Correspondence Rodney W. Jones Šumit Ganguly Debating New Delhi’s Nuclear Decision

To the Editors:

Šumit Ganguly’s article “’s Pathway to Pokhran II” is a relatively dispassionate effort to rationalize India’s May 1998 nuclear tests and nuclear breakout (i.e., avowal of nuclear weapons).1 His description of the main ingredients of India’s nuclear deci- sionmaking before 1990 covers much of the relevant terrain. His assessment of the relative weight of drivers (preferences of top policymakers, impulses in the nuclear and missile technology programs, and external pressures or threats) is open to serious questions, however, as is his interpretation of the reasons behind the fateful decisions of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Ganguly’s explanation of India’s nuclear breakout essentially rests on a retrospective selection of Indian elite statements that purport to reºect “perceptions” of Indian security interests. An Indo-centric perceptual analysis may be one reasonable starting point for explaining Indian decisions, but it is not necessarily the end point of a serious empirical analysis. Moreover, it is a shaky basis for Ganguly’s U.S. policy recommen- dations. His analysis is not comparably grounded in the perceptions and interests of India’s neighbors, and it begs other issues crucial to designing successful policy responses. Ganguly depicts India’s pathway to overt nuclear weapons as a zigzag response to external threats and to the failure of the big powers to provide India nuclear security, notwithstanding India’s earlier policy renunciation of nuclear weapons (pp. 150–151). He implies that India had to zig and zag because its resources were constrained and developing nuclear and delivery capabilities took a long time (Ganguly describes the process as “haphazard, discontinuous, and ridden with setbacks” [p. 171]), while problems in India’s external security environment rose and fell episodically (see “ªve phases,” pp. 149–171). Ganguly admits that domestic politics occasionally accelerated nuclear weapon–related decisions, but argues that these inºuences were not fundamen- tal. He speciªcally denounces the observation that India’s craving for international

Rodney W. Jones is President of Policy Architects International, a foreign and development policy consulting ªrm in Reston, Virginia. As an ofªcial in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1989 to 1994, Dr. Jones participated in the U.S.-Soviet (and successor state) nuclear arms negotiations. He has published extensively on and security issues in Asia and the Middle East.

Šumit Ganguly is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

1. Šumit Ganguly, “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of New Delhi’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring 1999), pp. 148–177. Subsequent references to this article appear parenthetically in the text.

International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 181–189 © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

181

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 International Security 24:4 182

“prestige and status” was a key driver of India’s nuclear decisions (pp. 171–172). Rather, Ganguly argues, nuclear threats from and were pivotal not only in stimulating and shaping the earlier nuclear program, but in driving the ªnal 1998 nuclear breakout decisions (pp. 172–173). The security theme is valid as a subtext in the larger narrative and is part of the explanation of the post-1964 “nuclear option,” but is central only if one looks at security issues exclusively through the eyes of a narrow Indian strategic interest group. 2 The evidence otherwise does not support Ganguly’s assertion that security threats were primary factors in India’s nuclear breakout for the reasons discussed below.

china and indian security perceptions China’s short-lived invasion of India in 1962 and China’s detonation of its ªrst nuclear weapon in October 1964 gave India a temporary reason to fear China militarily and to view Chinese nuclear weapons as a potential threat. But Chinese dangers receded signiªcantly after 1965 because China’s main external problems were in the north and in the Paciªc rim. Meanwhile, India erased its earlier vulnerability to Chinese incursion by building up its conventional defenses in the Himalayas, as Ganguly acknowledges. Moreover, India’s 1974 nuclear test showed the world that India thereafter had a nuclear hedge against a future Chinese nuclear threat, were it to materialize. Over the next three decades, China made no active nuclear threats against India, nor did it deploy nuclear weapons speciªcally to target India.3 It had no designs on core Indian territory or resources. Indeed, China had no contentious objectives in India beyond resolving the Himalayan border dispute, a legacy of British imperialism. Since the late 1980s, China has cooperated with India in relaxing tension, resuming border negotiations, and opening bilateral trade. Chinese security assistance to Pakistan was modest and represented no challenge to India’s conventional military superiority over Pakistan. China’s rationale for its nuclear deterrent draws from its historical conºicts with , Japan, and the , including the Korean . China has applied some arguably aggressive military pressure on Vietnam and other Southeast Asian states over disputed resources in the South China Sea, and China has rattled the saber over Taiwan. China’s military interests in South Asia, however, have been mainly prophylactic, to avoid potential spillover of instability into Tibet or Xinjiang. Chinese military activities since the mid-1960s have not supported perceptions of an active or growing nuclear

