Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
be similarly divergent. Unlike the United States, the Indian system of control
will be highly 'assertive',
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meaning that the civilian leadership at the very top,
in the person of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, will continue to exercise
strict and pervasive control over the structure of distribution of nuclear assets,
the authorization pertaining to the marriage of various strategic components in an
emergency, and the decision to actually use nuclear weapons as part of a
retaliatory response.
By being able to directly oversee the affairs of the DAE, while controlling
both the DRDO and the armed services through the civilian Ministry of Defence
(MOD), India's Prime Ministers have always been able to exercise—whenever
they chose to—close and continuing authority over any developments occurring
in these organizations.
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The acquisition of nuclear weaponry is only likely to
make this traditionally tight control even tighter.
Since India's nuclear weapons are intended primarily as political instruments
of deterrence and reassurance in the face of possible threats, and secondarily as
instruments of retribution in the event of actual use, policymakers in New Delhi
believe that their interests are not at all well served by opting for a completely
'delegative' command system where a significant number of completed nuclear
weapons are distributed to the military for routine custody and safekeeping, with
this end-user being granted the 'pre-delegated'
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authority for the use of such
weapons in an emergency.
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Instead, India's declaratory doctrine of 'delayed—but assured—retaliation'
can be preeminently satisfied by more or less strong forms of 'assertive' control,
which includes the devolutionary, rather than pre-delegated, transfer of resources
and authority to the military only under conditions of supreme emergency. Such
a command arrangement could be quite satisfactory so long as an adequately
distributed nuclear posture, which can assure the survivability of a significant
fraction of India's nuclear assets, exists in some form and is complemented by
the existence of effective procedures for post-attack reconstitution.
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Any assertive command system of the sort associated with centralized control
obviously suffers from one specific weakness, namely its vulnerability to
'strategic decapitation'.
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Strategic decapitation refers to the destruction of the
national command authority as a result of enemy action which is intended to
paralyze a state's ability to respond rapidly and coherently. Preparing for this
contingency certainly concentrates the minds of many Indians: the Draft Report
of [the] National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, for
example, affirmed that the requisite 'procedures for the continuity of nuclear
command and control' ought to be created in order to 'ensure a continuing
capability to effectively employ nuclear weapons' even in the face of 'surprise
attacks' and 'repetitive attrition attempts' by an adversary.
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While such directives are appropriate, there is good reason to believe that the
threat of strategic decapitation may not be as overpowering as is sometimes
