No First Use and India's Nuclear Transition
C. Raja Mohan
I. Introduction
India has been one of the consistent champions of the abolition of
nuclear weapons since the 1950s. For India, nuclear disarmament was
almost a matter of national faith. As part of that campaign India
has been strongly supportive of the idea of no-first-use and non-use
of nuclear weapons as valuable milestones on the way towards the longer
term goal of total nuclear disarmament. India is the only one among
the states in possession of nuclear weapons to adopt a nuclear strategy
is based on no-first-use of nuclear weapons. Unlike some of the five
NPT nuclear weapon powers that have declared supported to the concept
of no-first-use, for India it is an integral part of its doctrine.
This is rooted in a variety of considerations, including survivability,
safety and the costs of managing its nuclear arsenal. India has also
strongly supported international efforts to reduced reliance on nuclear
weapons as well as the institution of a norm among the nuclear weapon
powers in favour of a collective understanding on no-first-use, which
in effect would also become a non-use pledge against non-nuclear weapon
states. Yet, paradoxically, despite this record in favour of nuclear
abolition and no-first- use, there are strong indications that India's
political enthusiasm for these ideas is beginning to wane.
This paper is an attempt to explain that paradox, that is linked
to India's decision to test nuclear weapons, the new challenges in
its regional security environment as well as the rapidly changing
global nuclear order. The paradox can only be understood in the context
of a fundamental change in India's world view that is reflected in
an intense nuclear debate in the 1990s. This paper argues that since
its nuclear tests in May 1998, India has begun to move away from its
traditional approach in favour of global disarmament to one that has
begun to support arms control objectives at three different levels---global,
regional and bilateral. The paper also suggests that while India's
own strategy remains formally committed to the notion of disarmament
and strongly supportive of no-first-use, the logic of its nuclear
circumstance might be driving India to de-emphasize the traditional
abolition agenda and align itself with the new ideas such as missile
defences and counter proliferation that have been highlighted by the
radicals in the Bush Administration. The paper attempts to capture
a flavour of that complex, but very relevant, debate within India.
There is a rising view within New Delhi that it is in India's interest
to adapt quickly to the changing international rules of the nuclear
game, and within that framework the past stress on disarmament and
no-first-use might no longer be the top priorities of Indian foreign
policy. The extended treatment that the paper offers on the evolution
of India's policy underscores the reality of perceptions worldwide
about the utility of traditional arguments of the nuclear debate.
It is not just the Bush Administration that is breaking away from
the traditional Euro-Atlantic discourse on nuclear weapons. India's
nuclear policy in the last decade is about a serious effort to come
to terms with the traditional arms control and then moving away from
it to cope with the new ideas taking root in Washington.
The transition in Indian thinking about nuclear weapons has not been
articulated in any explicit manner by the Indian Government. Nevertheless,
the series of Indian responses to the international nuclear developments
over the last decade strongly point to a reorientation of India's
premises on nuclear weapons and national security strategy. The transition
was captured in India's dramatic flip-flop on joining the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty, its readiness to join Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty
negotiations, endorsement of the objectives of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, willingness to strengthen export control regimes, support
to nuclear free zones elsewhere in the world, and its readiness to
move towards substantive confidence-building measures with Pakistan.
The on-going change in India was dramatized by the unexpected Indian
support to the missile defence initiative of the United States in
May 2001. India has also been the least critical of the controversial
overhaul of nuclear strategy outlined by the Bush Administration this
year.