2. This refers to a circle of nuclear weapons proponents who emerged in the Indian atomic energy and defense bureaucracies with some sympathizers in the military services and political parties, notably the Samyukta Socialist Party and the Jan Sangh, a forerunner of today’s BJP. This group had considerable inºuence in pushing technology programs forward and, following the 1974 nuclear test, in articulating the policy of ambiguity based on a nuclear option. The group was unsuccessful, however, until the accession to power of the BJP in 1998, in its long-standing efforts to convince national political leaders to shift from the nuclear option as a contingency policy to an ofªcial nuclear weapons posture. 3. During his visit to Beijing in December 1988, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reportedly stated categorically that “Indian intelligence believes there are no [Chinese] nuclear missiles targeted on Indian territory.” See “Rajiv Gandhi in China: Breaching the Wall,” India Today, January 15, 1989, p. 20.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 Correspondence 183

threat to India. If perceptions of such a threat were harbored anywhere in India, it would have been only within the strategic interest group, not within the national political leadership or public at large.

pakistan’s nuclear and missile capabilities The nuclear and missile threat from Pakistan is now real, but it developed in reaction to Indian precedents and military pressure. Pakistan’s leadership secretly started to develop a nuclear weapons capability in 1972, only after the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, in which India defeated and dismembered Pakistan. There would have been far better chances of Pakistan joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or checking its weapons program at an early stage if India had chosen to cooperate fully with the international community by joining the same nonproliferation regime. Although India’s signing the NPT would have meant accepting legal constraints on its own nuclear program, these could have been lifted in the event of a grave threat to its supreme interests (e.g., from China). India’s defense minister, Sardar Singh, actually made this point during India’s late 1967 (and ªnal) cabinet decision not to join the NPT. Singh pointed to the treaty’s withdrawal clause as a safeguard of India’s interests. The NPT was rejected not because it foreclosed India’s defense options, but because its discrimi- natory provisions—different obligations on nuclear and nonnuclear states—were too controversial politically. Although strongly against nuclear weapons, Morarji Desai, the chief rival then to Indira Gandhi as prime minister, passionately indicted the NPT as discriminatory, and his speech carried the day.4

the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies A question outside Ganguly’s perceptual framework is whether India’s nuclear and missile activities have had a self-fulªlling logic and stimulated external reactions that were painted as threats to India and used to justify its nuclear weapons program. Manipulation of threat perceptions for defense purposes is a familiar enough phenome- non historically. Indeed it tracks well enough with Ganguly’s zigzag story which, ªltered through this prism, shows that India’s strategic interest group not only wanted to build up India’s unity, power, and image—goals that India’s national leadership elite generally subscribed to—but believed that developing Indian nuclear weapons and delivery systems was an expedient political means to these ends. Singularizing ad- versaries like China and provoking external crises with Pakistan would likely be by-products of this approach—along with other heightened security risks. Evidently, India’s nuclear weapons proponents believed that infusing India with strategic purpose not only would enhance its unity, conªdence, and power but would enable it to counter any new potential risks. Pakistan has also used the same expedients, singularizing the Indian threat to support an uncomfortably large defense establishment and to justify Pakistan’s nuclear and missile acquisitions. Nevertheless, any chronological analysis of nuclear and missile

