Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Toward a 'Force-in-Being': The Logic,
Structure, and Utility of India's Emerging
Nuclear Posture
ASHLEY J.TELLIS
After a hiatus of almost 24 years, India startled the world by resuming nuclear
testing at a time when the international community solemnly expressed a desire
through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to refrain from the field-
testing of nuclear explosives. On 11 May 1998, the Indian Prime Minister, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, tersely announced that New Delhi had conducted three nuclear
tests, one of which involved the detonation of a thermonuclear device. As a
stunned global community struggled to respond to this development, India
announced two days later that it had conducted two more detonations. In the
aftermath of these tests, India declared itself to be a 'nuclear weapon state'
1
and
formally announced its intention to develop a 'minimum credible (nuclear)
deterrent'.
2
This decision to create a deterrent, however, did not imply that India would
automatically develop an arsenal of the sort maintained by the established nuclear
powers. Rather, its traditionally anguished relationship with nuclear weapons
3
almost ensured that its new determination to formally create a strategic deterrent
—far from closing the national debate about nuclearization irrevocably—would
only focus attention, once again, on the five choices that India had grappled with
since its independence in 1947: (1) Renounce the nuclear option; (2) Maintain a
South Asian nuclear free zone; (3) Persist with simply maintaining the nuclear
option; (4) Acquire a 'recessed deterrent'; and, finally, (5) Develop a robust and
ready arsenal immediately.
While the first two alternatives in different forms were vigorously promoted
by the international community in the aftermath of the May 1998 tests,
4
the
national debate within India focused mainly on the last three alternatives, thus
signaling that denuclearization was simply not viable given the new security
environment facing the country.
While the proponents of alternative (3) argued that India, despite having tested,
ought not to acquire a nuclear force for both moral and strategic reasons,
5
they
appear to be marginal in the Indian strategic debate, which has for most part been
dominated by proponents of alternatives (4) and (5). The former argue that a
'recessed deterrent', which allows India to constitute a nuclear arsenal within a
