ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

The Rediff Special/ Gaurav Kampani

Barking Up The Wrong Tree

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's recent air campaign against the Yugoslav rump-state has produced a curious shift in the Indian strategic elite's pronouncements. An influential minority in the National Security Council's advisory board has hit upon the dubious idea that an Indian nuclear force would deter global sheriffs like the United States from subjecting India to the air bombardment and cruise missile diplomacy which has been used against countries like Yugoslavia, Iraq and Sudan.

The argument propounded by some strategic pundits in New Delhi is that a limited war of the kind waged in Kosovo makes India's 1998 nuclear tests justified in retrospect. Had Yugoslavia or Iraq possessed nuclear weapons, the US would not have dared to bomb them. The conclusion: a nuclear force is necessary for India to retain strategic autonomy and deter limited foreign interventions of the type that took place in Kosovo.

At first glance, the above argument is seductive. In the popular mind, and even in the minds of strategic analysts, the theology that nuclear weapons deter limited conventional wars appears very convincing. After all, nuclear weapons and the doctrine of nuclear "first-use" remain central to NATO's military strategy. From the late 1940s, the US apparently deterred a conventionally more powerful Soviet Union in Europe, by threatening to unleash its nuclear arsenal first. The Cold War is supposedly testimony to the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence.

The case in favour of nuclear weapons, according to these analysts, has assumed even greater significance in the post-Cold War era. Unlike the Cold War years when the US and its NATO allies brandished their nuclear shield to deter the more-powerful Warsaw Pact conventional forces in Europe, tables have now turned. Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the revolution in military affairs (RMA), the US and its allies together now enjoy an overwhelming conventional military superiority. Other regional powers simply do not have the economic resources or the technological-industrial base to match the US' lead in precision-strike, surveillance, and information- gathering and processing technologies. Hence, the clever way to deter limited US military strikes would be to rely on nuclear weapons. Implicit in this argument is the proposition that emerging powers like India should rely on nuclear weapons to deter superior conventional forces.

In this essay, I argue that the above proposition is flawed. It is based on a simplistic understanding of the US strategy of extended deterrence in Western Europe. It also does not account for shifts in NATO's military posture during the past four decades; NATO and the US, despite an avowed dependence on nuclear weapons and the doctrine of "first-use," have become increasingly reliant on high-tech conventional means for actual war-fighting purposes. Second, India's declared nuclear employment doctrine of "no-first-use," and the envisioned architecture of India's minimum deterrent render the task of deterring limited conventional wars with nuclear means incredible. Third, deterring conventional forces with nuclear means would require India to abandon its nuclear "no-first-use" principle in favor of "first-use;" it would also necessitate heavy investments in a nuclear war-fighting capability, something that is well beyond India's current economic, organizational, and technological means. Abandoning "no-first-use" would not only entail a heavy moral and political price, but investments in a nuclear war-fighting capability would invariably come at the expense of a robust conventional defence. This course would leave India's national security managers with two dangerous options in case of a limited conventional war: defeat or national suicide.

NATO and Nuclear Weapons

Historically, during the Cold War years, despite NATO's stated reliance on nuclear weapons to deter and blunt a Soviet conventional strike across Western Europe, nuclear weapons were really weapons of bluff. Even before 1949, when it enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, the US had concluded in private that a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union's vital economic and urban concentrations would not lead to a Soviet defeat. US war plans virtually conceded Western Europe and envisaged the use of conventional weapons in case of another general war in Europe.

This policy was briefly reversed in the mid-1950s by the Eisenhower administration. Concern for fiscal stability and mounting defence expenditures led President Eisenhower to propose the "New Look" or what subsequently became known as "massive retaliation." The new policy attempted to conventionalise nuclear war and substituted conventional weapons with nuclear firepower. In order to avoid getting into a ruinous conventional arms race with the Soviets, the US threatened to use nuclear weapons massively against even limited Soviet or Communist incursions at a time and place of its own choosing.

