Proposes a nuclear plan for India

...Thereafter, more normal trade links have been established, with the private sector leading the way...

...The case for an Indian nuclear deterrent therefore appears reasonable...

...Other Westerners argue that nuclear weapons will bring about military stability in the region...

...The reopening of talks on Kashmir and other bilateral disputes would be further incentives to denuclearize...

...The real military weaknesses in relation to China may well be ignored while the political class fiddles with phantasmagoric images of nuclear coercion...

...KANT...

...Both governments stand committed to going beyond the tests to construct a so-called "minimum deterrence...

...In addition to the border talks, summitry, and security dialogue, India and China have agreed to a number of confidence-building measures...

...Can India stop Pakistan's further nuclearization...

...Whether or not Pakistan would have tested independent of the Indian tests is unknown, but after New Delhi's decision there was little doubt that Pakistan would respond...

...Since the mid1980s, the foreign ministers, prime ministers, and presidents have in aggregate met at least a dozen times...

...Deterrence theorists cannot be proved altogether incorrect...

...The answer is probably yes...

...threat is usually portrayed as subsidiary and remote, one that it is politically incorrect to talk about openly...

...With India categorically and verifiably out of the nuclear weapons hunt, the pressure on Islamabad to join the hunt would have been largely absent...

...If it becomes technically possible to do so, there will undoubtedly be those who will push to make it operationally viable...

...Within the framework of deterrence thinking, this is logical: if an adversary has nuclear weapons, then one must invest in a retaliatory capability...

...the increasing sophistication of its conventional armed forces over the past two decades...

...and U.S...

...The talks have been institutionalized as part of a Joint Working Group that has continued to meet in spite of various ups and downs in the relationship...

...Indeed, as a further sign of normalization, India-China interactions at the political level have increased rapidly...

...India's serious weaknesses in conventional forces, gaps in army recruitment, and flagging morale are far more to the point than the reflexive, flapping hysteria over a nuclear threat from China...

...China's growing international stature is far more clearly linked to quite different factors: the vitality and quality of its top leaders...

...The most authoritative statement regarding Pakistani capabilities came from A. Q. Khan, the architect of Pakistan's weapons program, during the "Brasstacks" crisis of January 1987...

...A second opportunity to avoid a nuclear arms race was lost in the 1970s and 1980s when Pakistan stated publicly, on several occasions, that it would sign any denuclearizing agreement India was prepared to accept...

...Were inter-one disapproves of the way in which stability nal factors truly responsible for Beijing's wars has been achieved...

...Nevertheless, if India had called Pakistan's "bluff," it is difficult to see how, given the weight of world opinion, as well as influential sectors of domestic opinion, Islamabad could have reneged on its own commitment...

...Pakistan has had the capacity to test and deploy nuclear weapons since about the late 1980s...

...POLITICS ABROAD bate over the "scapegoat" thesis...

...A number of factors are cited to bolster the argument about an American nuclear threat...

...The Pakistani Threat...

...None of this means that India should put on rose-colored spectacles when it looks at China...

...According to the governments of India and Pakistan, the nuclear tests of May 1998 were for "defensive" purposes, that is, for deterrence...

...Unless India is maladroit enough to team up with one of China's older enemies or tempted foolishly to roil up trouble in Tibet, it is unlikely that this benign historical relationship will change for the worse...

...The tests in the Chaghai Hills on May 28, 1998, only confirmed Pakistan's nuclear status...

...No Indian leader—Jawaharlal Nehru included—has had any illusions about China...

...But the failure of deterrence, when nuclear weapons are absent, need not be catastrophic—as was evident in India's wars of 1948, 1962, 1965, 1971, and 1999...

...India's nuclearization, the naming of China as "potential enemy number one" by India's defense minister, and the rather unfortunate letter from Prime Minister Vajpayee to President Clinton (which tried to justify the May 1998 tests by citing the China threat and was leaked to the press by the Americans...

...In sum, talks on Kashmir plus a conventional forces agreement would have stood a very good chance of reassuring Pakistan and of stopping the advance of its nuclear weapons program...

...the break with the Soviets in 1958...

...Many in the West have already accepted those arguments and grown used to the idea that both countries will remain nuclear powers...

...The Ghauri missile, which reputedly is capable of carrying nuclear payloads, has the range to hit targets throughout India except in the northeast of the country...