While the transition is real, it certainly is not complete. New and
emerging premises on arms control remain to be fully endorsed by the
Indian political class. Suggestions from the Government that India's
diplomacy might be de-emphasising the traditional emphasis on total
elimination of nuclear weapons evokes a passionate opposition from
across the national political spectrum. For many within the Indian
establishment, is a surrender of core principles that have guided
Indian foreign policy over the last five decades. They argue that
India's support to missile defence and other ideas from Washington
are the triumph of a new Indian opportunism over the past commitment
to a set of principles. There is no need here to go into the details
of the argument, except to note that the domestic debate on arms control
is indeed part of a larger foreign policy transition that is taking
place in India, which has involved a redefinition of India's relations
with the major powers and an intensified engagement with the United
States and the West. It is also about finding ways to cope with the
existential threats to Indian security, particularly from terrorism
being sponsored by Pakistan and the extraordinary difficulties India
has had in restraining Pakistan within the new nuclear balance in
the Subcontinent. The foreign policy transition is an on-going one
and is riddled with many contradictions. Even as new ideas are being
pushed into the debate, the old notions continue to hold sway. But
change is clearly under way. The following sections map that change
and draw some implications for the current debate on nuclear weapons
and no-first-use.
II. From Disarmament to Arms Control
The Indian Government has not in any way over the last three years
suggested the discarding of its historical emphasis on global disarmament,
in particular the total elimination of nuclear weapons within a reasonable
time frame. On the contrary, after Pokharan II, India has repeated
its commitment to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons. Having
engineered a rupture in India's long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity,
the Government was reassuring key domestic players of the continuity
in India's foreign policy. But there is no question that the emphasis
in policy has shifted from the goal of time-bound elimination of nuclear
weapons to the pursuit of a less ambitious and limited agenda of agenda
of global nuclear restraint.
India's traditional campaign for global abolition had to come to
terms with the global nuclear discourse in the 1990s. Despite the
phenomenal change at the end of 1980s in the world correlation of
forces in its favour, the United States insists that nuclear deterrence
remains the cornerstone of its national security strategy. The U.S.
has also come around to the view that it needs nuclear weapons to
deter the use of other weapons of mass destruction (chemical and biological)
by the so-called "rogue states", a concern that has been
dramatically magnified after September 11. Russia which supported
nuclear abolition from the mid 1980s to early 1990s has now cooled
its ardour. It has abandoned the doctrine of nuclear "no-first-use''
it had propounded in the early 1980s. Given the steady erosion of
its conventional military capability in the 1990s, Moscow's reliance
on nuclear weapons has steadily increased. In China, the dominant
view on nuclear weapons is based on realpolitik. The collapse of the
mighty Soviet Union to its north, the end of the Cold War, and the
consequent reduction of American and Russian nuclear arsenals, Beijing
believes, have not reduced the importance of nuclear weapons in international
politics. The U.S. decision to tear up the ABM Treaty and accelerate
the efforts to build a missile shield has added to fears in China
that its nuclear deterrent might be less credible in future. From
its own past commitments to nuclear disarmament and no first use,
China might be debating a shift towards an expansion of its own nuclear
arsenal as well as towards ideas of a limited nuclear war and flexible
response. Britain and France, despite the absence of any threats to
their security have been reluctant to support nuclear abolition.
While pursuing disarmament as a diplomatic objective, India has begun
to recognize that nuclear abolition cannot be built apart from the
existing structure of power politics in the world. Disarmament treaties,
even those structured consciously to be non- discriminatory and fair,
have a differential impact on the key powers of the world and have
the potential to disturb the existing balance of power. India, like
the other second tier powers in the international system is looking
at the real prospect that in a world without nuclear weapons America's
conventional military superiority over its possible rivals might become
even more pronounced. The second-tier powers in the international
system, then, might never want to shed their nuclear weapons, even
if the U.S. did. For Russia and China, nuclear weapons would remain
important instruments for maintaining their position vis-à-vis
the sole super power in the global order. The overarching dominance
of the U.S. in the present world, and the growing military gap --
driven by the on-going revolution in military affairs - between the
U.S. and other powers, may have increased the utility of nuclear weapons
- as an equalizer - for the middle powers.