However, critics soon pointed out that "massive retaliation" was incredible. After all, once the Soviet Union had built up its own nuclear forces in the 1950s, it could inflict unacceptable damage on the US. Nuclear weapons could not so easily be conventionalised. Once the initial firebreak between conventional and nuclear weapons had been made, there was no predicting how a war would end. A nuclear war could easily spin out of control and result in a holocaust. Further, military exercises during the 1950s showed that nuclear weapons use, even on a tactical scale, would cause as much damage to the defender, as to any invading force.

During the 1960s, these arguments persuaded the Kennedy administration to switch from "massive retaliation" to a "flexible response," which emphasised the build up of conventional forces to meet a localised response. Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defence secretary, argued that the United States should not have to rely on nuclear weapons for the lack of conventional options.

The Kennedy administration therefore started leaning toward "symmetrical response." A "symmetrical response" envisaged the use of conventional forces to meet a conventional attack. Nuclear weapons would be used only in the aftermath of their use by the Soviet Union. To allay concerns of its West European allies that the US was diluting its nuclear guarantee, NATO acknowledged the need to possess the capability for "deliberate escalation" to the nuclear level and "general nuclear response."

By the late 1960s it became clear that NATO's military doctrine had shifted from a strategy of nuclear use at the very outset of a conventional war to a high probability of nuclear weapons use, the outcome of which could be both unpredictable and catastrophic. The real deterrent now was the uncertainty surrounding nuclear escalation.

This policy underwent further changes during the 1970s and '80s. By then the Soviet Union had attained strategic parity with the US. It also began deploying theatre nuclear forces in Europe. A nuclear response to a Soviet conventional attack, for all practical purposes, was now out of the question. In fact, it was both incredible and undesirable. Incredible, because conditions of nuclear parity made it highly unlikely that the US strategic arsenal might be used at all. And undesirable because nuclear weapons use, even on a limited scale, would result in the destruction of the attacker as well as the defender.

Hence, the challenge before the US and NATO was to revitalise conventional defence to blunt a Soviet attack and prolong conventional war until diplomacy could intervene to halt a conflict. How was NATO to achieve this? The technological breakthroughs in the labs in Western Europe and the US seemed to provide a potential answer. NATO and the US could for the first time hope to rely on qualitatively superior technologies to defeat a numerically superior foe. "Emerging Technologies" or ET involved advances in precision guidance, remote guidance and control, munitions improvements, target identification and acquisition, and command, control, communications, and electronic warfare.

Although the emergence of these technologies was evolutionary, their eventual impact on the battlefield would prove to be revolutionary. As early as 1982, the US Army in Europe adopted the Air Land Battlefield concept. This called for integrating all land and air assets and converting the entire battlefield into a three-dimensional continuum with no fixed lines or fixed notions of time and space. All air and land battles in a theatre would be merged into a seamless battlefield. While air and ground forces would engage an invading foe on the frontlines, air power would deploy long-range surveillance and targeting technologies, as well as precision-strike assets, to engage and destroy the enemy's war-fighting and war making capabilities deep in the rear.

Of course, the shift to a more robust conventional defence from the late 1970s did not mean that NATO abandoned its political reliance on nuclear weapons. Theatre nuclear forces were modernised and the doctrine of nuclear first-use retained to keep the risks of a war to the Soviet Union incalculable. Nevertheless, the US and NATO increasingly began to rely on qualitatively superior conventional forces to deter and defeat a Soviet attack.

This policy has reached its logical conclusion in the post-Cold War era. With the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War, the US has withdrawn all theatre and 80 percent of its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe. Nuclear weapons no longer serve any military purpose; instead, they serve a political purpose. Nuclear weapons now make the risks of a large-scale war in the Euro-Atlantic region incalculable and prevent nuclear coercion. Unlike the 1950s, however, nuclear weapons are no longer viewed as tools to be employed in a limited conventional war. Their role has become symbolic.

A Nuclear First-Use Doctrine for India?

