Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rajesh M. Basrur is Director of the Centre for Global Studies in Mumbai, India. He has been a visiting fellow at Sandia National Laboratories, the Brookings Institution, and the Henry L. Stimson Center.

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Minimum Deterrence and India's Nuclear Security

Stanford University Press

Contents

1 Introduction: Nuclear Weapons in World Politics.....................12 The Essentials of Minimum Deterrence................................253 Strategic Culture...................................................494 Compellence in a Nuclear Environment................................805 Missile Defense.....................................................1026 Nuclear Terrorism...................................................1227 Minimum Deterrence and Democracy....................................1488 Conclusion: Shaping the Uncertain Future............................169Notes.................................................................185Index.................................................................235

Chapter One

In May 1998, India shook the world with a series of nuclear tests accompanied by a declared strategy of "credible minimum deterrence." More than half a decade later, the contours of the strategy are not entirely clear. In essence, the Indian conception of minimum deterrence encompasses the understanding that it is not necessary to have large numbers of sophisticated weapons to deter nuclear adversaries; that nuclear "balances" are not meaningful; and that weapons need not be deployed and kept in a high state of readiness in order that deterrence be effective. Beyond this, important questions remain. While the development of capabilities in technology and organization proceeds apace, nobody is quite clear about what minimum deterrence means. How many weapons are adequate, and of what kind? Might deployment become necessary at some point of time, and if so, under what circumstances? Is war still possible, and if so, how? What kind of arms control is feasible? These and many other questions have been the subject of much discussion since the tests. Perhaps the best thing about the tests is that such questions are now being asked, for they scarcely ever were before the 1998 tests, though the weapons had long been built. This book attempts some answers by examining the fundamentals of nuclear weapons and deterrence in the Indian context.

This is neither a history nor a blueprint. Rather, it is a critique of Indian nuclear thinking and practice based on an inquiry into the basic assumptions and principles that underlie an optimal nuclear weapons posture. The book's central concern is with the hitherto inadequately defined conception of "minimum deterrence" officially adopted by India in 1998, and with the need to clarify its parameters so as to arrive at a cost-effective nuclear strategy. It seeks to comprehend the nature of the world around us, the place of nuclear weapons in it, and the strategic framework that is appropriate to this world. The character of world politics makes the possession of military nuclear capability a reasonable choice in certain circumstances. Yet the extraordinarily destructive quality of nuclear weapons makes their possession problematic, creating new dimensions of insecurity that can never be eliminated. What minimum deterrence can do is reduce them significantly without sacrificing security. The main objective of this book is to spell out the parameters of minimum deterrence, assess India's nuclear-strategic thinking and practice, and help correct the flaws discovered in the process.

Policy makers choose diverse doctrines because they fail to understand that minimum deterrence is the most cost-effective. A nation's actual choice of posture depends on the historical context in which the decision is made, on its technical and financial prowess, and on its normative preferences about the use of force in general and nuclear weapons in particular. India's adoption of an official doctrine of minimum deterrence is embedded in its historical experience and ethical predisposition, but has tended to lose its moorings because of an inadequate understanding of its fundamental assumptions. This is evident from India's search for a variety of capabilities in nuclear hardware, the recent failed experiment with coercive diplomacy or compellence vis--vis Pakistan, and the lack of clarity as to why missile defense is perfectly compatible with minimum deterrence. This book also examines a largely neglected area in the nuclear weapons discourse: the relationship between nuclear terrorism and nuclear strategy. Minimum deterrence, it is argued, is the optimal strategy for a country that faces a significant threat from nonstate actors with an interest in acquiring the capability for mass destruction. Finally, the implications of nuclear weapons for democracy are assessed, and the case is made that minimum deterrence keeps to tolerable proportions the moral and political costs that the possession of these weapons entails.

In the pages that follow, the gray areas between opposite trends and realities that affect India's still evolving nuclear posture are explored. These contradictions encompass the tensions between:

Anarchy and interdependence in world politics-between the self-help character of the world of states, in which power and the use of force are still the bases of national survival, and the increasing integration of this same world, succinctly described by the term "globalization." In the uncertain space between them lies the realm of decisions about the extent to which armed force, and nuclear weapons specifically, must be thought of and organized. The fundamental question is how best we can reduce threats and promote cooperation in such a world.

The possession and non-possession of nuclear weapons-between the sense of insecurity that nations experience when, under threat, they do not have the means to exercise deterrence, and the sense of insecurity they feel even after they do have them because there is no guarantee that deterrence will always work.