India's policy planners are asking themselves, if atomic weapons
are here to stay for a long time to come and they cannot be separated
from the international power politics, what should be the priorities
for Indian nuclear diplomacy in the coming years? Traditionalists
in India would like to stay with the idea of global disarmament. But
there are others suggesting that at a time when the rules of the nuclear
game are being recast by the Bush Administration, India needs an innovative
policy that is focused on new threats to international security, and
attempts to deal with India's security challenges and takes advantage
of the new dynamism in the global nuclear debate.
Meanwhile since the nuclear tests India has moved decisively towards
supporting treaties and arrangements less than total abolition of
nuclear weapons. The strategic objectives of India's nuclear diplomacy
were radically transformed in the summer of 1998. Until May 11, the
Indian diplomatic objective was to create and sustain the option to
make nuclear weapons when needed. Since Pokharan II, the task has
been to defend India's nuclear deterrent, reduce the political and
economic costs of exercising India's nuclear option, and learn to
live in nuclear peace with Pakistan and China.
In the past, India rejected most of the global nuclear arms control
arrangements, including the NPT, fullscope safeguards, regional nuclear
weapon-free zones, the bilateral denuclearization of India and Pakistan,
and more recently the CTBT. India's nuclear rejectionism was built
around the principles of global disarmament, equity and non-discrimination.
But underlying these normative arguments was a powerful security consideration-
that India cannot allow the global arms control and non- proliferation
regimes to chip away or completely rob it of the option to build nuclear
weapons when it wanted. Having finally exercised its option, it was
inevitable that India would review its traditional opposition to arms
control. Until now, the principal question that India asked itself
was whether an arms control treaty was global and non-discriminatory.
Since its decision to go nuclear, India had to look at two different
posers. First, how does a treaty affect India's national security?
Second, what are the political gains and losses of joining a particular
arms control arrangement?
India is not the first country to make such a transition. China,
for example, has moved from its past intense ideological opposition
to all arms control, which it had branded as reflecting super power
hegemony, to pragmatic participation in the global nuclear regimes.
China took nearly two decades to make this transition; but India did
not have that luxury. Facing a hostile international environment after
its nuclear tests, India needed to make a rapid transition in its
arms control positions in order to dent the international opposition
to its nuclear weapons. Immediately after announcing its nuclear tests
on May 11, the Indian Government did try to soften the impact of the
political shock waves it had created by announcing a package of arms
control proposals. That included an immediate moratorium on new nuclear
tests, flexibility on joining the CTBT, readiness to negotiate the
FMCT and a nuclear no-first use agreement. Some of these came up later
as key benchmarks in the extended nuclear dialogue between the Indian
foreign minister Mr. Jaswant Singh and the U.S. Deputy Secretary of
State, Mr. Strobe Talbott.
The transition in India's nuclear policy has also been captured by
the draft nuclear doctrine that India issued in August 1999. In the
controversy that followed the release of the document, Western observers
paid scant attention to certain formulations that were entirely new
for India. In its final section, the draft for the first time endorsed
the notion of arms control and its relevance for India's security.
The last two sentences of the draft state:
"Nuclear arms control measures shall be sought as part of
national security policy to reduce potential threats and to protect
our own capability and its effectiveness. In view of the very high
destructive potential of nuclear weapons, appropriate nuclear risk
reduction and confidence building measures shall be sought, negotiated
and instituted.
For a Western audience reared on deterrence and arms control, the
above statements might sound self-evident. But in the context of the
Indian debate that was centred around normative considerations, acknowledging
that arms control is part of security policy and recognizing the need
to institute nuclear CBMs is a substantial movement forward.
The new support to arms control and nuclear confidence building was
built on the incremental evolution of attitudes during the 1990s and
the intense exposure of the Indian strategic community to the unending
track two initiatives from the United States aimed at promoting nuclear
dialogue and CBMs in the Subcontinent. By June 1997 when India and
Pakistan had agreed on a structured dialogue, they had put "peace
and security, including CBMs" at the top of their bilateral agenda.