However, let us cast aside the subtleties in the US-extended deterrence policy or changes in NATO's military posture for a moment and turn our attention to India. In the Indian case, the idea that nuclear weapons should be used to deter conventional forces or limited foreign intervention is absurd for other reasons. It violates India's stated moral and political rationale to cross the nuclear threshold. It also contradicts India's declared "no-first-use" doctrine. Moreover, India does not have and is unlikely to have either a nuclear strike force or the requisite nuclear war management capability to threaten a first-strike or prevail in a nuclear war against any first- or second-tier nuclear weapon state in the short- and medium-term.

Although India invested in a dual-use nuclear capability and after China's entry into the nuclear club in 1964, could never really rule out a nuclear option, it never subscribed to principles of either nuclear arms racing or doctrines of nuclear war-fighting. Both were considered morally repugnant, politically predatory, and from a military perspective, a strategic dead-end. Nuclear war-fighting was considered morally repugnant because it blurred the distinction between civilian and the military; nuclear weapons were not regarded as weapons of war; they were viewed as weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons were predatory, as they constituted potential instruments of hegemony and coercion. In addition, militarily, a nuclear war would constitute a strategic dead-end as the destruction caused after even a limited nuclear exchange would be disproportionate to any imaginable political objective. A nuclear war could not be won and would invariably result in the annihilation of all.

The nuclear devotees who advocated nuclearisation for India always did so with two objectives in mind. First, India could not accept a discriminatory nuclear order; in other words, India could not accept nuclear apartheid. There would either have to be universal nuclear disarmament or in the absence of which, equal and legitimate security for all. Second, the nuclear lobby in India made a case for a credible and survivable nuclear deterrent to strengthen India's national security against potential Chinese nuclear coercion.

Thus, India sought to weaponise its nuclear capability on the principles of equal and legitimate security for all. In the aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests, the Indian government declared that India's nuclear strategy would be defensive. India would seek nuclear weapons only to deter potential nuclear aggressors or would-be aggressors by threatening to unleash unacceptable damage through nuclear retaliation. Most importantly, India, aware of its responsibility as a nuclear weapon state, would not seek security against other nuclear weapon or non-nuclear weapon states through the "first-use" of nuclear weapons. For these reasons, the Indian government declared a nuclear "no-first-use" employment doctrine.

Hence, the new thinking and advocacy on nuclear weapons use for purposes of conventional deterrence is politically and ideologically inconsistent with the declaration of the Indian government. This new advocacy marks the beginning of a new debate, the logical end of which could be the reversal of India's current "no-first-use" doctrine and the reproduction of the nuclear war-fighting doctrines of the Cold War era.

Of even greater significance to the debate is the fact that India is unlikely to have a nuclear strike force or the attendant nuclear war management capability for a secure retaliatory capability against China, let alone a first-tier nuclear weapon state like the US, for most of next decade. The Indian government's declaration of intent to build a secure, survivable, and credible minimum deterrent has not yet been translated into a tangible capability on the ground.

To threaten nuclear attack against a first-tier nuclear state like the US would require investments in an all horizons ( tous azimthus) nuclear force. Such a nuclear force would not only require an intercontinental strike capability, but it would also need to be survivable, and backed up by a robust surveillance and command, control, communications, and intelligence infrastructure. Thus far, India barely has a few dozen nuclear weapons. These are probably bombs deliverable by aircraft and some nuclear warheads may also be deliverable by the short-range Prithvi ballistic missile (150-250 kilometres).

However, India does not have the strategic reach to deter nuclear strikes from potential foes like China. The acquisition of such a capability will have to await the development of longer-range delivery systems like the Agni III and IV. The nuclear strike and war management assets (technical and human) needed for India to threaten a nuclear first-strike against countries like the US, are clearly beyond its economic, technological, military, and organisational capabilities at present, and are likely to remain so in the foreseeable future.

Thus, "first-use" in the absence of a credible military capability, would be tantamount to a strategy of bluff. Instead of ensuring security and deterring conventional attacks, it will create strategic instability and increase pressures during any future political crisis for a pre-emptive and decapitating strike on India's political leadership and small nuclear force.

