Indian Nuclear Policy

by Harsh V Pant

  India’s first response was of a pre-emptive military strike against Pakistan’s uranium enrichment facility at Kahuta. In 1981, the Israeli Air Force had successfully destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. According to a senior scientist who was then studying Pakistani nuclear programme for Indian intelligence, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did seriously consider this option in late 1982.15 The acquisition of Jaguars, a deep penetration strike aircraft, from Britain in the late 1970s provided the IAF the requisite firepower to target Pakistani nuclear facilities. The problem, however, was Pakistani reaction. Islamabad could declare a full-blown war upon India and the international community would have blamed New Delhi for its initiation. Islamabad could also have targeted India’s nuclear facilities in a tit-for-tat move, especially the BARC at Trombay. Given India’s larger nuclear infrastructure, the radioactive spillage could have been catastrophic. These concerns precluded the pre-emptive strike to emerge as a policy choice. At least in the minds of Indian decision-makers, a rudimentary nuclear deterrence was now a factor in India–Pakistan relationship.

  Instead, India veered towards a nuclear test (Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] 1981: 1). In her second innings as the prime minister, Indira Gandhi realized that restraint exercised after the 1974 PNE was indeed a mistake.16 Soon after assuming power, she tried to undo the anti-nuclear policies of Morarji Desai. She rescinded the promise made by her predecessor that India will not conduct any further nuclear tests. If Desai had taken India’s nuclear scientists to task, Indira restored the autonomy and power of BARC. In 1981, Raja Ramanna was sent to BARC as director, with a purported intention to revive India’s nuclear explosion programme. She had also asked the nuclear scientists to remain prepared for a second nuclear test, which included maintaining the nuclear shafts at the Pokhran testing range in Rajasthan. Though the exact timing is contested, sometime in 1983, the Indian prime minister gave a serious thought to a second nuclear test. The then defence minister, R. Venkataraman, later acknowledged that new shafts were dug at Pokhran and all preparations were completed (Venkataraman 1998). However, Gandhi demurred at the last moment. It is still unclear why she backtracked, but the fear of economic sanctions seems to have played a significant role in her calculus. Also, a nuclear test would have given Pakistan an opportunity to undertake its own nuclear explosion, with India receiving only international opprobrium for forcing Pakistan’s hands.

  India, therefore, prepared to weaponize its nuclear option, which entailed preparations for eventual delivery of nuclear bombs. Though India had exploded a nuclear device in 1974, as has been described earlier, it was not usable as a weapon. That requires miniaturization and further design improvements so as to be able to be delivered through aircraft or missiles. In 1974 and afterwards, no delivery systems were available, nor was New Delhi developing any. The pursuit of delivery vehicles began in earnest in Indira’s second term. In 1983, India launched the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP), under which ballistic missiles such as Prithvi and Agni were to be developed (Shukla 2013). These, in future, would become the preferred system for nuclear weapons delivery. However, as the IGMDP’s fruition was bound to take substantial time, India’s DRDO started experimenting with available aircraft in the inventory of the air force as delivery vehicles. The DRDO first tested its nuclear weapon designs on the Jaguar aircraft in 1984 but found their ground clearance too shallow to carry a nuclear payload in its underbelly (Kampani 2014b). India’s quest for its first nuclear delivery vehicle stopped with the French Mirage aircraft, which were ordered in early 1980s but were yet to be commissioned. Notwithstanding these initial problems, the fact was that by the time Gandhi’s prime ministership ended with her assassination in October 1984, India was veering towards weaponization of its nuclear capability. This process would be advanced by her son and political heir, Rajiv Gandhi.

  * * *

  The non-weaponization of the 1974 nuclear explosion proved that India was a reluctant nuclear power. India is the only country in the history of nuclear proliferation that did not immediately produce nuclear weapons after conducting a nuclear test. It, instead, insisted that the PNE was part of its quest to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy. India’s intentions did not bring her any great advantages. In the aftermath of the PNE, the country became the non-proliferation regime’s principal target. Advanced nuclear states imposed technology restrictions, thereby crippling its nuclear energy programme. Nuclear suppliers like the US conditioned further supplies of fissile material on India’s acceptance of more stringent safeguards regime. Even when India was the target of the emerging consensus on non-proliferation among the advanced nuclear states and technology cartels such as the NSG, it did comply with the precepts of non-proliferation while continuing its moral opposition to such an inequitable bargain. It eschewed transfer of nuclear explosive technology and observed strict export controls. Yet, New Delhi maintained a stoic resistance against giving up its nuclear option by not accepting full-scope safeguards. The problem for India was that non-proliferation was both a liability and also an asset: liability when it came to constraints on its nuclear option and an asset when it helped curb proliferation in its neighbourhood. In fact, as this chapter has argued, India did repose its faith in the non-proliferation regime to curb Pakistan’s nuclear programme between 1974 and 1979. In the end, the weakness of the same allowed Pakistan to develop a nuclear weapons programme. The lesson New Delhi learnt was that the decision not to produce nuclear weapons after 1974 was indeed a mistake. This was compounded by the security environment in which India found itself in the early 1980s. Great power conflict finally arrived at its doorsteps with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This created enormous problems for India’s security as the US sought Pakistan’s help in fighting Soviet communism, in the process doling out billions of dollars for Pakistan’s military build-up. It also turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear programme: geostrategic interests trumped America’s non-proliferation policy. In such a situation, India resuscitated its dormant nuclear explosive programme, this time with the intention to produce nuclear weapons. It also initiated a long-term plan to develop a credible nuclear deterrent by initiating a ballistic missile programme. In the short term, it relied on improvising upon its fighter aircraft.

