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Inside Nuclear South Asia

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Inside Nuclear South Asia Scott D. Sagan.............................................................................................................11. The BJP and the Bomb Kanti Bajpai...............................................................................................................................252. Testing Theories of Proliferation in South Asia Karthika Sasikumar and Christopher Way..........................................................................683. Contra-Proliferation: Interpreting the Meanings of India's Nuclear Tests in 1974 and 1998 Itty Abraham..........................................................1064. Pride and Prejudice and Prithvis: Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia Vipin Narang.........................................................................1375. Revisionist Ambitions, Conventional Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe S. Paul Kapur.....................1846. The Evolution of Pakistani and Indian Nuclear Doctrine Scott D. Sagan...........................................................................................219Contributors........................................................................................................................................................265Index...............................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

ON MAY 11 AND 13, 1998, India exploded a total of five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Since 1974, when India first tested a nuclear device, there had been an expectation that New Delhi would once again test and perhaps go nuclear outright. Yet the 1998 series of tests caught most Indians and the world by surprise. Why did India test after a gap of twenty-four years? Most accounts and explanations of the Indian nuclear tests-including the government's own public statements-have focused on the strategic rationale for India's nuclear program. Much less attention has been paid to the domestic roots of the decision to test. What role did domestic political considerations play in the Indian government's decision?

This chapter addresses two questions about domestic politics and the Indian nuclear bomb. First, what were the domestic political incentives for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in March 1998, to test barely six weeks later? Second, what were the domestic political effects of the BJP's decision to test nuclear weapons? Here, I focus on how the BJP remained politically unscathed despite a series of crises with Pakistan in the Indian part of Kashmir after the party took a series of positions and initiatives that were either palpable failures or that contradicted earlier stands. Why was the party not taken to task by the public and not hurt politically, including in the 1999 elections that occurred just after the Kargil War?

I have put the BJP at the center of my analysis. Although the BJP was only one of the twenty or so parties that made up the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that came to power in March 1998, it was the single largest party in the alliance and indeed the largest party in India in terms of the number of seats in Parliament. The prime ministership and the most important cabinet posts were with the BJP. There was an enormous struggle for domestic supremacy, primarily between the BJP and the Congress. Other parties may have been affected by the tests, but it was the BJP that made the decision to test and that stood to benefit or lose from it.

In bringing domestic politics into an understanding of India's nuclear tests and in asking how the consequences of post-test security policies can be explained, I do not intend to suggest that international politics played no role in the behavior of Indian leaders. It would be bizarre if Indian leaders' decision making on nuclear weapons was completely unrelated to their understanding of international politics and the challenges to national security. Conversely, in an increasingly globalized world, domestic politics are always influenced by the external world-by conflicts, pressures, and ideas stemming from foreign governments and societies. There can therefore be no purely external/ international and internal/domestic understanding of either international or domestic politics. Instead, what is needed is a careful weighing of the influence of different factors on important political decisions.

Put another way, political leaders are influenced both by international structural imperatives to assure the security of their societies in an anarchical world and by domestic constraints and opportunities. The decision to build a nuclear weapons program and to validate its effectiveness by testing may well arise out of the need to assure one's security in a self-help international system where there is no central authority either to adjudicate between member states or to enforce certain norms of behavior. Faced in particular by other states that possess nuclear weapons, especially those who are "rivals," governments will be pressed to seek a deterrent.

As Kenneth Waltz and other structural realists have argued, the incentive to follow such a course is strong. It is not, however, inevitable. States may choose to ignore structural pressures to balance themselves against rivals. They may eventually, as a result, be eliminated as sovereign entities in the international system or else, at the limit, be physically destroyed. Agents do have choices, however limited these may be. They must at some point make a decision to ensure their survival by investing in the requisite forms of military power (whether they do so by seeking another's protection or by their own efforts)-or face the possibility of capitulation or destruction. The point at which they take this decision, indeed the nature of the decision itself (to seek protection or to rely on one's own strength, to seek security guarantees or to build a nuclear deterrent) depends on a variety of domestic resources, self-understandings, conjunctions, and circumstances.

Specifically, in respect to building a nuclear weapons program, a state must at the very least possess the science and technology and natural resources (e.g., uranium), the financial resources, the military sophistication, and the public's support to construct a deterrent. Public support for a nuclear deterrent may come from an understanding of national security imperatives, but it may also come from deeper wellsprings of identity-from nationalism, from the desire to display one's sovereignty, from conceptions of modernity. Leaders may use national security arguments and/or powerful social-psychological emotions to affirm a national identity in their own narrower political interests-in the cut and thrust of domestic politics, to outmaneuver political rivals, ensure their own survival, enlarge their power, and stifle opposition. It is this last domestic perspective that we shall put forth in this chapter. The argument is that India's...