Nuclear Weapons and Conventional Deterrence

Nuclear weapons can deter nuclear attacks. However, they also raise the threshold for conflicts and do not always deter conventional and sub-conventional wars. In fact, the historical record shows several cases of deterrence failure or near-failure during the Cold War years. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is one such example. The 1969 Soviet-Chinese border clashes along the Ussuri River another. In the post-Cold War era, China's nuclear capability failed to prevent the US from threatening China by deploying two carrier task forces during the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis.

One of the central rules of the nuclear revolution is Glenn-Snyder's "Stability-Instability paradox." This means that whereas nuclear weapons confer stability at the top, there is instability at the bottom. Thus, although large-scale or total conventional wars between nuclear states may be unlikely (because of fears that a full-scale conventional war might escalate to a nuclear level), the chances of a sub-conventional or limited-conventional war, or a war along the periphery are quite high.

During the Cold War, for example, the central balance in Europe remained unchallenged. Nonetheless, this did not prevent the superpowers from pursuing proxy wars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The situation in the Indian subcontinent is no different. Nuclear deterrence has ensured that India and Pakistan will be reluctant to confront each other in a large-scale conventional war; but this does not prevent either country from waging low-intensity conflicts, or as the recent Kargil crisis attests, limited-conventional wars against one another.

In the recent Kargil war, India not only ruled out using nuclear weapons, but also for political reasons, refrained from escalating or widening the conventional war. The Indian Army and Air Force were ordered not to cross the international Line of Control or widen the war along other points. Neither did the Indian Navy sever Pakistan's sea-lanes. This decision had very little to do with military logic; in fact, it went against the fundamentals of military strategy. Without crossing the LoC, the Indian Army was unable to cut off the militants' supply routes. Without an option to widen the war where they would have enjoyed a natural advantage, India's armed forces were unable to relieve pressure or divert the enemy's attention. In this case, fears of escalation to the nuclear level, internationalisation of the Kashmir question, and great power intervention to prevent a nuclear crisis, forced the Indian political decision-makers to keep the conflict localised.

Similarly, another crisis like the one that was caused by the US deployment of its 7th Fleet in the Bay of Bengal in 1971, would have to be met using conventional means for three reasons. First, the US deployment would be unlikely to threaten the fundamental existence of the Indian state. Thus, for India to threaten nuclear retaliation would be disproportionate to any political and military objectives that New Delhi might hope to achieve. Second, India has a declared "no-first-use" nuclear employment doctrine. Nuclear "first-use" or the threat of use would be in violation of this doctrine. Finally, even if India were to abandon "no-first-use" in favour of "first-use," it would lack the nuclear military capability to make good that threat.

An analysis of the security threats and the wars fought by India over the last four decades suggests that in the coming decade, India will likely face two kinds of military threats. The first will be internal, emerging from the collapse of the Indian state with resultant militarisation of conflicts within civil society. Examples of this can already be seen in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where private armies have already challenged and displaced the exclusive right of the Indian State to bear arms and adjudicate conflicts. The second kind of threat will come from insurgency operations and limited conventional wars along the border such as the 1962 China war or the kind that was waged in Kargil recently.

To combat the first, the Indian State will need to restore the process and institutions of governance; it will also have to invest in well-trained, and highly-motivated paramilitary forces. The second will require extensive modernisation of India's conventional military machine, which is now on the edge of an obsolescence overhang. Despite mounting concerns, conventional modernisation and operational readiness are two areas that have been ignored by Indian defence planners. India's armed services have been on a capital holiday for nearly a decade and are now reeling under the impact of shrinking budgets and equipment and spares shortages. Expanding internal security duties and limited budgets have also affected training schedules and overall operational readiness.

The total cost of capital modernisation for conventional forces has been projected at $15-20 billion during the coming decade. Similarly, a small nuclear force could cost as much or even more. Thus, Indian defence planners are faced with difficult choices. They could either plan on a symbolic role for nuclear weapons and concentrate on a conventional military build-up to develop a countervailing and usable military capability in consonance with India's real security problems. Alternatively, they could invest in the proposed nuclear deterrent and imperil conventional force modernisation. Given India's fiscal constraints, they cannot do both.