4. For details, see section 4 on India’s NPT decision in Rodney W. Jones, “India,” in Jozef Goldblat, ed., Non-Proliferation: The Why and Wherefore (London: Taylor and Francis, for the Stockholm International Peach Research Institute, 1985), pp. 111–112.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 International Security 24:4 184

program activities makes clear that India has set the pace of proliferation in South Asia. Pakistan started far behind India in both areas. Pakistan was far from ready to recip- rocate when India tested a nuclear device in 1974, but not ill-prepared to respond by 1998. Similarly, Pakistan had no nuclear-capable ballistic missile technology when India began its ambitious military missile development program in 1983, but it was no surprise to India that Pakistan was proceeding to ªll this gap in the late 1980s, and had more or less succeeded by the mid-1990s.

perception of pakistan as a chinese pawn Ganguly argues that recent Indian security perceptions have been shaped by press reports that China has provided direct nuclear weapons assistance as well as ballistic missiles to Pakistan, implicating China as an oblique nuclear threat to India (p. 163). But he presents no concrete evidence of the most graphic allegations—for instance, that China knowingly supplied Pakistan a working design of a nuclear weapon or provided direct assistance in fabricating nuclear weapons. Given wide circulation of fundamental knowledge of nuclear ªssion principles, there is no reason to suppose that Pakistan would not be resourceful enough to solve early-generation weapon design problems by itself. In any case, it is indisputable that Pakistan’s agenda with India is its own, not a handmaiden to China’s.5 The evidence of Chinese sales of ballistic missile technology to Pakistan is stronger, although such transactions are readily explained by commercial motives and are not forbidden by international treaty. China has not shared the West’s growing aversion to selling such missiles and still claims that they provide a more stable means of defense than advanced combat aircraft. That said, India’s own missile program, which is based on inputs from a variety of foreign sources, suggests that India sees acquiring ballistic missiles as a legitimate defense practice. Ganguly omits mention that India garrisoned nuclear-capable mobile missiles near the border with Pakistan that can strike its most important urban areas. In this light, there is room to be skeptical of Ganguly’s argument that Indian security perceptions attach undue alarm to Pakistani acquisition of compa- rable missiles, whether from China or another commercial source—unless he is apply- ing double standards. If so, Ganguly’s characterization of Indian perceptions as security-driven must be taken with a grain of salt.

security environment of the 1990s Ganguly suggests that escalating nuclear threats to Indian national security in the 1990s accounted for both the planned but aborted 1995 nuclear test and the 1998 nuclear breakout actions (pp. 167–168). This proposition does not mesh well with the overall improvement in the nuclear threat environment since the end of the . China, formerly isolated from most international institutions and arms control processes, was

5. The public record on the Pakistan-China nuclear connection is examined closely in Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. McDonough with Toby F. Dalton and Gregory D. Koblentz, Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, 1998: A Guide in Maps and Charts (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998); see chapters on both China and Pakistan.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 Correspondence 185

being drawn into them. While no guarantee ºowed from this that China would never be a nuclear threat to India, China’s nuclear no-ªrst use posture was gaining respect- ability, even credibility, because China after thirty-ªve nuclear years still does not possess ªrst-strike strategic nuclear systems. India had a nuclear breakout hedge, in any case, fortiªed since the late 1980s with tested ballistic missile delivery vehicles. Along with the other four nuclear weapon powers, China signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), having made signiªcant concessions.6 U.S.-Soviet/Russian arms reductions under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces and Strategic Arms Reduction treaties and conªdence-building measures steadily reduced the competitive expecta- tions that could fuel a fast-track Chinese strategic and nuclear buildup. Although India’s reassurance from the 1971 Soviet friendship treaty collapsed with the , Russian arms transfers supporting India’s advanced conventional military modern- ization had been restored by 1995. It is difªcult to ªnd pressing nuclear threat or national security reasons for India to go nuclear at this late juncture.

