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Debating New Delhi's Nuclear Decision Correspondence Rodney W. Jones Šumit Ganguly Debating New Delhi’s Nuclear Decision To the Editors: Šumit Ganguly’s article “India’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 nuclear weapon 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 nuclear proliferation 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 China and Pakistan 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 Russia, Japan, and the United States, including the Korean War. 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.
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