Buddha smiled, but can we relax forever?

India conducted its first nuclear test almost five decades back and it will next week celebrate the 25th anniversary of its second

On May 11, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is likely to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran. There are political gains to be made from it.

The five nuclear tests of 1998, called the Pokhran II tests -- Pokhran I being India’s first nuclear weapons test in 1974, carried out by Indira Gandhi – were indeed significant for the nation and the world. In the eyes of the world, they turned India from a closet nuclear weapons state (NWS) into an openly declared NWS. In 1974, India had demonstrated capability; in 1998, India declared to the world that it was on its way to building a nuclear deterrent, although the weaponisation effort itself had begun secretly years earlier under Rajiv Gandhi.

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In Delhi, for years after 1998, there was talk in official circles about how Pokhran II, along with the then rising IT industry, had given India’s officialdom, as well as ordinary Indians, a new confidence on the world stage. It indeed had. Pokhran II – along with the changing geopolitical realities as China’s global rise was visible on the horizon (and 2020 was the time-frame for it) -- also paved the way for the India-US nuclear rapproachment, after three decades of US sanctions and technology denial post-Pokhran I. It gave India the ability and confidence to negotiate its way out of the nuclear doghouse; and it gave America a solid reason to dump its ‘cap, rollback, eliminate’ approach to India’s nuclear capability and to try to co-opt it instead.

Credit: DH Graphic

But, 25 years later, how has India’s nuclear prowess developed? In the years since 1998, have India’s capabilities and nuclear strategic thinking evolved to prepare the country for the period of Great Power competition that we have now entered?

On the question of India’s nuclear thinking, India declared its nuclear doctrine in 2003 and that thinking is reflected in the way it has gone about developing – albeit slowly – a credible minimum deterrent based on a nuclear triad (land, air and sea-based delivery systems) anchored in a No First Use (NFU) policy. In 2017, questions were raised as to whether India needed to update its NFU policy. The debate ended with the government vaguely hinting that it saw no need to update the policy, given its implications for nuclear force development. India had wisely chosen to build the strategic command and control systems and the delivery systems aimed at obtaining a survivable second strike force, rather than going overboard into nuclear madness trying to develop a first strike force. For all its pretend hyper-nationalist bluster otherwise, it is to the credit of the Narendra Modi government that it has not upended this sensible policy.

Yet, the total radio silence of the government on the nuclear front is not just uncharacteristic but also a little worrying. We are now in a new era of Great Power competition, indeed a new Cold War, with China challenging America’s global dominance. And unlike the US-Soviet Cold War, this new Cold War is happening right at our doorstep. Have our nuclear capabilities, capacities and thinking – warfighting doctrines and tactics -- kept pace with those of China and Pakistan? There is, of course, much thinking within closed military circles, much of which does not even percolate to the political level. But it must be realised that deterrence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. In matters nuclear, it is wiser to let the enemy know what you are capable of than to hide capabilities and rely on ambiguity -- especially when a capability and capacity gap starts to develop in the nuclear “balance of terror”.

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Therefore, we have to return to some nagging questions that have not been answered since 1998. India has conducted only six tests in all so far, while the US and Soviet Union/Russia have conducted nearly a thousand tests each, and Britain, France and China have all conducted dozens (China – 47 tests; of devices with yields ranging from 0 to 4,000 kt) of tests each before beginning to rely on computer simulations for the upkeep and further development of their nuclear arsenals. The Pokhran II tests were of bomb/warhead designs ranging from 0.2 kt to a claimed 58 kt (or was it 45 kt?) yield, the last one said to be a thermonuclear design. Yet, questions have been raised about whether the thermonuclear test was a success or it fizzled out, not just by foreign observers relying on seismic and other data from the explosion but even by one of the famous nuclear quartet of 1998 – K Santhanam. It is a question that was sought to be hushed up domestically and remains unanswered to the world’s satisfaction. Remember, again, that deterrence, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. But we have been, since 1998, under a “voluntary moratorium” on further nuclear testing.

Secondly, when much publicity was given until about 2011 to the Indian Army’s so-called ‘Cold Start’ doctrine against Pakistan, Rawalpindi, with its touch-me-not nuclear doctrine, decided to respond to it with tactical nuclear weapons. In the end, the Indian Army denied that there was such a thing as ‘Cold Start’, but it resulted in Pakistan building tactical nukes. India’s nuclear doctrine envisages “massive retaliation” even against a tactical nuclear strike by Pakistan on India’s forces on Pakistan’s own soil. The credibility of such a threat will rest on the nature of the leadership that obtains in India at the time when New Delhi has to make a decision. It may be prudent to come up with a more flexible but guaranteed response, perhaps with an escalatory ladder attached to it.

Thirdly, India has for long, though not officially, pegged its requirement for credible minimum deterrence at about half the number of China’s warheads, while the actual numbers have been a little below that benchmark. This would work fine so long as China, too, stuck to a moderate policy of minimum deterrence. But China, in recent years, has been expanding its arsenal rapidly. In 2010, SIPRI estimated the number of warheads in China’s inventory at 240, a figure that moved to 260 five years later; by 2021, that estimate had risen to 350. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates that in 2023, China has 410. India’s inventory is estimated to have grown from an estimated 60-80 (note the range) in 2010 to an FAS estimate of 164 (note the specific number, suggesting greater confidence in the estimate) in 2023. Pakistan is estimated to have 170 warheads. The SIPRI 2022 Year Book highlighted that “Global nuclear arsenals are expected to grow as states continue to modernise” them. Together with the warheads, China is on a massive spree building more long-range missiles and hardened missile silos, submarines and heavy bombers. China is expected to have 1,500 warheads by 2035.

What this growing nuclear gap with China means for India and what New Delhi’s response should be is an important question to debate. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recently noted the already existing power differential between China and India. But the fact that we have scarcely heard anything about matters nuclear – including even on matters on the civilian side, let alone the weapons side – from the Modi government is worrying. Let’s hope we hear some serious articulation, rather than bluster, credit-taking and domestic political messaging, on May 11.