  This decade of uncertainty in India’s nuclear policy ended with only one certainty: of South Asia’s nuclearization. Both India and Pakistan now veered towards an existential nuclear deterrence. In 1998, both these countries would openly declare themselves as nuclear weapon states. The process behind their overt nuclearization is covered in the next chapter.

  *Some sections of this chapter are based on Joshi (2018).

  1 NMML (1974b).

  2 Interview with a senior retired Indian diplomat, New Delhi, September 2017.

  3 For Desai’s nuclear policy, see Gupta (1978) and Kapur (1978).

  4 For a discussion on Desai’s security policy, see Thomas (1980).

  5 US Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, ‘Indira Gandhi’s Letter to Bhutto’, 29 May 1974, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974NEWDE07109_b.html.

  6 NAI (1976).

  7 NAI (1976).

  8 NAI (1977a).

  9 For when Indian intelligence came to know about Kahuta enrichment plant, see Kasturi (1995). One of the reasons for this intelligence blackout was that the new Morarji Desai government had severely curtailed the finances and functioning of India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). See Raina (1981).

  10 NAI (1977b).

  11 NAI (1977c).

  12 For an Indian assessment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, see Dixit (2002).

  13 NAI (1982).

  14 NAI (1981). All quotes in the para are from this source.

  15 Interview with Dr K. Santhanam, New Delhi, 16 December 2015.

  16 Interview with a senior Indian diplomat, New Delhi, September 2017.

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/>   Pathway to a Nuclear Weapon State

  By October 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, India had started moving gingerly towards a nuclear weapon capability. India’s journey to becoming a full-fledged nuclear weapons power took another decade-and-a-half, however. Three factors shaped India’s nuclear awakening. First, the threat of Pakistani nuclear weapons and Chinese collusion showed no signs of abating. In fact, under the shadow of nuclear weapons, Pakistan became overtly hostile, and started pursuing a proxy war in Kashmir and abetting terrorism across India’s body politic. To counter the burgeoning nuclear threat in its neighbourhood, India had no choice but to have a nuclear deterrent of its own. Second, with the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, India’s security environment undertook a dramatic turn. India lost its most trusted security partner during the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and the international system was now fully dominated by a single superpower, the US, which in the past had been unsympathetic, if not overtly hostile, to India’s security concerns. In this unipolar world order, the US also became the prime patron of non-proliferation and exerted enormous pressure upon India to submit to the non-proliferation regime. Third, the shifts in domestic politics were equally important, especially the rise of BJP. Even when successive Indian prime ministers protected India’s nuclear option, advanced R&D on nuclear weapons technology, and laid the foundations of a deliverable nuclear arsenal, it was only BJP which favoured an open declaration of India’s nuclear capability. Where the Indian National Congress suffered from both a moral dilemma and a policy inertia set by its past leadership, BJP openly celebrated the power and prestige associated with nuclear weapons.

  This chapter outlines India’s nuclear policy between 1984 and 1998. It is divided into three sections. The first section discusses India’s nuclear policy under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership saw India making tangible progress in weaponizing its nuclear deterrent, a process which began under his predecessor, Indira Gandhi. The second section deliberates the impact of the end of the Cold War and of the strengthening of the non-proliferation regime on India’s policy choices. The last section delves into the weapons tests of May 1998 and its immediate consequences.

  Rajiv Orders Full Weaponization

  By the time Rajiv Gandhi became the prime minister in late 1984, Pakistan’s nuclear programme had made steady progress. Indira Gandhi had begun the process of materially equipping India with a nuclear arsenal, but material capability is only one side of nuclear deterrence. Nuclear deterrence also requires the software of operationalization. The first challenge Rajiv faced as the new prime minister was to decide on the shape and size of India’s nuclear deterrent. In the summer of 1985, the Minister of State for Defence Arun Singh formed an informal committee to deliberate on India’s nuclear deterrent force.1 This committee was headed by Lieutenant General K. Sunderji, the then vice chief of the army staff. The committee recommended a nuclear force of 60–130 warheads, primarily delivered through the air vector.2 The cost of the arsenal, in the committee’s calculations, could have been anywhere between Rs 7,000 and 8,000 crores (70 and 80 billions). The committee argued that if given the go-ahead, this arsenal could be managed within three years by 1988–9. The report of this committee was the first-ever official articulation of India’s nuclear thinking, which subsequently came to be known as ‘minimum deterrence’. The report, however, did not result in any major follow-up by the Rajiv Gandhi government. Instead, the government explored diplomatic avenues to manage the increasing nuclear overtones in India–Pakistan equation. In December 1985, India and Pakistan signed their first major confidence-building measure (CBM) by agreeing not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities. One reason for this was the fact that Pakistan was, by now, in possession of at least five to six nuclear weapon devices and had hence acquired an ‘elementary nuclear capability’ (Dixit 1995: 185).

