Nuclear policy of India. Flashcards
Nuclear History of India.
India built its first research reactor in 1956 and its first plutonium reprocessing plant by 1964.
India’s nuclear programme can trace its origins to March 1944 and its three-stage efforts in technology were established by Homi Jehangir Bhabha when he founded the nuclear research centre, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. India’s loss to China in a brief Himalayan border war in October 1962, provided the Indian government impetus for developing nuclear weapons as a means of deterring potential Chinese aggression. By 1964 India was in a position to develop nuclear weapons. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974 (code-named “Smiling Buddha”), under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which it called a “peaceful nuclear explosion.”
Nuclear Policy of India
India’s nuclear policy is determined not just by Nehru’s perspective. Other factors that influenced it were the domestic variables like the uncertain political climate of the country and the influence of the bureaucracy.
The decision to build a nuclear force was taken only in the late eighties after evidence surfaced that Pakistan, with Chinese help, had made huge advancements in the nuclear weapons program.
Bureaucratic influence came from some defence scientists who played a key part in keeping the nuclear weapons program alive even without political support, and facing opposition as well.
Other bureaucrats developed political awareness about the country’s dwindling nuclear options. Nevertheless, these variables suggest a moderate Indian approach to nuclear weapons and thus reinforce the dominant tendency towards a political rather a military approach to looking at nuclear weapons.
They neither suggest any dramatic changes nor rapid advances in India’s nuclear weapons programme.
The Purpose of India’s Nuclear Weapons
Former Prime Ministers Lal Bahadur Shastri and Rajiv Gandhi sought international solutions to avoid committing to nuclear weapons; former Prime Minister Morarji Desai shut down the weapons program for a while.
Even Prime Minister A B Vajpayee, who ordered the nuclear tests in 1998, was more ambivalent earlier, supporting Morarji Desai in voting against restarting the nuclear weapons program in 1979.
Increasing nuclear threats and a progressively unaccommodating global nuclear order forced GOI to shift towards a declared nuclear arsenal in the 1990s. This discomfort with nuclear weapons has defined the manner in which India has viewed nuclear weapons.
past works.
It was only in the 1980s that some Indian strategists such as K. Subrahmanyam and General K. Sundarji started writing about what nuclear weapons might be useful for. This also coincided with greater attention among decision-makers to such questions.
Both Sundarji and Subrahmanyam argued that the kind of bloated nuclear arsenals that the US and the Soviet Union developed during the Cold War were needless and inefficient.
Nuclear deterrence could be had at a far cheaper cost, with a relatively small arsenal. In essence, as Tellis has argued, what Sundarji and Subrahmanyam were suggesting was a view of nuclear weapons that emphasized its political rather than military utility, its deterrence rather than war-fighting capability.
This view of the political utility of nuclear weapons is also reflected in arguments about nuclear weapons offering political space and strategic autonomy, arguments that former Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has made.
Predictably, the eventual Indian nuclear deterrent emphasized small numbers and a capability to retaliate, instead of developing a restraining force that would have parity with other nuclear powers.
Views of India.
Though India objected to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), it has seen proliferation itself as a danger to international peace and stability and has time and again flaunted its “exemplary non-proliferation record of four decades and more.”
Thus the Indian view of the spread of nuclear weapons is essentially unalike the ‘more may be better’ arguments of proliferation optimists like Kenneth Waltz, or even the drastic rejection of the non-proliferation concept by China before 1991.
Indian officials do not think that nuclear weapons have stabilized the region; rather they believe that nuclear weapons in Pakistani hands increase the nuclear risk in the region because Pakistan is seen as irresponsible. This fits a larger pattern of contradiction which assumes that other powers, Pakistan in particular, will not be as responsible as India has been.
INDIA’s first nuclear test.
Operation Smiling Buddha[a] (MEA designation: Pokhran-I) was the assigned code name of India’s first successful nuclear bomb test on 18 May 1974. The bomb was detonated on the army base Pokhran Test Range (PTR), in Rajasthan, by the Indian Army under the supervision of several key Indian generals.
Pokhran-I was also the first confirmed nuclear weapons test by a nation outside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Officially, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) characterised this test as a “peaceful nuclear explosion”. Indira Gandhi, then the Prime Minister of India, saw a massive rise in popularity following this test. After this, a series of nuclear tests were carried out in 1998 under the name Pokhran-II.
STATS.
1.Nuclear programme start date --1967 (55 years ago) 2. First nuclear weapon test-- 18 May 1974 (48 years ago) 3. First fusion weapon test --11 May 1998 (24 years ago) 4. Most recent test-- 13 May 1998 (24 years ago) 5. Largest-yield test--- 45 kilotons of TNT (190 TJ); Scale down of 200 kt model 6. Number of tests to date ---4 (6 Devices fired) 7. Peak stockpile --160 warheads (2022 estimate) 8. Current stockpil--160 warheads 9. NPT Party -No
Maximum Missile range of INDIA.
Agni-V - 5,500 to 8,000 kilometres or
3,400 to 5,000 miles
India’s NO FIRST-USE POLICY.