When the two governments agreed, in September 1998, to initiate talks
after a period of tension following the nuclear tests, there was the
first formal discussion of nuclear and conventional CBMs at the end
of 1998. And this was further consolidated in the MoU on CBMs that
the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries signed during Prime Minister
Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore in February 1999. At the
inconclusive conversation at Agra in July 2001, it is believed that
resumption of the negotiations on nuclear and other CBMs.
III. Supporting Non-Proliferation
Nothing illustrates the significant changes in India's nuclear mindset
than its one hundred eighty degree turn on the NPT. After years of
lambasting the treaty, which had become the veritable symbol of a
discriminatory order, India has over the three years has come to endorse,
if only critically, the basic objectives of the treaty. For nearly
three decades, India, ambiguous about its own nuclear posture, whined
and complained about the inequities and unfairness of the NPT. Despite
the fact that much of the world came to accept the NPT, India kept
up its demonization of the treaty. But having acquired nuclear weapons
itself, and recognizing the importance of preventing the further proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, India now takes a realistic view of
the treaty system. Even as it recognized that the NPT system will
not be able to confer the status of a nuclear weapon state on India,
New Delhi is confident enough to extend political support to the NPT
and its objectives.
In a formal statement before the Indian parliament on May 9, 2000
the foreign minister Mr. Jaswant Singh expounded on the new Indian
approach to the NPT. The occasion was the review conference of the
treaty under way in New York. Declaring that India is a "nuclear
weapon state", Mr. Singh told the Indian parliament: "Though
not a party to the NPT, India's policies have been consistent with
the key provisions of NPT that apply to nuclear weapon states. These
provisions are contained in Articles I, III and VI." Mr. Singh
went on explain India's "compliance" with the NPT. After
painting the NPT as an instrument of dominance and hegemony, and as
a symbol of "nuclear apartheid", India was declaring itself
to be part of the system.
Of particular significance are Articles I and III, both of which
refer to the non-proliferation obligations of the nuclear weapon states
under the NPT. In the reference to Article I, Mr. Singh said, "India's
record on non-proliferation has been impeccable." On Article
III, he added that India's nuclear exports have always been under
international safeguards. The statement reflected more than mere rhetorical
commitment to the objectives of non-proliferation. India's nuclear
dialogue with the United States looked at export controls as an important
benchmark, and resulted in a significant strengthening of India's
procedures in relation to monitoring and preventing the transfers
of sensitive items that could be used in programmes for weapons of
mass destruction. In the past India had denounced the export control
arrangements as part of the discriminatory North-South paradigm; now
India was acknowledging the importance of preventing high technologies
from falling into the hands of states of concern. In the past, India
refused to engage the multilateral export control groupings. As India
becomes an exporter of sensitive technologies, it is preparing to
consult with these groups and hopes to join them on a reasonable basis
in the near future.
While moving towards the great powers in terms of the articulation
of its interest in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction,
India has also sought to present it self as being in tune with the
sentiments of the majority of non-nuclear states for "negative
security assurances". Referring to India's no-first-use posture
and a commitment for non-use against non-nuclear states, Mr. Singh
said, "this meets the demand" for "unqualified negative
security assurances raised by a large majority of non-nuclear states".
In another twist, India which consistently rejected the South Asian
Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, first mooted by Pakistan in 1974, now is
ready to extend support to such zones elsewhere in the world. Mr.
Singh said, "India has indicated readiness to provide requisite
assurances to the nuclear weapon free zones in existence or being
negotiated". Skeptics would suggest India might be playing politics
with the nuclear issues. But clearly India's nuclear diplomacy has
begun to evolve.
