Toward a ‘Force-in-Being’: The Logic, Structure, and Utility of India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture - India as an Emerging Power - page 76

administrative structure spawns very effective, but shadowy, core networks
which are then superimposed on the existing institutions . In such circumstances,
strategic decision-making is transacted within the small network, while the larger
institutional, bureaucratic apparatus is simply relegated to the business of routine
management. 67
This modus operandi certainly does not preclude the development of more
formal and institutionalized procedures for managing the Indian nuclear
deterrent over time. In the interim, however, it does suggest that the security of
the control and oversight arrangements will be very difficult to compromise
because low-level actors will not possess sufficient information about the status
and disposition of all the constituent parts of the deterrent, while the high-level
actors will be both difficult to identify exhaustively and, even if identified, will
not reveal anything more than they choose to about the nuclear posture writ large. 68
This simple fact makes any counter-control targeting strategy difficult, if not
impossible, to execute even by an advanced nuclear power, because even the
destruction of every identifiable technical node within the command system may
not suffice to prevent control from being reestablished by more primitive means
and through the coordinated actions of a relatively small number of individuals
who know each other intimately.
What makes the distributed posture potentially effective from the viewpoint of
survivability is the fact that routine standard operating procedures already exist
both in the civilian and in the military realms. The Indian nuclear program, for
example, already has a working set of institutional procedures which regulate the
transfers of critical nuclear materials between various facilities and sites as well
as a physical infrastructure that enables the appropriate handling of all such
materials. 69
A similar set of procedures and infrastructure exists in the defense research
and development organization. Since these communities would have primary
responsibility for the custody, storage, and handling of both nuclear pits and
weapons assemblies in peacetime, it is not unreasonable to believe that these
components would be secured (or moved as the case may be) without any
security lapses or compromise. As the components themselves are relatively
small in size and can be moved by ordinary forms of transportation, the
likelihood that a potential adversary would be able to locate all or many of the
storage sites associated with the concealment of these components is extremely
remote.
As if to inure against this possibility, the Indian military, too, has a
comparable set of procedures and infrastructure governing the storage and
movement of critical war materials. 70 If anything, these organizational
capabilities are even better developed because the peacetime dispersal of India's
military assets across vast distances of the hinterland has required its armed
services to develop both the physical infrastructure and the organizational