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Agni, India’s intermediate-range ballistic missile |
With tensions rising over the disputed region of Kashmir, India and Pakistan have massed more than a million troops along their borders. In the event of war between the nuclear armed neighbors, there are grave concerns that the losing side in a ground war might resort to nuclear weapons to avoid imminent defeat.
Pakistan is believed to have 150 warheads and India around 250. According to a Pentagon report, if both countries unleash their full nuclear arsenals at each other, as many as 12 million people would die while another seven million would be injured. The Pentagon concluded that "the crisis would be so great that every medical facility in southwest Asia would be overwhelmed." 1
The Indian case of nuclear proliferation derives its importance from the ongoing political and academic discourse concerning Indian nuclear decision-making and the factors that played a role in such a process. Recently, this "puzzle" has been made more intriguing due to the nuclear tests conducted by India in May 1998 and the ongoing Indo-Pakistani crisis over Kashmir.
The main problem in proliferation studies lies in the lack of analytical appreciation of the complexity of nuclear politics, the reasons behind key strategic decisions and the reasons why states choose to go nuclear. More importantly, "the consensus view, focusing on national security considerations as the cause of proliferation, is dangerously inadequate because nuclear weapons programs also serve other, more parochial and less obvious objectives." 2
This article illustrates the range of reasons why India chose to go nuclear. It will argue that threats from China, Pakistan, and superpower meddling in South Asian affairs, definitely encouraged India to proceed in its nuclear ambitions. However, the role that the worldviews of key pro-bomb advocates inside the Indian scientific and political leadership played had an even greater role in shaping Indian nuclear politics. Had those leaders not been in power at critical moments in India's history, the country's nuclear program might never have been launched.
The tendency among the political and scientific leadership to equate nuclear weapons with scientific imminence, prestige and post-colonial modernity greatly contributed to the development of nuclear weapons in that country. Hence, a mixture of external threats and domestic dynamics hurled India onto the nuclear plateau.
External Threats
The Chinese threat to India is considered the primary motivation for the Indian nuclear program. More importantly, the framework of Sino-Indian relations in the formative period of India's nuclear program was defined by China's occupation of the Tibet, on India's northern border, in 1950. This greatly alarmed the Indian leadership: "in classic geostrategic terms: the large neighbor had extended its reach. Yet newly independent and poor India had few means with which to deal with the changed circumstances." 3
Beneath the surface lay the lingering dispute over three regions totaling 50,000 square miles of territory that Chinese maps recorded as Chinese and Indian maps recorded as Indian. 4 The territorial dispute became more apparent in January 1959 when Chou En-lai wrote to Nehru to officially claim the disputed three regions for China. This was coupled with the Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule, which resulted in the flight of the Dalai Lama to India. Indo-Chinese tensions escalated and negotiations were fruitless.
A turning point in Indian strategic thinking came in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian border war of October 1962. After invading India along the Himalayan border, the Chinese People's Liberation Army routed the ill-equipped and ill-prepared Indian army and came to occupy some 4,000 square miles of territory. The Chinese then declared a unilateral cease-fire after achieving their territorial objectives, thereby humiliating Nehru and the Indian political leadership. 5 The border war "forced Nehru to reappraise his strategy and his most cherished ideals." 6 Moreover, it resulted in a situation where "the country's military weakness was exposed, and the Himalayas no longer were viewed as an impregnable barrier to invasion." 7
The threat to India's security became more pronounced with the first Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nor on October 16, 1964. This lead to a firestorm of controversy in India as segments of India's political and scientific establishments pushed for the acquisition of nuclear weapons, since only "India's nuclear capabilities could elevate [it] to a position where it could not be subject to Chinese nuclear coercion." 8
The Kashmir dispute is generally considered the primary motivation behind the Indo-Pakistani nuclear competition and hence figures high in India's strategic calculations. 9 Nevertheless, neither India nor Pakistan initially decided to have nuclear weapons because of the territorial conflict in Kashmir. However, this does not mean that the overall Pakistani threat to India did not play an important role in India's strategic calculations - a role that seemed to increase over time.