IV. Underlining No-First-Use
Within days of testing its nuclear weapons in May 1998, India announced
that its nuclear doctrine would be guided by the two principles of
minimum nuclear deterrence and no-first-use against nuclear weapon
states and non-use against non-nuclear nations. A draft nuclear doctrine
issued a year later broadly confirmed this position. The quick assertion
of no-first-use by India was not a mere stratagem to soften the negative
international reaction to its tests. It was a reflection of the already
settled debate on a nuclear doctrine that was put in place in the
late 1980s. The nuclear tests of 1998 did not signal India becoming
a nuclear power. They only signalled that India had finally come out
of the nuclear closet. All indications are that India began to assemble
air-deliverable nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, when it became
clear to India it had a second nuclear neighbour, Pakistan. A small
group of officials and advisers in the late 1980s had worked out the
broad parameters of the Indian nuclear doctrine that focused on minimum
nuclear deterrence and no-first-use. The doctrine was based on a number
of assumptions, which remained valid when India declared itself a
nuclear weapon power.
The first of these assumptions was that there is no need to match
any adversary in the number of weapons, nor yields nor types of weapons;
nor of achieving superiority; as long as there is an assured capability
of a second strike that can inflict unacceptable damage defined sensibly.
More is not better if less is enough. Second, there was a clear rejection
of tactical nuclear weapons. The Indian intention is to deter the
adversary from making first use of tactical nuclear weapons and thus
gaining battlefield advantage. In case this fails, India could use
its relatively small sized nuclear weapons, not on tactical point
targets but on tactical area targets. Third, the no first use doctrine
does not take away the fundamental right of a nation to defend itself
by all available means when its very survival is at stake. What no-first-use
does do, is to forswear brinkmanship in the very early stages of a
conflict and gives up the possibility of using nuclear blackmail.
Fourth, no-first-use avoids the requirement of a hair-trigger reaction.
India believes its deterrence requirements can be met without time-urgent
responses to a nuclear attack. As Gen. K. Sundarji, one of the key
figures involved in framing the doctrine in the late 1980s pointed
out:
"The response can be a good few hours or even perhaps a day
after the receipt of the first strike. A very highly sophisticated,
highly responsive command, control and communication system that
functions in real time is not necessary….Even a very successful
decapitating attack by the adversary cannot give him any assurance
of the non-launch of the surviving second strike by the recipient
of the first strike. Standing Operating Procedures may well lay
down the launch of the second strike against pre-determined targets,
say after X hours of the receipt of the first strike, if no orders
countermanding it are received by that time".
Fifth, a no-first-use doctrine allows India to keep its nuclear warheads
and delivery systems separate and thereby ensure the survival of its
arsenal from a pre-emptive strike. Overall, the Indian nuclear doctrine
based on minimum deterrence and no-first-use will help keep the costs
down of managing its nuclear arsenal. This doctrine has survived considerable
domestic criticism as being inadequate and pressures from the right
for a larger and more robust nuclear posture.
The political confidence in this modest nuclear strategy has let
India campaign with some vigour for an international convention on
no-first-use. Reinforcing that campaign, India also began to call
for measures like de-alerting to reduce the danger of accidental or
unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. At the United Nations in the
fall of 1998, India introduced a resolution on "reducing the
nuclear danger" that called for a review of nuclear doctrines
by the nuclear weapon states and take steps to reduce the accidental
or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. The move was initially seen
by the world as an attempt to legitimize India's standing as a declared
nuclear weapon state. But support for the move has increased over
the years. The Indian focus on nuclear de-alerting signaled a number
of changes in Indian thinking on nuclear issues. Unlike in the past,
India is now emphasizing practical steps to deal with the danger of
nuclear weapons, without giving up its larger quest for their worldwide
abolition. Total disarmament, it was being pointed out, must be treated
as a long-term normative goal and not as an achievable diplomatic
objective in the near-term. Besides reflecting a shift towards pragmatism
in India's nuclear diplomacy, New Delhi's initiative on "de-alerting''
reinforces the national commitment to a responsible nuclear strategy.
