Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
India will be quite loath to quickly sign and ratify the CTBT and assist the Fissile
Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) negotiations to a speedy and successful
conclusion, because surrendering the benefits embodied by such actions would
occur only if there was some prospect of securing suitable political advantages as
compensation.
Second, India should not make any formal commitments to limit the upper
bounds of strategic capability. In practical terms, this implies that Indian security
managers will not provide any binding assurances to either the United States or
the international community that their desired force-in-being will not exceed
certain quantitative or qualitative thresholds.
Third, India should not restrain its domestic research, development and
production activities relating to nuclear weapons, fissile materials, and delivery
systems. In practical terms, this implies that India will continue to press ahead
with its existing efforts in all three arenas, although these may be accelerated in
some areas—like the production of fissile materials, for example—while
remaining more or less constant in others—such as the development of delivery
systems.
This threefold strategy is clearly intended to minimize, on the one hand, the
extent of the formal obligations restraining India's emerging strategic
capabilities while, on the other hand, producing the largest and most effective
deterrent force possible within more or less the limits of its current capabilities.
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The latter objective is not simply to expand the size of the nuclear weapons
inventory for its own sake, but rather to increase the extent of the residual
fraction that would survive a nuclear strike that might be mounted by its
adversaries.
The 'Draft Report of [the] National Security Advisory Board on Indian
Nuclear Doctrine' captured this requirement succinctly when it noted that India's
operational policy of 'retaliation only' makes 'the survivability of our arsenal…
critical'.
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The Advisory Board pointed out, quite accurately, that the size of
India's nuclear force eventually would be conditioned by many variables,
including the capability and the disposition of the nuclear forces maintained by
India's adversaries, the demands levied on penetrativity in the face of the
incipient transformations in the present offense-dominant global nuclear regime,
and the state of political relations: between India and its immediate adversaries;
between those adversaries themselves; and between India and other key powers
in the global system.
A recognition of these factors led the Board to insinuate that the size of India's
emerging nuclear force would have to be sufficiently variable to ensure
survivability in the light of the potential changes in these issue-areas.
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The
prospect of such variability, however, cannot imply that the size of India's
nuclear force would, by definition, be open-ended. Most Indian security
managers recognize that at some point in the future a FMCT, if successfully
