By Dr. Rajkumar Singh
In India’s policy of no-first use and retaliation only the survivability of our arsenal is crucial. This is a dynamic concept related to the strategic environment, technological imperatives and needs of national security.
The doctrine aims at clearly stating in unambiguous terms that any threat of use of nuclear weapons against India shall invoke measures to counter that threat and that any nuclear attack on India and its forces shall result in punitive retaliation with nuclear weapons to inflict damage unacceptable to the aggressor.
General environment in the region
With this aim in view, several experts consider that there are good reasons for creating a nuclear triad, which simply refers to the three legs that comprise most nuclear forces, the land-based international ballistic missiles (ICBMs), strategic bombers, and submarine- based long-range missiles.
All nuclear powers have had, or aspire to create such nuclear triads. Despite their individual advantages and disadvantages taking together they tend to cancel out the various disadvantages to create a robust, safe, and relatively invulnerable deterrent force. For example, land- based strategic bombers are large and soft targets.
Land-based missiles are similarly vulnerable, because their locations cannot be kept secret from energy spy-satellites. But land-based missiles, usually deployed in underground soils, can be hardened to a certain degree so that they can survive anything but a direct hit. Likewise, a submarine-based nuclear deterrent force has also advantages and disadvantages: Submarines, especially nuclear missile submarines which rarely come to the surface, are notoriously difficult to detect and track, which makes them the most invulnerable leg of the nuclear triad.
Thus, a nuclear triad, which includes all the legs of the triad, reduces the dangers, vulnerabilities and insecurity associated with any single leg. Because India will never see any merit in using nuclear weapons to strike first, it is fundamentally crucial for us with our defensive doctrine and a no-first use philosophy to ensure survivability of the nuclear arsenal to enable retaliation. It is this capability which will deter the aggressor from taking recourse to war and hence provide deterrence and peace and tranquillity so essential to the development of the nation.
Policy of India
The draft of India’s nuclear doctrine issued in August 1999 was subsequently formalised with some modifications in 2003. It explicitly stated that the country is pursuing nuclear deterrence though this was qualified as a minimal one. It also warns that “nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” Unacceptable damage, in plain English, means that these nuclear weapons would be dropped on cities, each killing lakhs or millions of innocent people. But India, unlike the cold warriors of the fifties, embarked on making nuclear weapons not as a war fighting arsenal or for use in a massive first strike, but only as an instrument of minimal nuclear deterrence.This deterrence was to be achieved with “……sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict destruction and punishment that the aggressor will find unacceptable….”
This policy has been repeatedly underlined and reiterated several times by the government of the day, despite efforts by hawks bent on adopting a more aggressive nuclear posture. Even very recently S.M. Krishna, India’s Minister for External Affairs asserted that there would be no revision of India’s no first use nuclear doctrine and said minimum credible deterrence would be maintained in view of threats and challenges. “On the nuclear doctrine, I would only like to say that there is no change in our policy. We are committed to universal, non-discriminatory nuclear disarm- ament and we remain firm on the commitment”, he said.
Status of China and Pakistan
In fact, since the time India became a declared nuclear power state in May 1998, there has been a concerted campaign, particularly by non-proliferation lobbies in western countries, echoed by analysts in China and Pakistan, to spread the notion that India’s strategic programme has been driven by considerations of prestige and propaganda, rather than by any real security threats.
Even some Indian commentators also consider that India’s dominant objective is political and technological prestige, while for every other nuclear weapon state it is deterrence. Only as a follow-up of the policy of nuclear doctrine India adopted in January 2003 formally at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, it has taken a series of graduated steps to put in place a triad of land-based, air delivered and submarine-based nuclear forces to confirm to its doctrine of no-first use and retaliation only.
Currently, at least two legs of the triad are fully operational. These include a modest arsenal, nuclear capable aircraft and missiles, both in fixed underground silos and those mounted on mobile, rail and road- based platforms. Land-based missiles include both Agni-II (1500 km) as well as Agni-III (2500 km). The range and accuracy of further versions for example Agni-V (5000 km) has been tested successfully only recently and will improve with the further acquisition of technological capability and experience. Further work for the third leg of the triad is in progress. We need a minimum of three Arihant class nuclear submarines so that at least one will always be at sea. The submarine-based Sagarika missiles have been developed and tested but are still relatively short in range. It is expected that a modest sea-based deterrent will be in place by 2015 or 2016.
Author: Dr. Rajkumar Singh, Professor and Head, University Department of Political Science, B.N.Mandal University, Madhepura, Madhepura-852113, Bihar, India.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).