Behind India's Bomb: The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Deterrence

The Indian nuclear tests of May 11 and 13, 1998, shook an unsuspecting world. Long at the forefront of the movement for universal nuclear disarmament, India had continually chastised the five declared nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom) for not moving to eliminate their nuclear arsenals as called for by the 1970 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. After demonstrating its own nuclear capacity in 1974, India had refrained from testing for more than two decades. And apparently, neither the emergence of a government in New Delhi led by the right-of-center Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) nor the Indian elites' deep reservations about the global nonproliferation regime had disturbed this quiescence. Indian decision-makers had indicated that they would not carry out nuclear tests until they had completed a lengthy "strategic review" of security threats and how best to cope with them.

The explosions in the Rajasthan desert, therefore -- in addition to prompting Pakistan to detonate a few of its own nuclear bombs two weeks later -- set off corresponding explosions in capitals around the world. Foreign diplomats, academics, pundits, and policymakers quickly and sharply criticized India for bucking the trend toward nuclear restraint. The open declarations of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons powers, many asserted, would unravel the carefully woven fabric of the nonproliferation regime by encouraging other states to acquire nuclear weapons. They might even propel the subcontinent toward nuclear war.

The condemnations belittled New Delhi's stated reason for testing -- namely, a growing threat from its powerful neighbor, China. China had not made any overt threats across the border, so what could be the problem? Foreigners instead generally ascribed the tests to what they saw as petty motivations: a desire to elevate India's international status and an attempt to bolster the BJP-led government's fortunes.

Three years on, however, little evidence has emerged to support these proffered motives. The quest for global status has been a staple of Indian foreign policy since the country's emergence as an independent state in 1947, and India's basic nuclear capability dates back more than 20 years; it is hard to link these essentially constant factors to a significant policy shift. As for the notion that the tests were designed to boost a sagging government's fortunes, informed analysts of Indian politics know that the fate of a governing coalition in New Delhi depends much more on the allocation of scarce resources such as ministerial positions than on arcane matters of national security and strategy. Even some ardent critics of the Indian nuclear weapons program now concede as much. In his new book India: Emerging Power, the noted South Asian security analyst Stephen P. Cohen echoes many commentators in attributing the tests to a blend of status-seeking and domestic politics, but he also acknowledges that these factors alone were not sufficient to drive India to explode five nuclear bombs.

It now appears that the real reason for the tests was indeed fear of the long-term security threat posed by China and Pakistan, coupled with bureaucratic pressures emanating from within India's scientific-technological complex. Yet only a handful of Western analysts have recognized these motivations, and even fewer have been willing to concede the legitimacy of India's strategic concerns. In fact, until recently no systematic book-length treatment of the subject was available. Now Ashley Tellis' India's Emerging Nuclear Posture -- carefully researched, meticulously documented, and tightly argued -- ably fills this void. It is not merely a tour d'horizon of the likely future of the Indian nuclear weapons program, but a tour de force on the subject of nuclear proliferation in general.

DETERRENCE "LITE"

Tellis has paid excruciating attention to detail, scouring both regional and international sources from journalism to the policy world to academia. Relying on a massive collection of evidence, he shows how growing perceptions of a security threat from China and Pakistan led Indian decision-makers toward overt weaponization and the abandonment of the country's long-held posture of nuclear ambiguity. He documents how China's security assistance to Pakistan during the 1990s, especially in the realms of nuclear weapons design and ballistic missile technology, made Pakistan a virtual strategic surrogate for China in South Asia -- and how India's security establishment took note of and sought to counter this emerging threat.

Although Tellis emphasizes the critical role of external threats in precipitating the full development of India's nuclear and missile programs, he also provides a nuanced discussion of the influence of key bureaucratic constituencies. He shows how India's atomic energy establishment, Defense Research and Development Organization, and space research program boosted and sustained both the nuclear and missile enterprises. But Tellis also delves within these institutions, demonstrating how a complex interaction among elected representatives, civilian strategists, key military officers, and the leaders of India's strategic technological enclaves drove the decision-making process.

The most important proposition that emerges from Tellis' analysis is the primacy of the political, understood broadly rather than narrowly. Key decisions resulted not from bureaucratic turf battles or complex institutions but from the preferences and choices of India's elected elites acting in concert with critical members of various military and technological entities.