Pakistan established its Atomic Energy Commission in 1956. In August 1960, the United States gave Pakistan $350,000 to prepare for a first research reactor. In 1962, Pakistan signed an agreement on nuclear cooperation with France, which in the 1970s would seek to supply Pakistan with a plutonium production reactor and separation plant. This was coupled with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's appreciation of modern science and technology, and particularly nuclear capability. He began to speak of the need for Pakistani nuclear weapons in 1965 and launched a program to acquire this capability in 1972. 10
The Pakistani factor in India's nuclear calculations was made clear in the aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war in which India was victorious. Many Indians considered the Tashkent Declaration of January 10, 1966 a humiliating for it returned to Pakistan the territorial gains made by India during the war. The Soviet-mediated talks in Tashkent resulted in an agreement that "called for both sides to withdraw their forces to positions held prior to August 5, 1965 and to repatriate prisoners of war. Both sides pledged not to have recourse to force and to settle their disputes through peaceful means." 11
However, the Tashkent Declaration failed to resolve the fundamental problem of Kashmir, stating merely "that Jammu and Kashmir was discussed, and each of the two sides set forth its respective position." 12 George Perkovich writes: "Paradoxically, the victory over Pakistan triggered renewed demands in India for nuclear weapons. The day before the cease-fire took effect, nearly one hundred members of Parliament from multiple parties, including Congress, issued a letter urging the prime minister to decide immediately to develop nuclear weapons." 13
Moreover, the Chinese role in the 1965 war was also an important factor in the Indo-Pakistani strategic equation. In fact, many suggest that the Chinese ultimatum to India in 1965 and Pakistani-Chinese collaboration alarmed the Indians more than the Pakistani threat in its own right. 14
The role of the great powers, especially that of the United States, concerning the enforcement of the non-proliferation treaty was seen by many as being largely biased since India's major security concerns were ignored. 15 Another watershed event in Indian-American relations was in 1971 when the United States attempted to pressure India through gunboat diplomacy. The deployment of the USS Enterprise and nine supporting warships to the Bay of Bengal during the war between India and Pakistan is cited by some Indian polemicists as an example of why India must have a nuclear arsenal of its own. 16
Nehru and Bhabha: Politician Meets Scientist
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| Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) |
The contribution of both Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Homi Bhabha, India's famous nuclear scientist, is extremely important in understanding India's nuclear decision-making. Both individuals laid the political and scientific base for the nuclear project to materialize. In terms of nuclear decision-making, the worldviews of the Prime Ministers, especially that of Nehru, and the Heads of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), especially that of Homi Bhabha - the founder of India's nuclear program - are undoubtedly the most important. This is largely due to the fact that India's "nuclear policy and atomic energy program is controlled by… a single man - the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who is accountable only to the Prime Minister." 17
Ashok Kapur wrote about India's intragovernmental nuclear debate: "It centered on the official relationship and personal friendship between Indian Prime Minister Nehru and the distinguished scientist, and subsequently first chief of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Homi Bhabha. Up to 1964 these two personalities symbolized the two facets of India's disarmament and security policies." 18
Nehru never took the view that the superpowers could perform better just because of their superior strategic capabilities. However, at the same time, he "did not regard influence-building activity as simply a product of 'talk' - of expressing moral concerns - unless this was accompanied by material strength." 19 In his far-ranging speech to the Indian Parliament on February 15, 1955, Nehru expressed the need for a "materially" strong India. 20
Within Nehru's worldview, the atom occupied a preeminent position as a sign of a new era of human civilization. Furthermore, India's weakness and its susceptibility to colonialism was, according to him, a product of its lack of technological sophistication: "The industrial age came in. India with all her many virtues did not develop that source of power. It became a backward country because of that… But an enormous new power came in. Now we are facing the atomic age; we are on the verge of it. And this is something infinitely more powerful than either steam or electricity." 21
In this regard, one could see how, in Nehru's worldview, nuclear power became synonymous with prestige, technological advancement and freedom from colonialism - part of the post-colonial project intended to bring India back to the forefront. Nehru wrote to the Cabinet as early as 1946: "If India has not got qualified scientists and up-to-date scientific institutions in large numbers, it must remain a weak country incapable of playing a primary part in a war." 22
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| Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1906-1966) |
Bhabha, like Nehru, whom he first met in 1937, "accepted the looming view that mastery over the energy potential in the atomic nucleus represented the apogee of science. The colonial British regime had purposely retarded Indian industrial development, but Nehru and Bhabha envisioned that Indian science would overcome this legacy and achieve the highest symbols of modernity." 23
Bhabha was known to have favored the nuclear option and firmly believed in nuclear weapons and their essential role in achieving national security. Bhabha maintained that "to achieve absolute deterrence it was essential to have nuclear weapons; if one had them, the other side's overkill capacity did not matter. Second, with conventional weapons, it was only possible to acquire a position of relative deterrence." 24
Mitchell Reiss argued that the responsibility "for India's nuclear development can be traced to one individual, Homi Bhabha." 25 From the initial acquisition of research reactors, to the initial deployment of a Canadian-built reactor, to the development of a plutonium processing plant in Trombay, Bhabha's role was manifested. 26
Furthermore, his well-timed interventions helped to produce the atomic bomb. He is known to have persuaded Prime Minister Shastri to approve work on a nuclear weapons option sometime during 1965. Immediately after learning from the United States of the imminence of the Chinese nuclear test in 1964, Bhabha called for a press conference to announce "India's ability to produce a nuclear bomb in eighteen months" adding that China's nuclear capability demanded a commensurate Indian response. 27
Days later, he challenged the economic argument against the nuclear bombs. Citing figures produced at the Third International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Bhabha claimed that a 10 kiloton bomb would cost $368,000 and a two megaton bomb would cost $680,000, adding that "atomic explosives were some twenty times cheaper than conventional explosives." 28
Nevertheless, the critical period after the death of Nehru in 1964 was marred by a great deal of ambiguity as to what the Indian nuclear and political establishment was doing. Bhabha said that "we are still 18 months away from exploding either a bomb or a device for peaceful purposes and we are doing nothing to reduce that period." Perkovich interprets comments made by Bhabha as an affirmation that Bhabha had been authorized to work on a nuclear explosion and that the delay in producing it was "not due to policy but unmet technological requirements." 29 Kapur also seems to reaffirm this view by suggesting that Bhabha seemed to have won over anti-bomb advocates, L.K. Jha, Shastri's principle secretary, and Shastri himself. 30
In November 1965, Bhabha put forward a note on a need for a subterranean nuclear explosion project (SNEP). In December, Shastri approved the proposal, allowing research to be undertaken up to a point "where, once the go-ahead signal was given, it would take three months to have the explosion." 31 Shastri's decision could be seen as a compromise with the pro-bomb members of the Congress party and the IAEC leadership. 32
Conclusions
India's case of nuclear proliferation illustrates the linkage between external threats and domestic dynamics. In other words, for any country to establish nuclear weapons, it must be facing external threats to its national security, and also have prominent members of its political and scientific leadership who equate nuclear weapons with better security and are able to take critical and timely decisions. Although the utility of nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of much-needed security has been questioned, 33 many countries still see it as a symbol of prestige, modernity, influence and ability to extend power in international affairs.
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