New Delhi's Long Nuclear Journey: How Secrecy and Institutional Roadblocks Delayed India's...

Having a nuclear de-vice is not the same as having an operational nuclear capability. It can take along time to weaponize, which is the process of building compact reliable rug-ged weapons and mating them with delivery vehicles. Unlike ªrst-tier nuclearweapon powers, recent nuclear weapon powers are taking much longer. Forexample, the ªve permanent members of the United Nations Security Council(P5) took up to two years to make the transition from exploding a test deviceto building weaponized versions of them. In comparison the process of weap-onization in South Africa, India, and Pakistan took eight, ªfteen and ten years,a nearly twenty-eight-fold increase on average.

It is also uncertain whether states that build prototype test devices succeedin weaponizing them. For example, seven years after North Korea’s ªrstnuclear test, the quality and reliability of its deliverable weapons remains un-certain.1 Likewise, the gap in operational capabilities (i.e., the soft insti-tutional, organizational, and training routines essential to using militaryhardware instrumentally) has increased severalfold between the pre- and post-Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) nuclear weapon powers.2 Whereas it took theP5 on average ªve months to achieve operational status, in the latter casesit took nearly four years. In South Africa’s case, it is unclear if its opera-tional capability extended beyond ªring a nuclear demonstration shot or

New Delhi’s Long Nuclear Journey

New Delhi’s LongNuclear Journey

Gaurav Kampani

How Secrecy and InstitutionalRoadblocks Delayed

India’s Weaponization

Gaurav Kampani is a Postdoctoral Transatlantic Fellow for International Relations and Security at theNorwegian Institute of Defence Studies in Oslo, the Center for Security Studies in Zurich, and the RANDCorporation in Washington, D.C.

The author would like to thank Matthew Evangelista, Sumit Ganguly, Peter Katzenstein, andChristopher Way for working very closely with him in producing the ªrst draft of this article.Manjari Chatterjee, Aaron Friedberg, Bharath Gopalaswamy, Devesh Kapur, Anit Mukherjee,Vipin Narang, Srinath Raghavan, and Stephen Rosen commented on an earlier draft at a confer-ence at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, criti-cal feedback from the anonymous reviewers helped give this article its ªnal shape.

1. Jacques E.C. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 41–75, 248–255; and Jacques E.C. Hymans, “NorthKorea’s Lessons for Not Building an Atomic Bomb,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2012, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137408/jacques-e-c-hymans/north-koreas-lessons-for-not-building-an-atomic-bomb.2. The term “instrumental” here refers to deliberate agency.

International Security, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Spring 2014), pp. 79–114, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00158© 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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two.3 As Jacques Hymans points out in his recent work, proliferation theoriesin international relations literature in general seek to explain the causes of pro-liferation, but they say little about the quality of those outcomes. The bulk ofthe literature focuses on the causes of proliferation and not the process or qual-ity of those proliferation outcomes.”4 Waltzian realism, for example, baldlyassumes that states capable of developing nuclear devices should have notrouble either weaponizing them or developing an operational force.5 Prestigeexplanations make no distinction between the development of a device, weap-onization, and soft operational routines. Likewise, organizational theories thatattribute nuclear proliferation to actor networks consisting of scientiªc andcivil-military bureaucratic enclaves do not explain the slow transition from in-cipient to mature nuclear capabilities.6

Similarly, in the policy world, there is a tendency to oversimplify prolifera-tion threats. Policymakers and think tank analysts often collapse the ability ofa state to enrich ªssile material to weapons-grade and build a nuclear test de-vice with the existence of weapons. States with minimally proven nuclear anddoubtful operational capabilities such as North Korea currently and Indiaand Pakistan prior to 1998 are considered a serious nuclear menace. Analystsoften believe that the mere possession of nuclear weapons by a state bringsinto operation a regime of “existential” deterrence, even when a state may lackthe means for delivering those weapons reliably. Alternatively, analysts andpolicymakers infer from the existence of nuclear weapons the prevalence ofcorresponding soft institutional and organizational routines that would renderthose weapons militarily employable in war.

It is important to draw distinctions between the development of a nucleardevice, a weapon, the process of weaponization, and operationalization be-cause of the gaps between them. A device is an apparatus that presents proofof scientiªc principle that a nuclear explosion will occur. The weapon is a rug-ged and miniaturized version of the device. It usually incorporates arming andsaªng mechanisms to prevent unauthorized or inadvertent use. Weaponiza-tion is the process of integrating the weapon with delivery systems. Operation-

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3. Peter Liberman, “The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb,” International Security, Vol. 26,No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 55–57.4. Hymans’s work Achieving Nuclear Ambitions constitutes the ªrst serious attempt to explore theprocess of nuclear proliferation and the lengthening gap in the success rate of pre- and post-NPTnuclear proliferators. It too, however, focuses on the development process of a nuclear device, notweaponization and operational capabilities.5. Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2012), pp. 17–26.6. Scott D. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb,”International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter 1996/97), pp. 54–86.

alization entails the development of soft institutional and organizationalroutines. It refers to command and control mechanisms, coordination proce-dures between scientiªc and military agencies, and training protocols in themilitary to deploy and explode weapons (stockpile to target sequence). Ifthe weapon systems constitute the hardware, operational routines makeup the software that enables use of weapons during war.

