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The Rediff Special/ Brahma Chellaney

Bangs turn into whimper

When history is written about the Shakti series of nuclear tests, what will stand out is how quickly India dissipated the gains from a momentous action that should have ushered in the world's Second Nuclear Age. It was through a diplomacy bereft of clear objectives that India largely squandered those gains. At the same time, it moved very slowly to consolidate its nuclear military assets on the ground, with the armed forces still not given a role in deterrence. A year after the tests, nuclear India is struggling to frame a clear diplomatic and defence strategy.

India has always toiled to get its nuclear act right. Considering that it initially began producing weapons-usable plutonium at about the same time that China exploded its first nuclear bomb, India took an extraordinarily long time to make up its mind to go overtly nuclear. Its nuclear indecision had become legendary, giving it the distinction of being the only country to openly conduct a nuclear test and yet shy away from a military posture based on deterrence. The rest of the world had watched India straddling the nuclear fence for decades, mocking the West self-righteously but unable to make up its own mind. After its 1974 test, India went back into its nuclear shell.

For more than three decades, India concentrated its efforts on "saving" its nuclear option than on securing peace through deterrence. So engrossed the nation was in battling "inequity" that it did not care to meet its nuclear imperatives. India practically turned its nuclear option into a sermonising ideology than a tool for self-defence. What should have been an asset began looking like a burden in the 1990s. By not weaponising or testing its nuclear capability and thus tacitly observing the terms of the treaties it despised, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India had exhibited strategic defiance without logic.

All that changed in one stroke on May 11, 1998, when India demonstrated its capability to manufacture and test the most modern nuclear weapons -- thermonuclear, fission and low-yield types. No country has ever demonstrated such a range of weapon capabilities in one go. Unlike 1974 when a crude fission device was detonated without being configured as a warhead, the five devices tested on May 11 and 13 were warhead prototypes. The tests validated three different weapon designs: (i) a fission warhead with a 15 kiloton yield; (ii) a thermonuclear design with a 45 kiloton yield; and (iii) very-low-yield devices for possible use as tactical weapons. By carrying out two rounds of simultaneous nuclear detonations, rather than test one test at a time over an extended period of time, India presented a fait accompli to the world that it had arrived as a nuclear-weapons state.

But no sooner had it done that than it began trying to "harmonise its security interests with" the post-Shakti imperious benchmarks set by the only country to engage in overt nuclear intimidation against it, the United States. It was the 1971 despatch of the nuclear-capable USS Enterprise that bared India's vulnerabilities and prompted Indira Gandhi to activate the peaceful nuclear explosion programme. As Richard Nixon bluntly wrote in 1985, "I considered using nuclear weapons ... (in) 1971, the Indo-Pak war. After Mrs Gandhi completed the decimation of East Pakistan, she wanted to gobble up West Pakistan ... We were concerned that the Chinese might intervene to stop India ... if they did step in, and the Soviets reacted, what would we do? There was no question what we would have done."

Even as India remains obsessed with America, the latter treats the world's largest democracy with barely concealed disdain, pairing it with traditional US client, Pakistan, and trying to make Communist China (the continuing source of Pakistani nuclear and missile technology) the non-proliferation gendarme of South Asia. In the years he has been in office, Bill Clinton has proved himself the most anti-India US president since Nixon. In his first year in office, Clinton become the first US president to raise Kashmir at the UN General Assembly. More recently, in his State of the Union address, he clubbed India not only with Pakistan but an alleged "rogue state", North Korea. Yet, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh believes he can cut a deal with the Clinton administration that would change the course of US-Indian relations. A visit to India (and Pakistan) by this very US president who has never said anything positive about India in a national or international address has been offered as a bait by US negotiators.

Today, Indian negotiators can reflect over how they went wrong. Not only are the talks with the United States in a stalemate, the Indian side has not been able to extract a single concrete concession from Washington. With the process of holding fresh election having begun, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will have to put the entire dialogue with America on hold. Besides grudgingly acknowledging the reality that Indian capabilities cannot be rolled back now, the United States has refused to accept India's nuclear-weapons status "even by implication" while still insisting that New Delhi agree to certain key regional measures to cap its capabilities in relation to its secondary nuclear concern, Pakistan.

India's talks with the United States and some other powers were designed to blunt international pressure by employing the important leverage flowing out of the Shakti tests. Such talks made a lot of strategic sense. But what did not make sense was the manner in which India surrendered its bargaining chips one by one.

After the tests, India cockily went about reversing its position on, or placing on the negotiating table, measures it had firmly rejected as discriminatory and unjust. An openly mercantile approach was adopted by the Vajpayee government. If the deal was right, India was willing to embrace any treaty or cartel. To open shop, it made some unilateral concessions as sweeteners.