...Third, the proposition that nuclear weapons have enhanced China's status (and the status of the other nuclear weapon states) is a constant and hoary theme in Indian thinking, but an ill-founded one...

...but historically these two civilizations have not had occasion to demonize each other...

...New Delhi's pronouncements suggest that China is the more important threat...

...Contrary to this pragmatic view, it needs to be emphasized that there are other security pathways ahead and that these may best be revealed by a critical, even counterfactual, look at the past...

...DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 25...

...The Simla Agreement of 1972 mandated bilateral discussions on Kashmir...

...But an equally strong refutation can be mounted against Pakistani claims—and also against the claims of all the other declared or aspiring nuclear powers...

...geo-strategy, which is hostile to rising powers such as India who could one day be global rivals and who, in any case, are seen as regional spoilers...

...and, notwithstanding a certain measure of turbulence, an impressive degree of political stability (even if 24 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 I I N SHORT, nuclear weapons have not hurt China's standing in world affairs, but it is untenable to ascribe Chinese status and influence primarily to their possession...

...Nevertheless, with time, as India's missile and submarine programs go forward, we should expect to see far more open references to the American threat...

...The rise of non-nuclear Germany and Japan as great powers and the decay and collapse of a nuclearridden Soviet Union further challenge the link between nuclear weapons, status, and influence...

...Is there no other recourse...

...Do the nuclear capabilities of Pakistan and China warrant India's nuclearization...

...Even now, if India renounced nuclear weapons, Pakistan would have little option but to end its program...

...What is reasonably evident is that a nuclear India would be unable to match China for status and influence unless it made important economic, social, and political changes...

...With long-range missile capability, it will be technically feasible to mount a retaliatory strike against the continental United States...

...Since the early 1980s, India and China have held talks on the border dispute...

...Options There is no credible movement in India to renounce nuclear weapons...

...It is important to do this because To Our Contributors A few suggestions: there is a certain fatalism about the Indian nuclear option that has only deepened as a result of the 1998 tests...

...At this point, though, the Indian government has identified Pakistan and China as the reasons for its tests and for the need to build a nuclear arsenal...

...the speed with which, after 1949, the new government exerted political control and embarked on social reforms...

...The answers to these questions are the business of sinologists, to be sure, but it doesn't take an expert on China to know that India has never figured in China's threat cosmology in any serious fashion—unlike the Russian Expansionist, the American Imperialist, and the Japanese Upstart...

...That challenge may be mounted from various perspectives, including the moral one...

...the dynamism of its economy since the late 1970s...

...THREE YEARS after India and Pakistan shocked the world with their nuclear tests, it is worth revisiting their arguments for nuclear weapons...

...But they can be delegitimized, prohibited, and abolished—much as is now being done with biological and chemical weapons...

...Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented...

...I will focus on the Indian case...

...Furthermore, is it not possible, even now, to turn the clock back, so that both India and Pakistan do not fall into the deterrence trap...

...against India and Vietnam...

...A defensive posture with limits on the more offensive weapons—strike aircraft, armor, mobile artillery— would have supplemented manpower reductions and was not impossible either...

...Could Pakistan have been stopped from developing nuclear weapons...

...Bringing down troop levels, so that India would have had enough for defense against Pakistan and China as well as internal security needs, was not impossible...

...A regional accord would have been—and still is— in Islamabad's long-term interest...

...Beyond this, some Indian strategic commentators have argued that the United States is also a military presence to worry India...

...22 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 p p kistan would have gone nuclear anyway because of its seemingly permanent inferiority in conventional weaponry and its lack of strategic depth...

...However, surely it is not beyond reasonable belief that if India had given up the nuclear option and had simultaneously offered to negotiate on a variety of bilateral issues— including Kashmir and conventional force levels—then Pakistani fears of India's military preponderance could have been assuaged...

...counter-proliferation policy, which, at minimum, could translate into military strikes against nascent nuclear programs, including perhaps India's...

...may change all that...

...If this analysis is correct, India's nuclearization will make little or no difference to its positioning vis-a-vis China...

...Put differently, the real race with China is civic and economic, not nuclear and strategic...

...Islamabad's various offers were seen as tactical maneuvers designed to embarrass India diplomatically...

...Although it is true that Pakistan was moving toward the acquisition of weapons capability before the Indian test of 1974, it is not clear that Islamabad would have gone forward with such speed and determination if New Delhi had unambiguously closed off the nuclear option in the 1960s...

