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Op-ed: India’s force in being

M V Ramana

Unfortunately India’s nuclear posture, like those of the US or other nuclear nations, is susceptible to hawkish pressures

When it comes to South Asia, the dominant policy question that the US has faced in the post-Cold War era has been how to deal with the nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan. For long the official US aim was to “cap, then over time, reduce, and finally eliminate the possession of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery” in South Asia. But since the mid 1990s, a growing number of influential people have been urging simply accepting the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan and finding ways of shaping their nuclear postures and arsenal sizes.

Even if the US accepts the nuclear status of the two countries, its concerns about India and Pakistan are quite different. In the case of Pakistan, the principal concerns have been that it does not become a source of nuclear materials or technology to other countries, in particular various Middle Eastern countries that the US deems dangerous, and that it does not initiate nuclear war in South Asia. With India the concern has been that it does not overstep its boundaries and become some kind of a regional power that could in principle oppose US interests. The US would also like to ensure that the Indian arsenal does not become large enough to alarm Chinese policy makers thus causing a build up of China’s nuclear forces in reaction. That might upset the status quo in East Asia, which is largely favourable to the US, and is therefore not desirable.

In parallel with direct and indirect expressions of these desires about India’s nuclear plans, there has also been an effort at inventing analytical categories describing current Indian nuclear policy and using them to predict future trajectories. This was the case even prior to the 1998 nuclear tests. Examples of the terms used then to describe the India-Pakistan situation were non-weaponised and recessed deterrence. The hope seems to have been that by elaborating on the virtues of that state of affairs, the two countries may be persuaded to stay at that level. Unfortunately for its proponents, India’s nuclear tests dashed that hope — along with the idea that the state of affairs prior to the 1998 tests was stable.

It is this strain of analytical effort that Ashley Tellis has involved himself in through his massive tome India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal. Tellis is a Senior Policy Analyst from the Rand Corporation, the US Air Force’s think tank and currently Senior Advisor to the US Ambassador to India. His views therefore carry considerable weight in shaping US policy towards South Asia. Thus it is important to understand what Tellis argues.

Tellis expects that India will end up with a “force in being” — a nuclear arsenal that is somewhere in between the pre-1998 form and one qualitatively modelled after that of the nuclear weapon states, that is readily useable. Thus, India would develop and produce nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, but with key subcomponents under civilian custody. Further, “these assets as a whole are not deployed in any way that enables the prompt conduct of nuclear operations... This distributed posture can be maintained indefinitely, with the various parts never reconstituted to form a true war-fighting force except in the aftermath of a nuclear attack against India.”

Tellis comes to this conclusion as well as other similar conclusions about the size of the arsenal based on an exhaustive reading of the Indian media, interviews with high-level officials and much surmising. The effort is indeed impressive and helps Tellis make his recommendation: “the United States should concentrate on shaping the character of the evolving Indian (and Pakistani) nuclear arsenals”. The character that Tellis recommends is that the Indian arsenal be small but safe, survivable and “reasonably effective”, stealthy and surreptitious, and not rapidly useable.

Despite the remarkable scholarship underlying the effort, there is plenty of reason to fear that Tellis may be wrong. When it comes to nuclear weapons, rhetoric by political leaders in India, or elsewhere for that matter, should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Unfortunately Tellis doesn’t take that precaution and prefers to accept, deliberately or accidentally, the statements of moderates who seek to calm international concerns about India’s nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, Tellis systematically dismisses the statements of hawks or military personnel as unlikely to be true or incompatible with the designs of India’s “security managers”. Unfortunately, India’s nuclear posture, like those of the US or other nuclear nations, is susceptible to hawkish pressures, which would result in the “force in being” becoming a stepping-stone to a readily useable arsenal.

Tellis is also burdened with a theoretical millstone, the realist brand of strategic analysis. This forces him to look for strategic rationality where there is none. This is wishful thinking and ends up substituting “ought” for “is” or “will be”. One example: Tellis argues that India’s force-in-being will not require any tactical early warning since there are no plans for prompt launches. Barely a few months after Tellis’s book was published in 2001, India acquired the Green Pine radar from Israel to detect incoming ballistic missiles. Realist analysis also precludes envisioning the possibility that different civilian leaderships may have different ideas — precisely what happened with the 1998 nuclear tests, one of the primary reasons for which was the BJP coming to power.

The message articulated by Tellis and others like him may be comforting to those US policymakers who have come to terms with India’s nuclear status and only seek to ensure that India does not rock the US boat too much. But it is not a message that those who are truly concerned about South Asia should be comforted by. Apart from the flaws in the analysis, what is more dangerous is the faith in nuclear deterrence that underlies the thinking of nuclear elites. That is a profoundly dangerous belief, the failure of which will have catastrophic consequences.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

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