Nuclear weapons as usable instruments and as unusable instruments of state power-between the fact of their actually having been used and the possibility of future use, on one hand, and, on the other, the powerful practical and moral constraints on their use for more than half a century. Here, we grapple apprehensively with the dilemma of possessing instruments of mass destruction that we never want to use, and yet threaten to use for the sake of our own survival.

The defensive character of one's own weapons and the offensive character of those possessed by others-between the security nations seek when they acquire (or attempt to acquire) nuclear weapons, and the insecurity they experience when others do so while citing the same reasons.

Democracy and deterrence-between the decentralizing tendency, openness, and respect for human life that characterizes democracy, and the centralizing tendency, secrecy, and indiscriminate destructiveness that adheres to nuclear weapons.

This is a holistic examination of these areas, encompassing three types of relationship. First, the study investigates the domain of interstate interaction, which is characterized by coexisting patterns of cooperation and conflict. Here, Indian policy must simultaneously optimize threat reduction and promote cooperation-not an easy task, since measures taken to offset threats, such as the acquisition of nuclear weapons, generate new tensions. The problem is to maximize security while at the same time restraining the negative impact of measures taken to do so. In this respect, the fundamental question to ask in organizing nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterrence is not how much is enough, but how little is enough.

The second relationship investigated is that between the external and internal realms of the state. Policy decisions as to how to respond to external threats are made in the latter. The ways in which Indians think about nuclear weapons and their preferences about how to organize their responses to nuclear threats are different from the ways in which others, for instance Americans and Russians, think about them. The reasons for this are historical, but also "cultural," though in a political-strategic rather than a social-anthropological sense. Like everyone else, Indians are not always very clear or consistent in their thinking (not least because of the contradictory nature of the weapons themselves), which opens the door to uncertainty about what is appropriate, and potentially, to a needless expansion of nuclear capabilities. The book presents a line of reasoning that fortifies the historically restrained character of India's minimum deterrence posture.

The third relationship examined is that between the state and civil society. The centrality of this relationship, marked as it is by the last set of opposites mentioned above, is unquestionable. Ultimately, the security of the citizen is indivisible: protection against internal threats is an integral part of the security needs of the individual. And if, as is evident in the case of nuclear weapons, the search for external security detracts from the citizen's everyday security within the state, that is a serious problem that needs to be acknowledged and dealt with. Here too, minimum deterrence must be understood in the most comprehensive way, not only as a means to augment the security of a democratic society by countering external threats, but as a doctrine that minimizes the erosion of that democratic society by curtailing the inherently anti-democratic character of nuclear weapons.

The book journeys across territory that is intensely contested. It seeks to draw attention to optimal choices, but without laboring under the illusion that these choices are unambiguous. There is no scientific model here, only an attempt to navigate a difficult political course through perilous waters. Above all, this is a work about the fundamental politics of choice. It is about the conditions in which nuclear decisions are made, and about how, in a context in which these decisions inevitably have profound positive and negative effects, we might make them in such a way as to maximize the former and minimize the latter. The process of making choices must spring from Indians' own understanding of contemporary world politics. In a sense, this already exists. No other single fact better illustrates the uniqueness of the Indian position than that nearly a quarter-century elapsed between the first nuclear test of 1974 and the series conducted in 1998. India's eminently political conception of nuclear weapons, much derided by critics, has not been adequately explained, has indeed been imperfectly understood, by its own adherents. Hence, the choice of a minimalist nuclear posture lacks a sound conceptual basis in the ongoing discourse. This work is an attempt to fill the spaces between the theory and the practice of India's nuclear stance, an effort to create a stronger strategic discourse that is distinctively Indian in its strategic language and understanding, but within a framework of universal principles.