...Can domestic political troubles be eased, in the new China, by external distractions...

...and it has its share of territorial ambition...

...the military victories in Tibet and Korea in the 1950s and the defeat of India in 1962...

...There is no guarantee that conventional deterrence will always hold—any more than that nuclear deterrence is foolproof...

...How vulnerable and unstable is China likely to be in the fu ture...

...Still others justify Indian and Pakistani nuclearization in relation to the unwillingness of the five established nuclear powers to eliminate their own arsenals...

...These include the use of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, to "coerce" India in the Bangladesh war in 1971...

...the dramatic improvements in the quality of physical life...

...If we add to this the progress that has been made in India-China relations since the early 1980s, then the likelihood of nuclear intimidation across the Himalayas seems even more remote...

...By contrast, India's day-to-day diplomatic and strategic moves indicate that Pakistan is a coequal if not greater threat...

...The promise of nuclear weapons in a strictly military sense is deterrence...

...The improved relationship allowed India to transfer up to two divisions of troops from the northern front to the Northeast and Kashmir for internal security duties— no mean benefit at a critical moment...

...After Rajiv Gandhi's visit of 1988, bor POLITICS ABROAD der trade was permitted, and trade links between public sector units were encouraged...

...China is a big power, albeit with many weaknesses...

...You can hear the fatalism in the retort frequently voiced in India that questioning the rationale for the bomb is now "water under the bridge," that the need of the hour is to "get on with things" diplomatically and militarily, that it is the "future that matters," and that Indians must "pull together" toward a consensus on nuclearization...

...At any rate, one opportunity to turn the nuclear clock back was probably lost in the 1960s...

...Challenging the rationales for the utility of nuclear weapons is a vital first step in this process...

...A plain, commonsensical argument against the bomb, couched within the traditional vocabulary of strategic discourse, is a necessary supplement to any moral critique...

...These reactions are understandable enough...

...Pakistan's nuclear tests and the revelations DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 2I POLITICS ABROAD regarding its missile program suggest that India ROPONENTS OF deterrence argue that Pa now truly confronts a nuclear-armed neighbor on its western border...

...The Indian and Pakistani case for nuclear weapons is, however, deeply flawed, as I hope to show...

...Unfortunately, moral arguments against nuclear weapons tend to be dismissed as idealistic...

...The past is of course the past...

...Fi nally, and most important, would war with In dia be credible in this regard, given that the only serious bilateral issue, namely the border, favors China...

...This is a what-if of history, admittedly, but not a risible or trivial one...

...Finally, Indian and Pakistani conventional forces could be constituted so that neither side could launch a surprise attack in most circumstances...

...And would it help or hurt an in secure regime to raise an India "threat" in such circumstances...

...This is another what-if of history, but credible enough, and it deserves a reply...

...it continues to hold Indian territory and withhold recognition of the Indian states of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh (even if this is largely a tactical ploy...

...My intention in outlining the renunciation option is to demonstrate that it is a strategic possibility and that it need not be based on moral objections to nuclear weapons...

...So, with the appropriate conventional force configuration, India and Pakistan would either deter each other or, if deterrence broke down, would robustly defend themselves and repel the invader...

...Last year, bilateral trade stood at over two billion dollars, having risen from a paltry two hundred million dollars in 1991...

...But what if we take a step back and ask whether Pakistani nuclearization could have been prevented...

...In return, Pakistan was to normalize relations with India by reopening diplomatic, economic, and social contacts...

...BAJPAI teaches at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India...

...The Indian government has said that its minimum deterrence is aimed at Pakistan and China...

...These include an understanding on the maintenance of peace and tranquility along the line of actual control and on thinning forces along the border...

...The nuclear choices of all the nuclear powers, including India and Pakistan, must be challenged in this way if we are to progress toward a nuclear-free world...

...More important though, for Pakistan, is the problem of nuclear asymmetry: India will likely always have an overwhelming preponderance of nuclear weapons, leaving Pakistan in fear of a disarming first strike from its neighbor...

...It probably can...

...India should therefore be watchful on its borders and should ensure that it has sufficient force to deal with Chinese provocations...

...Is its case justified...

...As things stand, the U.S...

...Finally, India-China economic contacts have deepened...

...Most recently, after the war with Pakistan in 1999, India and China agreed to a "security dialogue" that takes discussions beyond the unresolved border quarrel...