Weaponization and soft organizational routines represent a continuum onthe path to operationalization. The likelihood of an emerging nuclear powersucceeding in actualizing its arsenal for military use is nearly always as impor-tant as its developing that arsenal. For all its political bluster, a nuclear pos-sessor state that is unable to accomplish the latter two steps in the aftermath ofdeveloping a nuclear device will not pose a credible military threat to itsneighbors. Likewise, a nuclear possessor state that lacks operational meansopens a diplomatic window to the international community to cap its capabili-ties short of instrumental means to wield credible military threats.

In this article, I use India during the years 1989–99 as a case study and pre-sent new empirical evidence to highlight some of the challenges that prolifer-ating states face in developing operational nuclear forces under the hostilegaze of the nonproliferation regime’s lead enforcer, the United States. This casestudy is a plausibility probe because India constitutes an example of a class ofstates that long possessed the technical and organizational means to developan operational nuclear capability and yet achieved that capability over anexcruciatingly long span of time. For example, India acquired nuclear weap-ons in 1989–90, but it lacked the capacity to deliver them reliably and safelyuntil 1994–95 or possibly 1996. More signiªcant, even after Indian scientistsand engineers solved the technical challenges of delivery, political leaders re-frained from embedding the weapons within organizational and proceduralroutines that would render them operational in the military sense of the term.In the process, they opened a vast operational gap that left the Indian state vul-nerable to a nuclear attack with doubtful means for successful retaliation.

I argue that secrecy stymied India’s operational advances in the 1990s, boththe reªnement of nuclear hardware and the development of soft operationalroutines. The secrecy in turn grew out of a fear of the nonproliferation regime,which otherwise proved far too weak in preventing Indian leaders from devel-oping nuclear weapons. At the same time, Indian political leaders feared pres-sures for nuclear rollback from the United States. These pressures pushed theweaponization process underground, deep into the bowels of the state. Tosafeguard secrecy, policy planning was weakly institutionalized. Sensitive nu-clear weapons–related information was tightly compartmentalized and hivedoff within an informal social network consisting of a small number of scientists

New Delhi’s Long Nuclear Journey 81

and civilian bureaucrats. Secrecy concerns prevented decisionmakers and pol-icy planners from decomposing problem sets and parceling them out simulta-neously for resolution to multiple bureaucratic actors, including the military.

This hoarding and compartmentalization of information not only preventedIndia from coordinating the weapons development and weaponization pro-grams efªciently, but also encouraged sequential decisionmaking. In theabsence of holistic planning stretching back to the 1980s, many technical prob-lems, particularly those related to the integration of weapons with combat air-craft, were only partially anticipated. In other instances, policy plannersremained unaware of the technical challenges until they demanded resolution.All of these factors became roadblocks on the path to weaponization. Secrecyconcerns similarly prevented policy planners from institutionalizing the softorganizational and training routines between the scientiªc and military agen-cies necessary to move weapons from the stockpile to the target, in effect atten-uating the state’s capacity to make good on its insinuated threat to punish anuclear aggressor via a retaliatory response.

Secrecy also had the pernicious effect of compounding management prob-lems common to all principal-agent relationships in organizations. In mostcomplex organizations, leaders (principals) typically use three mechanisms tomanage their subordinates (agents). The ªrst is institutional oversight mecha-nisms that bring a version of the “wisdom of the crowds” to vet the quality ofthe subordinates’ actions and performance. A second mechanism is transpar-ency, which reduces the cost of monitoring and oversight for principals. Third,principals often institute competition among their agents so that conºicting in-formation about program choices and actions can percolate up the decision-making chain. In India’s case, internal secrecy and political risk aversionprevented top decisionmakers from using all three institutional mechanismseffectively. The net consequence of such information scarcity within the statewas that a regime of relative ignorance cocooned the top political decision-makers. They were generally unaware of the quality and reliability problemsthat afºicted the weaponization program in the 1990s. Equally signiªcant, theyremained oblivious to the demands and signiªcance of soft routines for mili-tary operations.

