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Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, using language that is by now fairly common
among the country's strategic community, authoritatively staked out this position
in Parliament when he asserted that India would not seek more than a 'minimum,
but credible, nuclear deterrent'.
13
Leading strategic analysts have amplified this
leitmotif, with K.Subrahmanyam, for example, arguing that India is centered 'on
minimum deterrence combined with no-first use'.
14
Very rarely, some commentators have given vent to dissenting views on this
question, as for example Brigadier V.P.Naib, who asserted that the need to
retaliate against a nuclear strike would require India to have 'in readiness a
reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage at any time during the strategic
exchange'.
15
In a similar vein, one of India's most prominent civilian hawks, Bharat
Karnad, said that, for India, the most effective solutions are personified by a
'maximally strategic'
16
deterrence posture built around multiple kinds of high-
yield nuclear weapons and numerous, diverse delivery systems which, taken
together, would create the 'full and robust deterrent'.
17
Such arguments, however, do not appear to command a strong following among
either the civilian leadership at both the political and the bureaucratic levels, or
the higher leadership of the armed services, or the more numerous retired service
officers who have written on this subject. Among this last group, a more typical
example is represented by Major-General (ret.) Ashok Mehta, who noted that
'minimum deterrence and an NFU (no-first-use) policy allow for the
maintenance of a limited nuclear arsenal—warheads and delivery systems—and
a small, not-too-elaborate command and control structure. This makes the strategic
deterrent affordable and prevents a nuclear arms race'.
18
While the general consensus in India, both among civilian commentators and
the armed services, thus seems to converge on the desirability of a 'minimum
deterrent', it is not surprising to find that Indian 'defence experts …seem to be
divided over…what constitutes a minimum deterrent'
19
(see
Figure 2
).
Indeed, the concept of minimum deterrence—being borrowed from Western
debates on the subject—has been controversial right from the very beginning of
its history. The simplest conceptions of minimum deterrence have defined it as a
'nuclear strategy in which a nation (or nations) maintains the minimum number
of nuclear weapons necessary to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary
even after it has suffered a nuclear attack'.
20
Intuitively, this definition suggests
that such a nuclear force would be oriented towards countervalue targeting since
the small number of weapons presumably entailed by the adjective 'minimal'
ultimately requires 'city-busting' in order to satisfy the need for 'unacceptable
damage'.
This predicate of minimal deterrence, however, left many theorists dissatisfied
on both moral and prudential grounds and, consequently, a number of
alternatives ranging from 'finite counterforce' to 'limited nuclear options' were