Were Indian security planners to invest in a nuclear deterrent at the expense of conventional force modernisation, the end consequences of that policy could be tragic. From a military perspective, nuclear weapons would have only symbolic purposes. Domestically, nuclear artifacts could serve as symbols of modernity and feats of organisational skill to enhance the prestige and legitimise the authority of the Indian State. Externally, they would convey India's formal rejection of nuclear apartheid and resolve to become accepted as a great power. But beyond that, nuclear weapons would serve no purpose.

In order to fight limited conventional wars like the one in Kargil, or deter limited foreign interventions like the US' 1971 naval deployment in the Bay of Bengal, India would have to rely on conventional means. However, a conventional military machine that suffers from obsolescence due to investments in a nuclear deterrent, or lacks operational readiness due to internal security duties, would become vulnerable to defeat on a modern battlefield. Faced with defeat, Indian planners could then threaten to escalate to a nuclear level, a course of action, which would be both incredible and suicidal.

Conclusion

Clearly, the preponderance of historical evidence shows that nuclear weapons do not deter foreign interventions. Neither do they prevent conventional or sub-conventional wars. If anything, a nuclear umbrella makes it safer for states to wage limited-conventional and sub-conventional wars.

Indian strategists' attempts to draw parallels with NATO's reliance on nuclear deterrence and "first-use" are misplaced because they oversimplify extended deterrence and ignore the shifts in the alliance's military posture over the past four decades. Starting in the late 1960s, advances in conventional weaponry have reduced the salience of nuclear weapons as instruments of war. Nuclear weapons, because of their nature as weapons of mass destruction, had led to the complete blurring of the lines between civilian and military operations. However, modern conventional warfare, with its reliance on advanced surveillance and precision-strike technologies, has begun to reverse that historic blurring so that war can once again become a fight between professional armed forces. Also, the revolution in military affairs now makes possible the precise application of military power to achieve limited and concrete political goals.

In India, the advocacy on limited nuclear war-fighting goes against this historical trend. It undermines India's principled political and moral position against weapons of mass destruction. India's "no-first-use" nuclear employment doctrine also stands contradicted. To deter foreign intervention or limited-conventional wars with nuclear means, India would have to abandon its "no-first-use" doctrine in favour of "first-use." Such a stance would reverse India's historic aversion for nuclear warfare; it would also have little or no correlation to existing military capability on the ground. As argued above, India does not and is unlikely to have the resources or the technological width and depth to field a nuclear strike force with a global reach, or the accompanying nuclear battle management capability to make that threat credible in the foreseeable future. Instead of ensuring security, a nuclear "first-strike" doctrine would invite strategic instability. Worse, the resources sunk into a nuclear deterrent would delay further the more pressing need for conventional modernisation.

Thus far, arguments favouring nuclear weapons for purposes of conventional deterrence have not led to any changes in the Indian government's policy. These arguments first surfaced during NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, but they ended just as quickly, especially after the US leaned on Pakistan to vacate the heights on India's side of the LoC in Kashmir. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to imagine that these arguments would have acquired greater salience had there been any attempt to internationalise the Kashmir issue or a threat of great power intervention. Although the idea has become temporarily eclipsed by an unanticipated turn of events, it has not been defeated in the intellectual marketplace. Indeed, the nuclear bomb lobby in New Delhi has had a field day arguing positions without either analysing their overall implications or thinking the entire process through.

A year after India conducted nuclear tests, the Indian government has not yet defined the architecture of India's proposed minimum deterrent. In the absence of a clear decision, one is forced to arrive at the startling conclusion that the government and its national security team do not perceive nuclear threats at an operational level, and in the absence of which, are content to make ex-post-facto rationalisations to justify India going nuclear.

Gaurav Kampani is a Research Associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the CNS or the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

The Rediff Specials

Tell us what you think of this feature