In existing international relations, proliferation, and area studies literature,four explanations for the slow pace of Indian weaponization and operationalplanning during the 1990s are widely accepted. The ªrst explanation attributesIndian restraint to fence sitting, which stemmed from the normative beliefs ofdecisionmakers who pitted their moral aversion of nuclear weapons againstmore prosaic realist national security concerns.7 The second is that Indian


7. For variations of this argument, see, for example, Neil Joeck, “Tacit Bargaining and Stable Pro-

decisionmakers elected to institutionalize a regime of existential deterrenceout of normative concerns for strategic stability in South Asia.8 A third expla-nation attributes restraint to a unique Indian strategic culture of restraint inwhich the political symbolism associated with nuclear weapons overrides anyprospective military use.9 A fourth explanation identiªes the dysfunctionalnature of Indian civil-military institutions as the likely cause for India’s slowtransition from developing nuclear weapons to operationalizing them.10

The evidence I present in this article contradicts all four explanations. Ishow that the private actions of Indian decisionmakers in the 1990s under-mined claims of normative restraint. All Indian prime ministers in this periodfavored and authorized advances in weaponization. The alleged restraint outof an appreciation for what George Perkovich in the early 1990s described asthe “nuclear third way” actually stemmed from the absence of hard technolog-ical capabilities. Likewise, the furious attempt on the part of Indian defensescientists in this period to integrate nuclear weapons with combat aircraft forpurposes of reliable and safe delivery contradicts the assertions of cultural the-orists. I also present evidence to show that Indian planners’ obsession withsecrecy, not civil-military tensions, was the reason for the slow pace of weap-onization and operations planning. In addition to the existing arguments inthe literature, some scholars have proposed India’s bureaucratic malaise as apossible explanation for its nuclear pathologies. Others have argued thatIndian planners’ obsession with secrecy probably had as much to do withshielding Indian vulnerabilities from China and Pakistan as the United States.Because evidence for both proposed explanations does not yet exist in the liter-ature, I appraise them preemptively.

The rest of this article proceeds in four sections. I begin by highlighting thealarmist assumptions about India and Pakistan that dominated the thinking ofmany U.S. proliferation scholars, think tank analysts, senior government bu-reaucrats, and decisionmakers during the 1990s. In the second section, I con-trast these prevailing beliefs against the sequential and haphazard unfoldingof India’s weaponization program from 1980 to 1999. In the third section, Ipresent new evidence to show how the process of hiding in the nuclear closet


liferation in South Asia,” in Avner Cohen and Benjamin Frankel, eds., Opaque Nuclear Proliferation:Methodological and Policy Implications (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 78–80; Jacques E.C.Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 195–203; and George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: TheImpact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 448–449.8. George Perkovich, “A Nuclear Third Way in South Asia,” Foreign Policy, No. 91 (Summer 1993),pp. 85–104.9. Rajesh M. Basrur, “Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture,” Journal of Peace Research,Vol. 38, No. 2 (March 2001), pp. 181–198.10. Stephen P. Rosen, Societies and Military Power: India and Its Armies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1996), pp. 251–253.

retarded the development of India’s operational capabilities during the 1990s.In the fourth section, I evaluate six alternative explanations to the secrecy ar-gument I develop in this article. I conclude by ºeshing out some of the policyimplications that ºow from this article’s empirical ªndings.

My methodology combines historical process tracing through open sourceliterature with extensive elite interviews that I conducted in the ªeld in 2009and 2010 with policy planners and decisionmakers, both civil and military,at the highest levels of the Indian state. Given the sensitivity of some of thedata, many of the interviews are non-attributable. Based on the unique op-erational details presented in this article, the reader should draw the reason-able inference that many of my sources were intimate participants in India’sweaponization program during the 1990s and beyond.

South Asia: The “Most Dangerous” Place on Earth

Throughout much of the 1990s, India and Pakistan engaged in a game of nu-clear shadow boxing by insinuating the existence of nuclear weapons-in-the-basement. Outside South Asia and especially in the United States, mostacademics, think tank analysts, journalists, and government ofªcials assumedthat India and Pakistan were de facto nuclear weapon powers, meaning theypossessed the technical capability to assemble and deploy nuclear weaponsand the organizational capacity to use them instrumentally.

In his history of the Indian nuclear weapons program, for example,Perkovich cited evidence that during 1988–90, India readied “at least twodozen nuclear weapons for quick assembly and dispersal to airbases for deliv-ery by aircraft for retaliatory attacks against Pakistan.”11 Writing in 1992,George Quester downplayed the challenges of weaponization and declaredthe issue of nuclear delivery a minor one.12 Both Perkovich and Quester claimedthat whatever nuclear weapons India possessed at the time were readily deliver-able via its ºeet of Mirage, Jaguar, and MiG combat aircraft.13 Leonard Spectorechoed these claims independently.14 Summing up the prevailing view of thestate of Indian nuclear capabilities at the time, Steve Coll reported in 1991 that,“while the exact status of the military nuclear programs in India and Pakistan isbeing kept secret, U.S. ofªcials believe both countries have acquired the ability


11. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 293.12. George H. Quester, “Nuclear Pakistan and Nuclear India: Stable Deterrent or ProliferationChallenge” (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1992), pp. 5, 7–10.13. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 295.14. Leonard Spector with Jacqueline R. Smith, Nuclear Ambitions: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons,1989–1990 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990), p. 79.