the bjp government’s nuclear decisions There is little doubt that the BJP leadership decided before assuming the mantle of government to bring India into the open as a nuclear power, and lose no time in doing so. Ganguly himself points out that the party’s campaign manifesto was explicit on this point, and he is correct that this should have been ample warning to Western policy- makers that change was afoot. The BJP leadership knew that it could count on the support of the strategic interest group and that hawkish elements in both the Congress and socialist parties would dilute negative criticism. Thus the BJP avoided any sig- niªcant consultative process and informed relevant cabinet ministers from other coali- tion parties of its decision to test at best a day or two in advance. The orders to carry out the tests apparently were given weeks earlier, within days or hours of the BJP taking power, in March 1998. Ganguly’s assertion that Pakistan’s Ghauri test of April 6, 1998, served as a “trigger” for the Indian nuclear tests therefore strains credulity (p. 170). The Ghauri test imme- diately followed an Indian Agni-2 test. The provocation was mutual. Inasmuch as the Indian nuclear tests were foreordained, blaming them on Pakistan’s Ghauri test was a convenient public relations ploy. The BJP leadership believed that declaring India a nuclear state could help to consolidate the party’s domestic political appeal. This calculation cannot be dismissed as part of the explanation of the BJP’s decision, but Ganguly almost certainly is correct that it was not the driving factor (pp. 173–174). The driving factor more likely was the grand political calculation of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and a small foreign policy circle within the BJP that India’s nuclear tests and self-declaration of a nuclear weapons state would discredit irrevocably India’s old foreign policy rationale and

6. The October 13, 1999, vote in the U.S. Senate against the CTBT now puts the future of that treaty in jeopardy and complicates future U.S. policy toward South Asia, but this negative U.S. action was hardly expected in 1998 and had no bearing on Asian decisions in 1995–96 when the treaty was being completed and signed.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 International Security 24:4 186

might support a concerted Indian effort to reshape the external environment. New in the BJP initiative was the calculation that India’s emergence as a nuclear power could give India the leverage to get the big powers to choose up sides differently. The hope was that both the United States and Russia would see a nuclear India as a natural ally against China’s potential emergence as a twenty-ªrst-century superpower, and send the message to China that its arms sales relationship with Pakistan was a losing and potentially dangerous game. The BJP estimated that post–Cold War decentralization trends had ripened enough to rearrange the post–Cold War order in Asia along traditional balance-of-power lines. In this context, India would enhance its freedom of action and revitalize its inºuence multilaterally. This same scheme would make it easier internally, as well, to justify disengaging Indians emotionally from their traditionally intense preoccupation with Pakistan, a concern attributable, perhaps, more to Prime Minister Vajpayee than to the BJP as a whole. There is considerable afªnity between this BJP foreign policy agenda and the tradi- tional calculations of India’s strategic interest group, even though many members of that group loyally served successive Congress Party governments. This correspondence subsumes the strategic interest group’s main beliefs—in the underlying linkage between nuclear security and a strong, united India, supporting the desire that India stand tall on the world’s stage—under a new foreign policy approach that is classically realist in its premises and that discards Gandhian principles that oppose reliance on force. This outlook aims to bring together the Indian elite’s aspirations for great power status, alleged national security needs, and the possession of nuclear weapons. What stands out empirically in this collage, however, is evidence of an elite interest group’s subjec- tive drive for international esteem and for national assertion in great power politics, not a response to a compelling external security threat, nuclear or conventional.

comment on policy issues Ganguly’s recommendations for U.S. policy assume that the international community must accept and learn to live with the nuclearization of the subcontinent. He argues that the attainable objectives now are to stabilize a three-way nuclear balance involving India, China, and Pakistan. He advocates three-way discussions on future force levels, deployments, and acquisitions as the starting point for an Asian nuclear arms control regime that he believes would underwrite stability. The result of this prescription, however, would be to place arms control at the service of building up and ratifying the South Asian nuclear forces at some level of parity, bilaterally and with China. This would not restrain armaments but rather consolidate them at higher levels. A stabilizing arms control scheme among players of such disparate interest and capability, however, probably is not viable. On the contrary, a safer baseline for Western interests is to stand fast on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1172 and on related constructs that would preclude nuclear arms deployment and limit missile programs within the subcontinent, as well as on schemes to extend tested international nonproliferation controls. Even if these fail to take hold, other concepts, such as a mutual nuclear stand-down on the subcontinent