India has a declared nuclear no-first-use policy and is in the process of developing a nuclear doctrine based on “credible minimum deterrence.” In August 1999, the Indian government released a draft of the doctrine which asserts that nuclear weapons are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of “retaliation only”. The document also maintains that India “will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail” and that decisions to authorise the use of nuclear weapons would be made by the Prime Minister or his ‘designated successor(s)’. According to the NRDC, despite the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in 2001–2002, India remained committed to its nuclear no-first-use policy.
Neutron bombs
R Chidambaram, who headed India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests, said in a 1999 interview with the Press Trust of India that India is capable of producing a neutron bomb.
India’s STRATEGIC NUCLEAR COMMAND.
India’s Strategic Nuclear Command was formally established in 2003, with an Indian Air Force officer, Air Marshal Tej Mohan Asthana, as the Commander-in-Chief. The joint services SNC is the custodian of all of India’s nuclear weapons, missiles and assets. It is also responsible for executing all aspects of India’s nuclear policy. However, the civil leadership, in the form of the CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security) is the only body authorised to order a nuclear strike against another offending strike. The National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon reiterated a policy of “no first use” against nuclear weapon states and “non use against non-nuclear weapon states” in a speech on the occasion of Golden Jubilee celebrations of National Defence College in New Delhi on 21 October 2010, a doctrine Menon said reflected India’s “strategic culture, with its emphasis on minimal deterrence.
In 2016, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar questioned the no first use policy, asking why India should “bind” itself when it is a “responsible nuclear power”. Later he clarified that this was his personal opinion. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in 2019 said that in the future, India’s no first use policy might change depending upon the “circumstances”. In a January 2022 statement, however, the Ministry of External Affairs reiterated India’s doctrine of “maintaining a credible minimum deterrence based on a No First Use posture and non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states”
INDIAN NUCLEAR TRIAD:
Air-launched nuclear weapons.
Nuclear-armed fighter-bombers were India’s first and only nuclear-capable strike force until 2003, when the country’s first land-based nuclear ballistic missiles were fielded.[45]
In addition to their ground-attack role, it is believed that the Dassault Mirage 2000s and SEPECAT Jaguars of the Indian Air Force are able to provide a secondary nuclear-strike role.[46] The SEPECAT Jaguar was designed to be able to carry and deploy nuclear weapons and the Indian Air Force has identified the jet as being capable of delivering Indian nuclear weapons.[47] The most likely delivery method would be the use of bombs that are free-falling and unguided.
Three airbases with four squadrons of Mirage 2000H (about 16 aircraft with 16 bombs from 1st and 7th squadrons of the 40th Wing at Maharajpur Air Force Station) and Jaguar IS/IB (about 32 aircraft with 32 bombs from one squadron each at Ambala Air Force Station and Gorakhpur Air Force Station) aircraft, are believed to be assigned the nuclear strike role.
Land-based ballistic missiles
The estimated 68 nuclear warheads of land-based nuclear weapons of India are under the control of and deployed by the Strategic Forces Command, using a variety of both vehicles and launching silos. They currently consist of six different types of ballistic missiles, the Agni-I, the Agni-II, Agni-III, Agni-IV, Agni-V, Agni-P and the Army’s variant of the Prithvi missile family – the Prithvi-I. However, the Prithvi missiles are less useful for delivering nuclear weapons because they have a shorter range and must be deployed very close to the India–Pakistan border. Additional variants of the Agni missile series have recently been inducted including the most recent, the Agni-IV and the Agni-V, which is currently being deployed. Agni-VI is also under development, with an estimated range of 8,000–12,000 km and features such as Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) or Maneuverable reentry vehicles (MARVs).
Sea-based ballistic missiles.
The Indian Navy has developed two sea-based delivery systems for nuclear weapons, completing Indian ambitions for a nuclear triad, which may have been deployed in 2015.
The first is a submarine-launched system consisting of at least four 6,000 tonne (nuclear-powered) ballistic missile submarines of the Arihant class. The first vessel, INS Arihant, was commissioned in August 2016. She is the first nuclear-powered submarine to be built by India. A CIA report claimed that Russia provided technological aid to the naval nuclear propulsion program. The submarines will be armed with up to 12 Sagarika (K-15) missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
The second is a ship-launched system based around the short range ship-launched Dhanush ballistic missile (a variant of the Prithvi missile). It has a range of around 300 km. In the year 2000 the missile was test-fired from INS Subhadra (a Sukanya class patrol craft). INS Subhadra was modified for the test and the missile was launched from the reinforced helicopter deck. The results were considered partially successful.[63] In 2004, the missile was again tested from INS Subhadra and this time the results were reported successful.[64] In December 2005 the missile was tested again, but this time from the destroyer INS Rajput. The test was a success with the missile hitting the land based target.
What is SAGARIKA?
Sagarika is a submarine-launched ballistic missile with a range of 700 km. This missile has a length of 8.5 meters, weighs seven tonnes and can carry a pay load of up to 500 kg.[60] Sagarika has already been test-fired from an underwater pontoon, but now DRDO is planning a full-fledged test of the missile from a submarine and for this purpose may use the services of the Russian Navy.