to produce and deploy quickly a small number of nuclear weapons. [B]othcountries possess sophisticated ªghter aircraft that could conceivably penetrateair defenses while carrying one or more nuclear bombs.”15

These prevailing views were reinforced by U.S. government ofªcials whonever tired in public of pointing to the immediacy and severity of the prolifer-ation threat in South Asia. For example, during the 1989–90 Indo-Pakistani cri-sis over Kashmir,16 a senior U.S. defense ofªcial suggested, “If readiness ismeasured on a scale of one to 10 and the Indians are normally at six, they havenow moved to nine.”17 U.S. intelligence sources estimated that India was capa-ble of building nuclear weapons within a matter of days and that weaponscould be delivered by combat aircraft, a point reinforced by Lynn Davis, theU.S. undersecretary of state for international security affairs.18 In a February1993 hearing on proliferation threats before the U.S. Senate Committee onGovernmental Affairs, Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey stated:“The arms race between India and Pakistan poses perhaps the most probableprospect for the future use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclearweapons. Both nations have nuclear weapons development programs andcould, on short notice, assemble nuclear weapons. [A]dvanced aircraft are of-ten the delivery system of choice for weapons of mass destruction, and theyare now commonplace among proliferating countries. [T]he aircraft availableto these countries are fully capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”19

These claims and statements are explicit in their assumptions of India’s tech-


15. Steve Coll, “South Asia Retains Its Nuclear Option: India and Pakistan Pose Dual Risk as Po-tential Flash Points,” Washington Post, September 30, 1991.16. India and Pakistan faced a dangerous military standoff during the winter of 1989 and springof 1990. The crisis resulted from the outbreak of an insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmirthat was actively supported by Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. During the crisis,Pakistan allegedly sought to catalyze U.S. support and intervention by signaling that it might usenuclear weapons if the crisis turned to war; the United States believed that Pakistan might haveassembled and possibly deployed a nuclear weapon. In January 1990, Pakistani Foreign MinisterShahabzada Yakub Khan traveled to Delhi and delivered what Indian political leaders perceivedas a veiled nuclear threat. The crisis was ultimately defused with the help of U.S. diplomatic inter-vention. See Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Re-port (New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 65, 204; P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen,The Compound Crisis of 1990: Perception, Politics, and Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2003); SeymourM. Hersh, “On the Nuclear Edge,” New Yorker, March 29, 1993, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1993/03/29/1993_03_29_056_TNY_CARDS_000363214; and William E. Burrows andRobert Windrem, Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1994).17. James Adams, “Pakistan Nuclear War Threat,” Sunday Times (London), May 27, 1990.18. Michael R. Gordon, “South Asian Lands Pressed on Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, March 23,1994.19. R. James Woolsey, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Pro-liferation Threats of the 1990s: Hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, 102nd Cong., 1stsess., February 24, 1993 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1993), pp. 14–15.

nical capability to build and deploy nuclear weapons. Equally signiªcant, theyimply the existence of the state’s institutional and organizational capacity touse them. Such consensual views notwithstanding, however, the evidence Ipresent in this article suggests that 1994–95 was the earliest date when Indiaactually achieved the technical capability to air-deliver nuclear weapons.20

Furthermore, although India elected to build weaponized nuclear devices in1989, the process of integrating them with aircraft-based delivery systemsstretched out for nearly seven years, until 1994–95 (see ªgure 1).21 More puz-zling, even after weaponized devices and aircraft-based delivery systems be-came available in the mid-1990s, the Indian government did not develop thesoft institutional and organizational capacity to manage its nuclear hardwarein any instrumentally meaningful way until a year after it had conducted nu-clear tests and formally claimed nuclear power status. The term “institutionalcapacity” here refers to the civil-military chain of command, standard operat-ing procedures, practice drills, and ground rehearsals to coordinate actionwithin and across the various agencies tasked with responding to a nuclearemergency.22 It also refers to operational planning in the military’s meaningof the term.23 This state of affairs continued until the summer of 1999, whenIndia suddenly found itself at war with Pakistan over the Kargil Heights inKashmir.24 This, the Kargil War, was the historical moment when the Indiangovernment initiated nuclear operational planning with the air force.25

India’s Weaponization Program in Practice

In May 1974, India exploded a nuclear device and dubbed it a “peaceful nu-clear explosion.” In its wake, India did not declare itself a nuclear weapon


