[sacw] An American history of the Indian Bomb

[Harsh Kapoor]

FYI
(South Asian Against Nukes)
____________
The Times of India
Wednesday 17 November 1999

An American history of the Indian Bomb

By RAMESH CHANDRAN

WASHINGTON: A doyen amongst South Asian analysts, Stephen Cohen of
Brookings Institution says it is a book he wishes "he had written,'' one
that will have an "important impact" on the current and future policy
debate in the United States, India and Pakistan. India's Nuclear Bomb: The
Impact on Global Proliferation by George Perkovich, director of the Secure
World Program of the W Alton Jones Foundation, is first and foremost an
analytic history of how India's nuclear explosive program evolved from its
inception in 1947 through to the early aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear
tests.

In this fastidiously researched book, which took six years to complete, a
number of new nuggets of information and fresh insights emerge. The early
chapters analyse the thinking of Pandit Nehru and Homi Bhabha. Others look
at the status of India's technical capabilities which were ``different than
what Indian leaders and especially Bhabha claimed.''

Certain revelations in the book concern US intelligence assessments and
policies towards India. Others look at how India's nuclear decisions were
made and who was involved and who was excluded. The book delves into the
issue of the ``military's exclusion from nuclear policymaking and how the
nuclear scientists joined with prime ministers in preferring this.'' It
makes an earnest attempt to provide insights into how the ``Nation of
Mahatma Gandhi'' grappled with the twin desires to have and renounce the
bomb. Mr Perkovich told the Times of India responding to a specific query
on Indian scientists' ability to build and deliver nuclear fission weapons
without testing in the late 1980s, ``Such devices would only have been used
in extremes. A few weapons could have been assembled and mounted on
aircraft in retaliation to a nuclear attack on India but this capability
was not as robust and as proven as a country would want if it were
intending to deploy nuclear weapons in an overt manner and develop a
militarily robust nuclear posture and doctrine.''

He added: ``For a robust, high confidence capability, the military would
have insisted on testing. Yet, one can argue persuasively that the basic
retaliatory capacity India had was sufficient to deter its adversaries at
the time. India's know-how and capacity to assemble fission weapons for
air-delivery were enough to deter Pakistan from initiating a large-scale
war against India, and were enough to reinforce China's general perception
that there is nothing worth fighting India over.''

India's ``strategic enclave'' -- comprising gifted men like Homi Bhaba and
others had made many claims about technical self-reliance. But Perkovich
points out that, notwithstanding their talents, they depended extensively
on foreign technology and know-how and required more time than commonly
recognised to produce effective nuclear weapons. The author also writes
probingly about how the history of India's nuclear policymaking exposed
larger illusions in American international relations theory and nuclear
nonproliferation policy. The author who met virtually everyone remotely
associated with India's nuclear policy or who have written on the subject
in both India as well as in the United States told the TOI that "India's
nuclear weapon capabilities were developed in a continuous, albeit slow and
steady manner following a lull between 1975 and 1980. Throughout the 1980s,
work was done to refine calculations and designs, to test non-nuclear
components of devices and generally to develop the capacity to build
lighter, smaller explosive devices."

Perkovich, who is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and
the International Institute for Strategic Studies, adds that Rajiv Gandhi
"authorised an acceleration of this work and this continued under Narasimha
Rao. One way to understand this is to recognise that the short-lived BJP
government in 1996 authorised a nuclear test, and whatever devices were
then going to be tested had been developed under the Congress governments
before it. I describe in the book how that tentative decision was suspended
by Vajpayee even prior to his government's loss of the no-confidence vote.
But the bigger point is that the nuclear capability evolved steadily
throughout the 1980s and 90s. It is technically impossible that vital
elements of the bombs tested in May 1998 had not been designed under
earlier Congress governments, including Rajiv's.''

Asked about his extensive remarks in the book about India's "strategic
enclave" dependence on foreign technology and know-how, Perkovich points
out that he was "primarily referring to India's civilian nuclear program
which has always failed even remotely to reach its targets for electricity
production. The power production was badly hurt by the cut-off of foreign
assistance following the 1974 PNE, and it has never recovered. This has
been acknowledged for several years as Indian governments have opened the
way to foreign ownership and supply of nuclear plants, and now actively try
to court Western and Japanese suppliers to break the export embargo.''