An important underlying thread running through the book is the understanding that the politics of nuclear weapons is conducted at two levels. At the primary level, there is a direct relationship between the existence of nuclear weapons and state behavior. The weapons, regardless of the strategies woven around them, produce patterns of caution and war-avoidance among states that possess them. From time to time, states strain at the leash, but inevitably they draw back, sobered by the prospect of mass annihilation. At the secondary level, there is an overlay of symbolic strategic politics in which states engage in moves and countermoves that have no real basis in the politics of the primary level. Nonetheless, this behavior has the potential to subvert the essential stability of the primary level. This is evident, for instance, in the politics of "bean counting," where much emphasis is placed on "balances" between numbers and types of weapons grossly in excess of the requirements of deterrence. This type of politics produces nuclear arms races that spiral upward toward ever higher levels of confrontation, thereby creating the very instability they seek to avoid. The secondary level includes the politics of prestige, which is about the self-image of nations as well as about the image that other nations have of them. This type of politics may motivate states to acquire nuclear weapons, or be unwilling to relinquish them, and hampers arms control. The Cold War embodied both types of nuclear politics, with the secondary level exercising an excessive influence on the policies of its contestants. The persistence of secondary nuclear politics, in part a game played for the benefit of corporate and bureaucratic players, accounts for some of the slowness of post-Cold War arms control. In India's case, the primary level has been dominant, and the secondary one restricted to image consciousness. An important purpose of this book is to contain the secondary level of nuclear politics, which produces no benefit (other than to vested interests) but invariably carries costs. These are not only economic costs-the price of large arsenals-but, more seriously, security costs-the rising levels of risk related to "vertical" proliferation and arms racing.

The question of motivation is not the focus of this work. That has been discussed at length in numerous scholarly works, all of them centering on one or more of Scott Sagan's three causal models: security, bureaucratic politics, and normative concerns. Rather, the purpose, while acknowledging the diverse reasons why states choose to go nuclear, is to provide a sound intellectual basis for minimum deterrence as the optimal nuclear doctrine and posture for the attainment of national security objectives. The central issue today is not whether India's actual decision to go nuclear was for the right reasons or not, but how to think about maximizing stability once the choice has been made. This involves a degree of optimism, since much that goes by the name of doctrine is devoid of substantive intellectual content. Nor is it assumed that doctrine is the necessary progenitor of nuclear posture, for politics often privileges parochial motives and uncontrollable processes. But hope springs eternal. The project is worthwhile because it may bring a modicum of clarity and effectiveness to an enterprise that is inherently hazardous in the extreme.

Outline of the Book

In this chapter, nuclear weapons are placed in the context of global politics. Any effort to develop a coherent nuclear strategy must begin with a cogent worldview. What is the appropriate conceptual framework for understanding the world around us? To what extent is it a world of cooperation and interdependence, and to what extent a world of conflict? What is the role of force in this world and, more specifically, what is the place of nuclear weapons in it? Such questions call for an assessment of alternative "paradigms" or ways of understanding the world. Within the broad canvas of the worldview that emerges, I discuss the fundamental characteristics of nuclear weapons and their role in the attainment of national security. These characteristics are often contradictory, which makes the formulation of policy difficult. What can nuclear weapons do and what can they not do? What have nuclear weapons done to politics and what is the politics of nuclear weapons? The answers to these questions set the parameters of cost-effective choice.

Chapter 2 focuses on the concept of minimum deterrence. Though Chapter 1 narrows the range within which optimal choices can be made, actual choices may and do vary considerably, from very large arsenals (the United States and Russia) to small ones (India and Pakistan), and beyond to what might be labeled "proto-arsenals" (Japan, Sweden). It is shown why minimum deterrence, which itself encompasses a range of potential postures, is optimal. Its various facets-deployment, delivery vehicles, targeting, and perennially debated questions about escalation, preemption, stability, and damage limitation-are analyzed in terms of the pivotal calculation of potential risk in relation to strategic objectives. Less, it is argued, is invariably better.

Chapter 3 focuses on the evolution of India's deterrence thinking and practice, and the crystallization of India's strategic culture of nuclear minimalism. This approach to nuclear weapons is the most conducive to the rational requirements of minimum deterrence as understood through the discussion in Chapter 2. However, strategic culture is not static. It evolves over time and needs to be reinforced if it is not to lose its bearings and carry strategy away from cost-effectiveness. Indian strategic culture has a tendency to drift toward operational conceptions whose implications are not very well understood, and hence toward the expansion of capability without a clear conception of what is sufficient. The critique ends with a call for self-awareness, balance, and consistent observance of the precepts of minimum deterrence.

Chapter 4 underscores the lack of clarity in Indian thinking in a different respect. Though it is often said that nuclear weapons are meant only to deter, they may also be used-and on numerous occasions have been-more "proactively" to induce specific behaviors in an adversary. The chapter examines at length the shift in Indian strategy from deterrence to compellence vis--vis Pakistan. This shift carries intrinsic difficulties, however, because compellence is a difficult objective to achieve, and because the risks of escalation are considerable. The analysis concludes that minimum deterrence overrides compellence, and that the latter is not a viable strategy for India.

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Excerpted from Minimum Deterrence and India's Nuclear Securityby Rajesh M. Basrur Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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