Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the survivability-rapid retaliation dilemma but, equally importantly, an analysis
of how any solution adopted to deal with this issue also affects India's ability to
cope with other challenges, like the threats posed by accidental detonation,
unauthorized use, mistaken authorized use, and terrorist seizure.
When these challenges are explicitly incorporated into the analysis, it becomes
obvious that Postures V and VI may quickly become subversive of stability
insofar as they require nuclear devices to subsist in completed form routinely.
The threats emerging from such a posture, however, can be reduced considerably
if the nuclear weapon designs incorporate some sort of enhanced nuclear
detonation safety system (ENDS) and various kinds of permissive actions links
(PALs),
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but if such technologies are not available (or available only in
relatively primitive form), other alternatives will have to be relied upon.
An alternative that resolves the survivability-rapid retaliation dilemma
together with the other challenges of nuclear possession, then, can be found only
among Postures I, III and IV, with Posture I being optimal for the air-breathing
arm and Posture IV being optimal for the land- and sea-based missile arms of the
force. Both these postures, however, would require nuclear weapons based on
'insertable pit'
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designs—hardly the acme of safety technology today.
Regardless of which of the above postures Indian security managers prefer,
these will be operationalized not in static but in dynamic form. That is, the many
components of the deterrent force which are stored separately may be
periodically moved from location to location covertly, and their relatively small
size, coupled with the fact that there already exists a ready physical infrastructure
designed for storing, maintaining and readying such elements, makes a
distributed solution to India's strategic problem eminently feasible. There are, in
general, three conditions which are necessary for the success of such an
arrangement: first, there must be a large number of storage sites under the
effective control of the state; second, the number of individuals with information
about the physical location of the actual holdings must be small; third, there
must be an organizational system capable of handing both the storage and the
episodic, but covert, movements of various components.
All three conditions obtain abundantly in the case of India. While the number
of facilities at which India's strategic assets could be distributed is potentially
very large, the number of individuals with information about the location and
status of these component parts is, in contrast, very small.
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Those who possess a
'God's eye view' of the entire weapons program are probably less than two
dozen in number, though perhaps many more individuals are aware of bits and
pieces pertaining to the general effort.
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Administrative structures in India, especially those relating to the nuclear
weapons effort in particular, cut across organizational realms, and operational
directives are invariably communicated informally and without any written
record whatsoever.
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These arrangements work only because the Indian