20. According to the testimony of Scientiªc Adviser to the Defense Minister A.P.J. Abdul Kalambefore the Kargil Review Committee, weaponization was completed from 1992 to 1994. The re-cords of this and other conversations pertaining to India’s nuclear weapons program from theearly 1980s until 1998 are contained in the annexure to the report, which has not been declassiªed.See Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 205. The author’s interviews with sev-eral senior retired Indian air force ofªcers at the highest levels suggest that India achieved an air-deliverable capability sometime in 1995. See also Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret Storyof India’s Quest to Be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 382–383.21. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 332–333.22. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X,” New Delhi, India, October/November2009.23. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “Z,” Gurgaon, India, February 2010.24. The Kargil War between India and Pakistan was triggered by the latter’s incursion into and oc-cupation of mountain ridgelines on the Indian side of the line of control (LoC) in Kashmir. The warlasted from May to July 1999, and ended with Pakistan’s withdrawal from all positions on the In-dian side of the LoC. See Jasjit E. Singh, ed., Kargil 1999: Pakistan’s Fourth War for Kashmir (NewDelhi: South Asia, 1999); and Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes andConsequences of the Kargil Conºict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).25. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “A,” New Delhi, India, July/August 2010.

state, nor did it seek such legal recognition internationally. Bucking the trendof other nuclear weapon powers until then, and somewhat paradoxically,India did not follow up this lone test with other tests. This single nuclear testspawned the legend that India was not motivated by national security con-cerns.26 The very likely answer to the riddle of India’s lone 1974 test, however,was the manageable risk of Chinese nuclear blackmail in the short term,27 itsresource constraints, the lack of a diversiªed industrial infrastructure,28 andWestern nonproliferation pressures.29 By the late 1970s, the balance of threatin South Asia had begun to change for the worse, as clear indicators emerged ofPakistan’s nuclear quest. In the case of Pakistan, the Himalayas did not pres-ent a geographic barrier as they did in the north vis-à-vis China. India’s struggleagainst Pakistan was also an ideological and existential one. Pakistan’s revanch-ism became evident after India helped catalyze its breakup on ideological


26. Ibid.27. L.K. Jha, “Nuclear Policy,” Prime Minister’s Secretariat, May 3, 1967, P.N. Haksar Files, Sub.F.-111, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, India.28. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, pp. 121, 173–174.29. Ibid., pp. 173–174.

Figure 1. Nuclear Device Development and Weaponization Time Lines

grounds in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Pakistan similarly hoped to reopen theKashmir dispute with India after developing a nuclear capability.30

In a classic internal balancing act to counter the emerging Pakistani threat,India revived its nuclear weapons program after Indira Gandhi was reelectedprime minister in 1980.31 Gandhi’s government also instituted a ballistic mis-sile program in 1983. The Indian air force purchased dual-use combat aircraftcapable of performing nuclear missions. These programs were ostensibly partof a balancing response against Pakistan’s nuclear developments. India’s “op-tion” strategy, as it became known, was interpreted as an attempt to develop athreshold nuclear capability. The strategy entailed assembling all the compo-nents of a working nuclear arsenal that would give New Delhi the means todevelop and deploy nuclear weapons rapidly. The option strategy was alsothought more economically manageable and far less likely to attract interna-tional “negative” balancing efforts in the form of sanctions.

The problem was that India’s nuclear weapons program was never clearlytied to the development of delivery systems. Tasking orders for weapons anddelivery systems proceeded on parallel tracks. Time lines for the developmentof nuclear weapons and the ballistic missile program did not match. The airforce purchased combat aircraft without thinking through the challenges ofweaponization. Similarly, the nuclear weapons developed in the late 1980s didnot ªt onto the dual-use combat aircraft in the inventory of the Indian air force.Indian planners also did not anticipate the formidable technical challengesof ensuring reliable and safe delivery of nuclear munitions via combat air-craft. And even after these challenges were overcome, howsoever unreliably,planners did not implement coordination and training routines between thescientiªc and military user to move weapons from the stockpile to target.Put bluntly, the process of weaponization and operational planning withinthe Indian state in this period was characterized by inefªciency, delay,and dysfunction.

How did India, a country with a proven capability to build a nuclear deviceand a large nuclear estate and scientiªc-industrial infrastructure, tie itself up inknots? I answer this question by showing that the institution of secrecy dis-rupted parallel coordination among India’s nuclear estate, its defense researchand development agencies, and the military. Furthermore, Indian decision-makers’ political hesitancy in confronting the nuclear nonproliferation regime,especially its lead enforcer, the United States, caused them to select narrowand static goals. These goals were strictly technical and followed a sequential


30. Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, pp. 185–187.31. Ibid., pp. 199–206.

logic. Institutional and organizational breaks inside the state compartmental-ized weapon development from weaponization. They also separated hardwaredevelopment from procedural, planning, and training sequences, the softwarethat makes up operational military routines. All of the nodal developments inthe proliferation chain, particularly the decisions concerning weaponizationand operational planning, were event-based outcomes. They were neitherdriven by decisionmaking economy nor deduced by decisionmakers’ concernfor aggregate and holistic planning.