It also meshes in with the Indian determination to pursue a series
of confidence- building measures with Pakistan as part of an effort
to design a regime for nuclear restraint in the subcontinent. Indian
diplomacy on de-alerting hopes to bring the other nuclear weapons
towards a doctrinal posture that the others would like to see in India-lengthening
the nuclear fuse.
V. Warming up to the Bush Doctrine
The decision in May 1998 to end its nuclear ambiguity has allowed
India to move towards a more positive approach towards arms control
at all levels. It has helped define a more responsible Indian approach
to arms control treaties at the global level, a new readiness to accept
internationally mandated restriction of its strategic programmes,
recognize proliferation of weapons of mass destruction an important
international security problem, raise standards of implementing controls
on the spread of sensitive technologies, and accept the need for a
credible regime of nuclear and conventional military CBMs in the subcontinent
to reduce the danger of a nuclear war. India has overcome the past
intellectual resistance to idea of arms control that is limited in
scope and aims at a small range of security objectives. New Delhi
is no longer the permanent dissident in the global nuclear debate.
It is ready to contribute constructively in building global and regional
arms control regimes. As it demonstrates a willingness to pursue its
national security interests in a responsible manner, India is prepared
for substantive negotiations that involve complex bargaining and trade-offs.
Ironically, even as India moved quickly after the nuclear tests to
find a lasting accommodation with the international system, it began
to discover that the old nuclear order was on its last legs. The American
post Cold War debate on nuclear strategy appears to have been finally
clinched in favour of a more radical view that questioned the value
of the traditional arms control framework, was insistent on tearing
up the ABM Treaty, build missile defences and explore non-traditional
means to deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the
hands of the so-called "rogue states" and terrorist organizations.
Somewhat counter-intuitively the advent of the Bush Administration
offered an entirely unexpected convergence of interests between Washington
and New Delhi.
The Bush Administration's attempt to recast the global nuclear strategic
framework opened the door for building cooperation between India and
the United States in the area of nuclear weapons. India was among
the first to back at least parts of the controversial National Missile
Defence initiative of the Bush Administration unveiled on May 1, 2001.
Stating that the Bush ideas are an attempt "to transform the
strategic parameters on which the Cold War security architecture was
built", India declared that "there is a strategic and technological
inevitability in stepping away from a world that is held hostage by
the doctrine of MAD to a cooperative, defensive transition that is
underpinned by further [nuclear]cuts and a de-alert of nuclear forces".
India's surprising support to the missile defence project was based
on a number of political expectations. The Indian decision involved
considerations of its strategic relations with the United States and
Russia as well as its security concerns in relation to China and Pakistan.
One, a new strategic framework might open the door to addressing India's
long-standing problem with the global nuclear order and India's place
in it. India's inability to test nuclear weapons before January 1
1968 made it impossible for India to be accepted as a legitimate nuclear
weapon power. India's efforts to find a modus vivendi with the NPT
system in the late 1990s were indeed real. But that process remained
an unfinished business during the Clinton Administration. While the
Clinton White House was willing to live with India's nuclear weapons,
it was not ready to lift the restrictions on technology transfer that
apply to India under the NPT regime. The Bush Administration's attempts
to rework the global nuclear order are seen by some in India as providing
an opportunity for India to become part of the making of a new system
of nuclear rules. Unlike Russia and China, India has had no stakes
in the survival of the ABM Treaty. In welcoming the collapse of the
ABM Treaty-the cornerstone of post War global arms control-the ABM
treaty- India of course had to take into account the sensitivities
of its long-standing partner Russia. India, unlike the Europeans and
the American Democrats, bet that Moscow will ultimately find an accommodation
with Washington rather than confront it on the question of missile
defence.