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 Correspondence 187

and an externally provided multilateral nuclear security guarantee, deserve considera- tion. Elusive though they may seem at the moment, the more promising national security futures depend on the solution of the underlying causes of military confron- tation, such as the Kashmir dispute, and on economic performance and prosperity, not on the reinvention of nuclear deterrence and its local legitimization by arms control schemes. Otherwise the emerging situation in South Asia is likely to last for some time as one of messy competition, grim ambiguity, experimentation, uncertainty, and possibly trial by error. The Kargil ªght over the line of control in the disputed territory of Kashmir in May and June 1999 is one case in point, and India’s ºoating an expansive nuclear doctrine paper last August is another. Both reºect the dangers of two contiguous nuclear-armed states pressing for political gain, while the risk of escalation to open war and potential nuclear exchange looms in the background. Heightened nuclear pressures almost certainly will aggravate domestic political instability and create uncertainty about reliable political control over nuclear defense decisionmaking. Although the immediate causes of the October 1999 military coup in Pakistan apparently were internal, future historians are likely to conclude that the underlying effects of India’s 1998 nuclear breakout on Pakistan’s economy, expectations of Pakistan’s military establishment, and political openings for Islamic radicals contrib- uted to this fresh army takeover of Pakistan’s government. Resource limitations and domestic economic preoccupations may be the main con- straints on the pace of the evolving in South Asia, at least until constituencies for something quite different gain footholds in the countries involved, or a deªning event (such as an accidental nuclear detonation, a nuclear strike, or a nuclear terrorist attack) forces a radically new thought process. —Rodney W. Jones Reston, Virgina

The Author Replies:

Rodney Jones’s critique of my article “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II” does not stand up to careful scrutiny.1 His dismissal of India’s security perceptions ignores pertinent facts. To begin, his extraordinarily benign assessment of Chinese behavior and interest in South Asia does not conform with the historical record. He claims, for example, that “Chinese dangers [to India] receded signiªcantly after 1965” and that “China had no contentious objectives in India beyond resolving the Himalayan border dispute.”2 This is palpably false. In 1967 India and China exchanged a signiªcant artillery barrage near

1. Šumit Ganguly, “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of India’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring 1998), pp. 148–177. 2. Rodney Jones, “Correspondence Debating New Delhi’s Nuclear Decision,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), p. 182.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 International Security 24:4 188

the strategic Nathu La Pass. A post-1962 revitalized Indian army managed to acquit itself well in this conºict, and China did not again press India along their shared Himalayan border. Nevertheless, China continued to regard India as an adversary and sought to undermine it in other ways. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, the Chinese actively exploited domestic turmoil within India by supporting ethnic insurgents and neophyte communist guerrillas in India’s northeast and in the state of West Bengal.3 Furthermore, India had good reason to continue to fear China, for as Jones himself asserts, “no guarantee ºowed from this that China would never be a nuclear threat to India.”4 Jones agrees with me that the Chinese supplied Pakistan with an unspeciªed number of short-range M-11 missiles, but then attempts to minimize the strategic consequences of this weapons transfer. These missiles, carrying nuclear warheads, can strike sub- stantial portions of India’s northwest, including many military bases and signiªcant population centers. Indian defense planners are uninterested in whether or not the Chinese were driven by “commercial motives” or other considerations in making these missile transfers or whether these transfers were “not forbidden by international treaty.”5 What matters to India is the result. Jones also does not countenance evidence of Chinese nuclear transfers to Pakistan except for the sale of ring magnets, which Jones has correctly described elsewhere as an “integral part of magnetic suspension bearings, which are controlled as dual-use items by the Zangger Committee.”6 There may be no concrete evidence, but even Pakistani analysts have acknowledged that China passed on nuclear weapons designs to Pakistan.7 And Jones is mistaken in attributing to me the assertion that “Indian security perceptions attach undue alarm to Pakistani acqui- sition of comparable missiles.”8 Later in his letter, despite an enormous body of evidence to the contrary, Jones repeats the bromide that China at the end of the Cold War was being drawn into “international institutions and arms control processes.”9 China has agreed to abide by the terms of various nonproliferation regimes, but in its behavior has not always kept its pledge. The United States, the principal proponent of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), has found China’s adherence to the expectations of the regime wanting on a number of occasions. For instance, as Jones himself has acknowledged elsewhere, the Pentagon in 1996 reported that ”China remains Pakistan’s most important supplier of missile-related technologies“ in contravention of the MTCR.10