a weakly institutionalized nuclear social network

As India instituted a weapons research and development program in the early1980s, all nuclear decisionmaking was concentrated in the prime minister’sofªce. The entire policy planning and decisionmaking apparatus comprised aloose social network of nuclear and defense scientists. It also sometimes in-cluded prime ministers’ principal and cabinet secretaries; and from 1989 on-ward, a specially designated coordinator, then Defense Secretary NareshChandra.32 This small network of civilian and scientiªc personnel advised suc-cessive prime ministers and liaised between the prime minister’s ofªce and thedefense scientiªc agencies. Within this social network, the mode of communi-cation was largely oral. Little was committed to paper, and, by extension, littlewas recorded in the institutional memory of the state. At any given juncture,only one or two individuals within the network enjoyed the proverbial “God’seye” view of the nuclear program.33

Several scholars attribute the strategic direction, pace, and scope of India’snuclear weapons program to a powerful network of nuclear and defense scien-tists. Itty Abraham coined the term “strategic enclave,” which continues to beused generally to describe the nuclear, defense, and space sectors in India,which enjoy substantial autonomy and are believed to constitute a proverbial“state within a state.”34 Regardless of the power of the strategic enclave in giv-ing strategic direction to the nuclear weapons program, its power to determinethe program’s scope and pace in the 1980s and 1990s was highly constrained.Scientist-bureaucrats from the two most powerful agencies within the strategicenclave, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Defense Researchand Development Organization (DRDO), enjoyed careers that spanned succes-


32. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”33. I borrow this characterization from Ashley J. Tellis’s India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: BetweenRecessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2001); and interviews with se-nior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”34. Itty Abraham, “India’s ‘Strategic Enclave’: Civilian Scientists and Military Technologies,”Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 232–252.

sive governments, sometimes as long as three decades. Nuclear scientists suchas R. Ramanna, P.K. Iyengar, R. Chidambaram, A. Kakodkar, S.K. Sikka, andtheir DRDO counterparts including B.D. Nagchaudhuri, V.S. Arunachalam,K. Santhanam, and A.P.J. Kalam leveraged their status and continuity in gov-ernment to build close personal ties with the prime minister’s ofªce, the nervecenter for all strategic defense and foreign policy decisions.

For example, R. Ramanna, the leader of the 1974 nuclear explosion teamwent on to become the chief scientiªc adviser to the defense minister from1978 to 1981, the head of Atomic Energy Commission in 1983, and minister ofstate for defense in 1990. V.S. Arunachalam, from DRDO, continued for a dec-ade as the scientiªc adviser to the defense minister and the lead adviser onthe weaponization program to ªve prime ministers from 1982 until 1992.K. Santhanam, who became involved in the weaponization program in themid-1980s, served as the coordinator between DRDO and the Bhabha AtomicResearch Center (BARC) in his position as chief technology adviser to the de-fense minister’s scientiªc adviser at the time of the 1998 tests.35 Their individu-ally powerful positions as members of the strategic enclave notwithstanding,as a group the scientists were not institutionalized within any agency such as anational security council or a secretariat that could provide them a structuredplatform to advance their views.

As an advisory group, therefore, the scientists and technologists existedlargely as an informal social network. There were no established legal or evenquasi-legal administrative rules of business to guide their interaction, and theydid not have independent access to other government agencies such as thecabinet or parliament. In the absence of legal and administrative authority,entrée and continued participation in the network depended on a personal re-lationship with prime ministerial incumbents or with their coordinatingagents. In addition, the internal regime of secrecy had the consequence of frag-menting and compartmentalizing all weapons-related information. The strate-gic enclave’s weak state of institutionalization as a group and the process ofinformation monopolization by a few exacerbated coordination problems andproduced a dysfunctional state of planning.

disaggregation and sequential planning

This institutional fragility left the strategic enclave in a weak position to ex-tract commitments from key political decisionmakers to undertake holisticplanning. Indeed, the deconstruction of every major episode pertaining to thenuclear weapon development program during the 1980–98 period—the can-


35. The BARC is the nerve center of India’s nuclear weapons design and development program.For career trajectories of these ofªcials, see Chengappa, Weapons of Peace.

celed 1982–83 tests; precursor programs to weaponization in 1986; the 1989decision to build weapons and integrate them with combat aircraft; prelimi-nary nuclear posture plans in 1990 and the implementation of dispersal, stor-age, and concealment routines in 1995; the aborted plans for nuclear tests in1996—shows that decision goals were largely technical, limited, and looselycoupled.36 Above all, the technical goals were decoupled from any organiza-tional imperatives of operational planning.