On the nuclear weapons side, Perkovich maintains that the ``Indian
scientists and engineers benefited from various forms of outside
assistance: reactors, heavy water; declassified literature on isotopes;
blueprints and information for tritium separation; literature on implosion
systems for weapons; and so on.Yet, assistance in the form of major
technology has been blocked for decades and Indian teams have developed
self-sufficiency in designing and building nuclear weapons.''

Perkovich said that the broader point is that every state with nuclear
weapons has benefited from contributions by others in one form or another.
He pointed out that the first US bomb was largely the product of work by
scientists from Europe. The Soviet bomb benefited enormously from espionage
from the U.S. The Chinese bomb was developed with ``modest assistance''
from the Soviet Union. The British bomb emerged from collaboration with the
US in the Manhattan Project. France helped Israel extensively. China helped
Pakistan enormously. ``So this focus on how indigenous India's bomb
capabilities are seems peculiar. Perhaps it is a hangover from colonialism
in two ways: Indians want to insist on self-sufficiency to repudiate any
sense of colonialism, while some of the major powers may want to highlight
India's dependence in a sort of subconscious message that a poor country
like India could not get by without help. But it's a rather silly
discussion," he added.

One of the more tantalising segments of India's Nuclear Bomb is when
Perkovich dwells upon the civilian and military decision making apparatus.
Asked to elaborate on this subject, the author told this paper: ``Indian
leaders from the beginning insisted on ensuring that the military was
subordinate to civilian leadership, in part to guarantee democracy and
avoid the sort of coups that were common in post-colonial states.Pakistan
is the most unfortunate example of this tendency. The Indian military has
heroically embraced this deference to civilian control with great dignity.
Thus, the exclusion of the military from the nuclear policymaking is an
extension of this general pattern. There is a specific dimension to it,
however, insofar as India's political leaders have been very ambivalent
about nuclear weapons.''

The author points out that India's civilian leaders have seen nuclear
weapons as ``political instruments'' than as military usable devices, and
they have had little faith in the kinds of ``hyperactive, excessively
robust and dangerous nuclear doctrines that were developed and adopted by
the defence establishments of the US and the Soviet Union. And he adds:
``So politicians were especially keen to keep the military from
militarising India's nuclear program. In this the politicians have been
joined by the scientists who have no interest in losing their relative
autonomy in the nuclear enterprise. The scientists do not want the military
to specify what kinds of weapons are needed, in what quantities. They don't
want the military to establish performance criteria and evaluate the work
of the scientists.''

Perkovich suggests that the military is perceived as being ``potential
rivals'' to the scientists and pointed out: ``Some of the military officers
I interviewed suggest that there is a caste dimension to the relationship:
the scientists have tended to be Brahmins and they may have a diminished
regard for the military who are generally not Brahmins. There is also an
economic dimension--once nuclear weapons become part of military planning,
requirements inevitably go up. Military leaders do worst case assessments
and conclude they need greater numbers of weapons, more robust command and
control, delegation of launch authority,and so forth.''

All of this raises requirements and expenses and Perkovich said: ``So if
politicians who are responsible for the nation's overall economic
well-being and expenditures want to focus on development priorities, they
will be reluctant to create pressures to increase defence spending.

The National Security Advisory Board and other strategists now say that
nuclear weapons will not allow a reduction in conventional forces, but
actually require an increase in conventional force expenditures to raise
the threshold of nuclear use. India's nuclear ambitions will now raise
overall defence spending and the cost will rise dramatically to the extent
that the military become involved in setting operational requirements for a
deployed arsenal.

India's Nuclear Bomb, which K Subrahmanyam describes as a ``highly nuanced
and sensitive narration of the complex interaction between domestic and
external factors that led to the nuclear tests of May 1998'' is scheduled
for release in India in January 2000 through Oxford University press.