  That an existential nuclear deterrence was in effect in the subcontinent became fully evident in 1986–7 when India and Pakistan entered one of the most intense military crises South Asia had seen since the 1971 war. In the summer of 1986, the Indian Army conducted one of its biggest military exercise—Exercise Brasstacks—along the western border with Pakistan. Brasstacks was an attempt to signal India’s increasing conventional strength to Islamabad. It, some argue, was also a ruse to initiate a major military confrontation with Pakistan so as to eliminate its nuclear capability. Whatever be the real motivations, India’s military moves evoked major counter-mobilization from Islamabad. By December, the two militaries were staring at each other across the international border. Yet, the exercise was important because, for the first time, Islamabad not only openly accepted its nuclear capability but also issued a nuclear threat to India. As A.Q. Khan, father of the Pakistani nuclear programme, told an Indian journalist in January 1987, ‘we shall use the bomb if our existence is threatened’ (Nayar 1987). The crisis was defused by high-level diplomacy between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President Zia. The lessons of the crisis were evident. First, if Bhutto had initiated the Pakistani nuclear programme in 1972 to blunt India’s conventional military capability, Brasstacks was its first manifestation. This would become the hallmark of Pakistani nuclear strategy henceforth. Second, conventional military activity between India and Pakistan now involved the risk of nuclear escalation. The problem for India, however, was that even when Pakistan was issuing nuclear threats, India’s nuclear weapons programme had yet not acquired enough teeth as a deliverable nuclear arsenal was missing. As K. Subrahmanyam has argued in his memoirs, ‘In the period 1987-1990, India was totally vulnerable to the Pakistani nuclear threat’ (Subrahmanyam 1998a: 44).

  Therefore, 1988 was one of the most crucial years in Indian nuclear decision-making. Two major decisions changed the pace of India’s nuclear weapons programme. First, Prime Minister Gandhi made the last diplomatic argument for India’s renunciation of nuclear weapons. In the third UN Special Session on Disarmament, Gandhi presented to the world leaders a comprehensive plan for nuclear disarmament (Gandhi 1988). Called the 20-year disarmament programme, it was by far the most important diplomatic effort made by India since the NPT to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons. The action plan envisaged complete and verifiable nuclear disarmament in a time-bound framework. Rather than the abstract guarantee towards nuclear disarmament enshrined in NPT, the action plan, for the first time in the history of nuclear disarmament diplomacy, advocated a time-specific disarmament plan. India’s disarmament diplomacy was, however, running against the tide of change in international politics. Though supported by the Soviet Union, it only received a lukewarm response from other nuclear powers, especially the US, which was much more interested in what India could do for its nuclear non-proliferation agenda than what Washington would do for India’s disarmament goals (Subrahmanyam 1998a: 44). Even when India’s pleas fell on deaf ears, it was in some sense a moral vindication for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He had made the last effort for the principle of disarmament which India had stood for since its independence; its security now required resorting to the ultima ratio of power in international politics, of nuclear weapons.

  Second, suffering humiliation in the UN, Prime Minister Gandhi ordered the weaponization of India’s nuclear capability. Since the beginning of his term as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi had authorized the DRDO ‘to start development of rugged, miniaturized, safer and more reliable components and subsystems for what might eventually be called a weapon system’ (Kampani 2014b: 91). The idea was to maintain a nuclear capability at a ‘minimum state of readiness’. After the humiliation at the UN, Rajiv allowed full development of an air-delivered nuclear arsenal. Fighter aircraft became the principal vector of India’s nuclear delivery, principally because of two reasons. First, India’s missile programme was far from ready to carry nuclear warheads. India’s first ballistic missile, Prithvi, was test-fired for the first time only in February 1988, followed by the longer-r
ange Agni missile in May 1989. However, both these systems were still in the R&D stage. Second, even though Indian scientists had started miniaturization of nuclear warheads, they had not reached a stage where the weapons were compact enough to be carried on missiles. India had also started a nuclear submarine programme in the late 1970s, but it was geared towards producing nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSN) for the Indian Navy rather than nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBN). The only platform available to the scientists was therefore the aircraft. By the late 1980s, India acquired Mirage fighter aircraft from France and the DRDO started modifying these aircraft to carry a nuclear payload. The IAF also started training its pilots in the intricate manoeuvres called ‘flip-toss’ or ‘bomb-toss’ required for releasing the bombs from an aircraft’s underbelly. It was indeed a primitive style of nuclear delivery; however, at least in the short term, this was the only option available.