In 1982–83 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, although fearful of U.S. economicsanctions, approved nuclear tests in response to Pakistan’s nuclear advances.To win the prime minister’s approval, however, the scientists presented thetests to her as experiments, not the start of a test-series of a weapons develop-ment program.37 Even this proved insufªcient to prevent the prime ministerfrom retracting her approval within hours of granting it.38 Next, in 1986, afterit became clear during the Brasstacks crisis with Pakistan that Islamabad wasclose to acquiring or had acquired the capability to build nuclear weapons,39

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi authorized DRDO to start development of rug-ged, miniaturized, safer, and more reliable components and subsystems forwhat might eventually be a weapon system. His mandate was to “keep thecountry’s nuclear capability at least at a minimum state of readiness.”40 Itstopped short of ordering the building of a weapon or integrating it into a de-livery platform. Eventually, in 1989 Gandhi approved weaponization in thewake of the failure of his global disarmament plan and menacing Indian intel-ligence reports, which concluded in March 1988 that “Pakistan was in posses-sion of at least three nuclear devices of 15–20 kiloton yield.”41 Once again,however, the prime minister’s ofªce restricted the program’s scope to buildingair-deliverable devices and the certiªcation of an air-delivery platform for safeand reliable delivery.42 In essence, as former Principal Secretary to the Prime


36. For an overview of technical developments during the 1980s and 1990s, see ibid.37. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 243.38. Interview with V.S. Arunachalam (science adviser to the defense minister/secretary, DefenseResearch and Development Organization, 1983–92), Bangalore, India, May 2009.39. Brasstacks was a large military exercise held by the Indian army in the Rajasthan desert facingPakistan during the winter of 1986–87. The exercise triggered a Pakistani military counter-mobilization and almost drove the two countries to war. According to the Indian government’sKargil Review Committee report, during the crisis, Pakistan conveyed a nuclear threat to theIndian government through India’s high commissioner (S.K. Singh) in Islamabad. See Kargil Re-view Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 191; and P.R. Chari et al., Brasstacks and Beyond: Per-ception and Management of Crisis in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), pp. 23–67.40. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 303–305, at p. 303.41. Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 190. The committee reported that esti-mates of the “number of cores/devices/weapons in Pakistan’s possession” varied in different in-telligence reports and assessments prepared for the government.42. B.G. Deshmukh, From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Ofªce: A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back (NewDelhi: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 170–171; and Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 331–332.

Minister B.G. Deshmukh revealed subsequently, the program was reduced to“bar charts” detailing “when the (bomb) trigger would be ready, what type ofplatform would carry the bomb, how the bomb was to be mated to a deliveryvehicle, the type of electronic checks,” with the prime minister retaining vetoover the passage of every technical threshold.43

Holistic decisionmakers would have probably ordered policy planners tosimultaneously think through command and control, posture, and operationalplanning, especially after electing to commence weaponization. This is notwhat happened in India, however. During the Kashmir crisis in the winterand spring of 1989–90, the Indian government found itself without a nuclearcommand and control system. Worse, it had no guidelines and proceduresto respond to a nuclear emergency.44 A secret committee, the Arun SinghCommittee, sat in the summer of 1990, in the aftermath of the subconti-nent’s ªrst serious nuclear crisis, to plan India’s nuclear emergency responsemeasures.45 The committee subsequently prepared emergency response proce-dures and command and control mechanisms, but it did not delve into opera-tional planning.46 The committee’s “only speciªc recommendation,” recalledK. Subrahmanyam, who participated in its deliberations, was to “to create sep-arate storage for missiles and warheads . . . what should be the drill for thembeing brought together . . . and then . . . the communications from commandand control.”47 As Perkovich reports in his history of the Indian nuclear weap-ons program, “[T]he group called for designating air force units to receive nu-clear devices and deliver them according to previously prepared orders thatbase commanders would possess under seal.”48

The piecemeal nature of decisionmaking at the prime minister’s ofªce canbe inferred from the fact that the committee’s key recommendation was notimplemented until certiªcation of the air-delivery platform in 1994–95. Onlysubsequently, in 1995, did Prime Minister Narasimha Rao approve the enact-ment of dispersal and concealment routines planned for safeguarding ªssilecores and nonªssile trigger assemblies from a preemptive attack.49 Meanwhile,wartime operations planning to coordinate action between the air force andscientiªc agencies and to enable the air force to plan nuclear missions was de-layed still further.50


43. Deshmukh, From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Ofªce, p. 171; and Chengappa, Weapons of Peace,p. 335.44. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 353–356.45. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, pp. 313–314.46. Interviews with K. Subrahmanyam, Noida, India, October 2009.47. Ibid.48. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 313.49. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, p. 391.50. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”

military planners on the margins

Because the political goals during the 1980s and 1990s largely concernedweaponization, those most often consulted were the scientists and technolo-gists, particularly the heads of the DAE and DRDO. Alarmed at the disag-gregation and dysfunctional planning within India’s nuclear program, twosuccessive army chiefs in the 1980s, General K. Rao and General K. Sundarji,exploited their excellent personal relations with Prime Ministers Indira andRajiv Gandhi to lobby them to institutionalize nuclear coordination withingovernment;51 in Sundarji’s case, with such clamor that it aroused the conster-nation of Cabinet Secretary B.G. Deshmukh.52 Although distrust of the mili-tary is the oft-attributed reason for its exclusion from nuclear decisionmakingin this period, according to India’s nuclear coordinator in the 1990s, Ambassa-dor Naresh Chandra, it had more to do with the civilians’ attempt to safeguardthe program’s secrecy.53 Then Foreign Minister Narasimha Rao’s response toSubrahmanyam’s suggestion in the mid-1980s to leverage the rise of GeneralSundarji, by then the army’s preeminent nuclear theorist, to educate the armyand the military in general on nuclear issues is telling: “No . . . no . . . weshouldn’t do that . . . because that will suggest to the outside world that we aredeveloping nuclear weapons.”54