3. Onkar Marwah, “New Delhi Confronts the Insurgents,” Orbis, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1977), pp. 353–373. 4. Jones, “Correspondence,” p. 185. 5. Ibid., p. 184. 6. The Zangger Committee was an organization composed of members of the advanced industrial nations that met in Vienna to coordinate export controls on dual-use nuclear technology. Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. McDonough with Toby F. Dalton and Gregory D. Koblentz, Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, 1998: A Guide in Maps and Charts, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998), p. 52. 7. Afzal Mahmood, “Ties with China in Perspective,” Dawn (Karachi), October 3, 1999. 8. Jones, “Correspondence,” p. 184. 9. Ibid. 10. Quoted in Jones and McDonough, Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, 1998.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021 Correspondence 189

Jones’s assessment also trivializes India’s legitimate security concerns. In his zeal to dismiss these security concerns, Jones provides a lopsided account of India’s decision to remain outside the ambit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India chose not to sign the treaty because of the treaty’s discriminatory features and because it wished to keep its nuclear weapons option open.11 Jones offers Russia’s resumption of commercial conventional arms sales to India as a replacement for the 1971 friendship treaty with the Soviets, but ignores the fact that this new relationship lacked the most important element of its predecessor: a security guarantee. Jones’s characterization of Pakistan’s strategic behavior in the region over the past ªve decades is also inaccurate. For example, Pakistan, not India, started all three Indo-Pakistani , as well as the 1999 conºict in Kargil. More to the point, in the 1980s Pakistan was deeply involved in supporting Sikh insurgents in the Punjab, and since the early 1990s has substantially aided insurgents in Kashmir.12 Jones asserts that the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership believed that the Indian nuclear tests “could help to consolidate [the BJP’s] domestic political appeal” but offers no proof of these sentiments. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his BJP associates certainly had sufªcient political acumen to know that nuclear tests could not have cemented a fractious coalition—which indeed they did not. Jones and I draw fundamentally different inferences from the Kargil episode of April–June 1999 and the August 1999 draft statement of the Indian nuclear doctrine. On Kargil, even the most die-hard apologists for Pakistan have been forced to concede that Pakistan, not India, precipitated this ill-conceived venture. India’s calibrated reac- tion to the Kargil incursion, however, suggests that a form of crude nuclear stability is emerging in the region. During the 1965 war, when Pakistan threatened to cut off Jammu and Kashmir from the rest of India through a signiªcant intrusion into Indian territory, India resorted to horizontal escalation and promptly crossed the international border in the Punjab. In 1999, however, Indian decisionmakers showed unusual re- straint, no doubt because of Pakistan’s nascent nuclear capabilities, when formulating a response to the Pakistani attack. Finally, I agree with Jones’s characterization of India’s draft nuclear doctrine as “expansive.” It is misleading, however, to suggest that it will contribute to increased regional instability. The statement is only a draft and is currently being subjected to sharp scrutiny and debate. The ªnal version that will emerge from this process is far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, given India’s signiªcant ªnancial constraints, combined with its mostly cautious past strategic behavior, there is every likelihood that the ªnal version will be prudent, limited, and aimed at strategic sufªciency. —Šumit Ganguly Stanford, California

11. K. Subrahmanyam, “India: Keeping the Option Open,” in Joel Larus and Robert M. Lawrence, eds., Nuclear Proliferation: Phase II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973). 12. For evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in Punjab and Kashmir, respectively, see Steve Coll, On the Grand Trunk Road (New York: Random House, 1994); and Edward Desmond, “The Insur- gency in Kashmir (1989–1991),” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1995), pp. 5–16.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228800560345 by guest on 24 September 2021