Two, there was a view in India that the American movement towards
might open up the exploration of new solutions to one of the problems
that had significantly complicated India's security environment over
the last two decades-the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles
in its neighbourhood. India believes it has been the biggest victim
of Chinese proliferation of nuclear weapons to Pakistan in the 1980s
and missile technology in the 1990s. For years India protested about
Chinese nuclear and missile proliferation. But it could make no impression
on Beijing which insisted either that it was within the bounds of
its treaty commitments or flatly denied such , and is open to any
move that has the potential to reduce the dangers from such spread
of weapons of mass destruction. U.S. plans for missile defence have
created space for India, for the first time to put pressure on China,
both on its own nuclear arsenal as well as its perceived policy of
balancing India through WMD transfers to Pakistan. It has often been
argued that U.S. missile defence programme would lead to an expanded
Chinese nuclear arsenal and India would be forced to respond in kind.
But New Delhi has no desire to match China weapon to weapon; it is
more interested in breaking out of the current political box that
it has been trapped into vis a vis China and Pakistan. While India
has taken out a modest nuclear insurance, it is missile defence that
might offer at least a conceptual way out of its current security
dilemmas. Even before the Bush Administration unveiled its plans for
missile defence, India has been actively engaged in an effort to obtain
theatre missile defence technology from Israel. It is also exploring
cooperation with the United States in the field and the Pentagon has
offered to make an evaluation of India's missile defence requirements.
Finally, having recognised the proliferation of WMD as a serious
threat to its own national security, India is deeply concerned about
the spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of states or groups of
terrorists who do not abide by the traditional rules of nuclear deterrence.
India's own experience with Pakistan's nuclear blackmail, and Islamabad's
strategy of using the nuclear balance to foment terrorism across the
border puts it in empathy with the arguments in Washington that there
are forces out there who cannot be deterred by traditional means.
Added to it is the concern that is the concern that Pakistan might
become a failed state or that nuclear weapons might fall into the
hands of extremist forces in that country. That reinforces India's
interest not only in defence but also in counter-proliferation, or
the military capability to deal with an environment in which there
is proliferation of WMD. At the end of their joint Defence Policy
Group meeting in December 3-4 2001 in New Delhi, India and the United
States pointed to "the contribution that missile defenses could
make to enhance strategic stability and to discourage the proliferation
of ballistic missiles with weapons of mass destruction." They
noted that, "that both India and the United States have been
the targets of terrorism, the two sides agreed to add a new emphasis
in their defense cooperation on counter terrorism initiatives, including
expanding mutual support in this area. The two sides also recognized
the importance of joint counter-proliferation efforts to achieve the
goals of their defense cooperation".
VI. Conclusion
In sum, then, India has adopted no-first-use as its national nuclear
strategy. This is a unilateral decision and is not contingent on the
nuclear approaches of either China, which has lent declaratory support
to no-first-use and Pakistan, which opposes the idea. India strongly
supports, at the political level, the movement towards a collective
agreement among all nuclear powers on no-first-use. India is also
in favour of agreed measures on de-alerting which expand the time
for nuclear decision-making amidst crises. But in the prevailing international
environment the prospects for such agreements do not look too bright.
The obstacles to such agreements do not lie in technical fixes but
in the political parameters that guide the world today. The absence
of a politico-military confrontation among the great powers of the
international system has reduced the political pressures for traditional
arms control measures within the domestic public opinion in the Euro-Atlantic
world. The Bush Administration has gone many steps further in arguing
that the old framework of arms control is an obstacle to dealing with
the new security challenges to the world in relation to nuclear weapons.
While the new security threats that involve the combination of WMD,
extremist forces and failing states might look somewhat remote in
Europe, they are seen as part of a clear and present danger in India.
New Delhi might increasingly distance itself from the view that treaties
on further reduction of nuclear weapons or agreements on no-first-use
provide answers to the current security challenges. While India will
go along with any such agreements, its focus is likely to be riveted
on building political and military coalition of democratic and moderate
states against the new forces of extremism that are determined to
acquire and exploit WMD for their own purposes.