It could have delayed its declaration of test moratorium until the international reaction had settled down and no new sanctions were on the anvil. But by immediately surrendering that card, India got repeatedly slapped during the course of the negotiations with new US sanctions, such as the blackballing of many major Indian private and state-run enterprises. It unilaterally broke the G-21 consensus that negotiations on the proposed fissile material cut-off treaty should not start without negotiations on complete nuclear disarmament. It also unilaterally agreed to strengthen and broaden its export controls without linking the step to a reciprocal loosening of the repressive Western export controls against it.

It is a measure of the skill with which the Indian side is negotiating that it agreed to barter away India's CTBT card before any sign had emerged that the United States would ratify that very treaty -- that too without the kind of scandalous conditions it has attached to its belated ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

It speaks volumes about Jaswant Singh's diplomacy that India should come under greater US pressure after the tests than before. The talks, instead of blunting pressure, reared new pressures. One of the first US demands was that India define its credible minimum deterrence. Then it demanded that India precisely quantify its deterrent requirements in terms of the number of warheads and missiles it intends to build. And this demand came from a country that has yet to disclose data on its 1960s-era nuclear tests or revealed the precise size of the arsenal it intends to maintain for the future.

Nuclear India faces major diplomatic and strategic challenges. The national elation over the successful nuclear-weapons tests should not cloud the fact that India's real test has just begun. India has to take its tests to their logical conclusion by building a small, affordable but survivable nuclear-deterrent force. India already has deployable nuclear weapons but their induction into the military structure has not yet begun.

A year after declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state, India has still not brought its armed forces into the nuclear picture. The paradox of a country proclaiming it has a nuclear deterrent without the necessary military underpinnings can only create a dangerous situation, exposing the State to serious risks. The failure to involve the military in nuclear-deterrence planning so far has resulted in India still not having an operational nuclear doctrine.

India is the only major democracy that has shut out its military from defence policy-making. Uniformed officers are excluded from the Indian defence ministry, which is run by non-specialists from an elite civil service whose members move every few years to a new job, stretching from urban development and social welfare to public health and defence. As a consequence, India has never clearly defined its vital interests and still pursues an outdated threat-scenario approach to defence (which puts it in a reactive mode), rather than a capacity-building approach. Capacities take a long time to build and can help deter new threats. A tight civilian control over the armed forces was intended to preclude any possibility of a military coup.

Over the decades, however, the country's mammoth bureaucracy, whose red tape is legendary, has pushed the military further away from the policy-making process. The nuclear paradox provides a glimpse of India's deeper national-security problems. Unless the paradox is corrected, India could make itself more insecure.

India faces three major challenges in achieving its deterrence goals. First, the country's small reserves of weapons-grade plutonium and limited financial resources dictate that it can only have puny nuclear forces. The predetermined diminutive size of the Indian nuclear arsenal imposes high reliability and security standards on New Delhi. Without the luxury of allowing numbers to compensate for quality, India will have to rigorously meet the technical imperatives of its deterrent. Unlike Pakistan and Israel which can draw on China and the United States respectively for continued nuclear-warhead design assistance, India is the only non-NPT nuclear state without an external benefactor.

Two, India has to build its credible minimal deterrent in a global environment openly hostile to further overt weaponisation, particularly by a new nuclear-weapons state. Each new weapons-related action will draw adverse international reaction. It is thus vital that the follow-up steps to erect an appropriate deterrent are taken quietly and without the official braggadocio so characteristic of every Indian advance, however small.

Three, India is still some distance from acquiring the technical capacity to terminate a Chinese nuclear threat and needs to plug this vulnerability on a war footing. A deterrent against Pakistan was never the central mission of Indian nuclear strategy. There is not a single political or military reason for India to build a nuclear deterrent against Pakistan.

Nuclearisation of the subcontinent only blunts India's conventional-military advantage over Pakistan, allowing the latter to employ nuclear forces as an equaliser. An Indian deterrent makes strategic sense only in context of China. Without being able to stand up to China, New Delhi will never be able to persuade Beijing to halt its containment of India or its covert nuclear and missile transfers to Pakistan.

If India does not pursue result-oriented diplomacy and a defence strategy that does not seek to deal with its security challenges in a realistic, pragmatic way, it cannot secure its future. Instead of breaking loose from externally-imposed fetters, India has been signalling a readiness to accept new fetters. And instead of determinedly building a credible deterrent, it has shied away from quick follow-up steps. India should not lose sight of the objectives that impelled it to boldly conduct the tests.

Professor Brahma Chellaney is with the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

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