fighting because both sides know the other will not risk escalation to nuclear war and, thus, there is no barrier to conventional war. Pakistan's adventurism in Kargil in 1999 was cited as an early exemplar of this phenomenon, coming as it did only a year after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons.

This key strand of nuclear analysis has always assumed that all nuclear weapons states seek stability at the nuclear level. However, Pakistan does not: it seeks managed instability. We thus enter the poorly understood and poorly analyzed and theorized realm of the "instability-instability paradox", which poses a whole new order of challenge for a state that faces —as India does with Pakistan —a nuclear weapons state which seeks to maintain instability at the nuclear level.

In this context, Pakistan's recent rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal (stated by some estimates to have doubled in size in the last three years), the expansion of its nuclear weapons production facilities with the KH2 and KH3 reactors, its refusal to sign the widely supported Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, the retention of the nuclear first-use option, and the move to deploy nuclear weapons which have long been considered as destabilizing – such as cruise missiles – point to an increasingly complex challenge for India.

Furthermore, all leading nuclear nations, and indeed all nations concerned about international peace and order, should be paying increased attention to the challenge India faces from Pakistan's expanding and rapidly evolving nuclear weapons and to the emergence of nuclear weapons dynamics in South Asia that may not fit comfortably into the Brodie/Khan model. The reason for this is simple: the states that are next in the queue to join the nuclear club, such as Iran and North Korea, are much closer in character to Pakistan than to the other nuclear weapons states. They too are nuclear "anomalies" in terms of the factors which make Pakistan so distinctive.

For contemporary nuclear analysts, amongst whom analysts of the South Asia context should be in the vanguard, there are now the twin tasks both of understanding and managing nuclear relations between nuclear weapons states which seek stability at the nuclear level (as has been the norm), and understanding how states that seek nuclear stability manage their relations with nuclear weapons states that do not. In the next few years, this question is for no state —other than India —more consequential than for Israel, facing up to a revisionist Iran with strong links to terrorist groups, intent on developing nuclear weapons, and with the very survival of Israel at stake.

The writer is director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit and associate dean, University of Bradford, UK

Christopher Sidor wrote: And I am hoping that they are able to significantly degrade this capability of PA/PN/PAF. With this how does Pakistan deploy and use its so called third-strike option? The only way possible is terrorist groups.

Comments anybody

Narad wrote:Shiv garu, IMHO the most effective way of surviving a nuke bomb attack would be to prevent it beforehand. In current state our nuclear doctrine expects us to be well baked, burned and vapourised before we can pitch in our "disproportionate" response, provided we are in a position to deliver. This is the most absurd expectation from mangoes like me.

I suggest our ND be modified to include, credible intelligence about imminent nuclear attack, as crossing the red line. Credible intelligence of first strike should be treated at par with an event of actual nuclear strike. Therby providing India the option of nuking tattistan under the pretext of self-defence. We need to become more paki than the pakis themselves, if we are to deal with this assymetric stale mate.

Any porki gernail will henceforth be having his balls in his mouth, should he be ordering any integration of nuclear warheads on their delivery systems Or threating India with a nuclear attack, should India retaliate to some pigLet attack or even for the sake of psy ops.

Our ND should not be passive Gandhian literature only, but a very useful psycological tool to keep the abduls guessing of the consequences and fate if they adhere to any nuclear blackmailing.

Christopher Sidor wrote: Oh the cost that we paid for the 123 nuclear deal. The 123 deal directly impacted our Deterrence.

1. Any singular nuclear attack on India, invites India's retaliation against Pakistan, which is complete and comprehensive!
2. Any retaliatory nuclear attack by Pakistan on India, invites India's retaliation against all parties that helped Pakistan build the bomb - namely China, Saudi Arabia!
3. Any large scale nuclear attack on India, invites India's retaliation against both Pakistan and all those parties, who helped Pakistan build the bomb!

Pranav wrote:China is not the only power that is complicit in Pak nukes. P5 powers may think they can get away with it since Indians will not develop reliable, proven thermonukes.

The goal of any doctrine must be that when potential adversaries game the various scenarios, they should reach the conclusion that they will not survive.

Chandragupta wrote:And what if China preempts this move and nukes India right after an Indo-Pak spat goes nuclear?

putnanja wrote:Jaswant for review of no-first-use Nuke policy

...
Noting that the security concerns are multi-dimensional and policies of 20th century will not work, he pressed for a revision of the nuclear policy “with a sense of urgency”, particularly of the no-first-use doctrine formulated by the NDA government.

”...(Nuclear) policy of NDA is greatly in need of revision ...Please hold broader consultations,” he suggested to the UPA government, adding “Time will not wait for us.”

The government should also take into confidence the Opposition while revising India’s nuclear policy, he said.
...