Beginning in the early 1980s, however, despite lacking any directive fromthe government, the Indian army began debating and experimenting with amobile defense and offense-in-depth conventional war strategy based onmechanization. The army leadership believed the new strategy necessary forconducting successful operations against Pakistan. In the Army’s College ofCombat at Mhow, Lieutenant General Sundarji held a series of seminarson conventional operations under conditions of nuclear asymmetry, which be-came the basis of the “Mhow (Combat) Papers” and the core of his subsequentnuclear advocacy and strategy for India.55 Scholars such as W.P.S. Sidhu drewon the army’s doctrinal debates and restructuring from this period to arguesubsequently that Army Headquarters had autonomously developed a nu-clear doctrine tacitly endorsed by the government.56 Those claims in retrospectare overstated.

As former Army Vice Chief Lt. Gen. Vijay Oberoi clariªed to the author,“From the early 1980s, the army created structures and commenced with


51. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 253–255, 260.52. Deshmukh, From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Ofªce, pp. 163–166.53. Interview with Ambassador Naresh Chandra, New Delhi, India, November 2009.54. Interview with Subrahmanyam.55. K. Sundarji, ed., “Effects of Nuclear Asymmetry on Conventional Deterrence,” Combat Paper,No.1, Mhow, April 1981.56. W.P.S. Sidhu, The Development of an Indian Nuclear Doctrine since 1980, Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-versity of Cambridge, 1997, pp. 303–316.

the formulation of policy so far as nuclear protective measures were con-cerned . . . given nuclear developments in Pakistan. However, there was no of-fensive planning (nuclear) at that stage because the army leadership was notprivy to India’s nuclear weapons capability.”57 Conªrming that assessment,an ofªcer from the army’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical WarfareDirectorate explained to the author in 2009, “Sundarji did think about it . . .Combat Papers 1 and 2, especially 1 . . . and there were some published pam-phlets used in the Indian army . . . but those were straight out of Western liter-ature, copied literally . . . and therefore had limited use for the subcontinentbecause the data based on demography, geography, and meteorology variedso substantially.”58

Until 1998, the air force was the only military service with any knowledge ofthe weaponization program because of its role in delivering the weapons. Buteven as the user service tasked with delivery, until the early 1990s, it only par-ticipated in the weaponization program at the margins. The DRDO ªrst con-ducted trials in the early 1980s to test the Jaguar combat aircraft, which Indiahad purchased from Britain in the late 1970s, as a potential delivery vehicle.Of this interaction between DRDO and the air force, a test pilot on the teamhad this to say: “We were groping in the dark. We had no interaction with thescientists who were actually making the bombs. They had never ºown an air-craft and we were not involved in the bomb’s development. . . . [W]e arguedthat unless we knew what the left hand is doing how can the right hand bringit together.”59 Having found the Jaguar unsuitable because of the low groundclearance between the aircraft and the nuclear weapon container, DRDO nextidentiªed the Mirage 2000 as its choice for a delivery system.

Even in the aftermath of that decision, the interaction between DRDO andthe air force during the 1990s was primarily technical. It was strictly conªnedto the modiªcation of the Mirage 2000 for nuclear missions and the training ofa handful of pilots to deliver nuclear weapons using dummy bombs. Until1996, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao privately conªded to Air ChiefMarshal S.K. Sareen that India possessed nuclear weapons, no air chief had“ofªcial” knowledge of the program.60 The air force’s role, in the memorablewords of another air chief who served in the 1990s, was simply that of a “de-livery boy.”61 The same air chief brutally summed up the institutional con-


57. Interview with Vijay Oberoi (vice chief of army staff, 2001–02), Chandigarh, India, July 2010.58. Interview with senior army ofªcer “Q” (NBC Warfare Directorate: Army Headquarters), NewDelhi, India, May 2009.59. Quoted in Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, p. 327.60. Interview with S.K. Sareen (chief of air staff, 1995–98), Gurgaon, India, January 2010.61. Interview with “O” (retired chief of air staff), New Delhi, India, December 2009.

straints of his ofªce by stating that “no air chief wants to approach the primeminister about nuclear issues only to be told to go mind his own business!”62

In the mid-1990s, a small number of civilian ofªcials working with thescientiªc agencies drew up “paper plans” for an assured retaliation posture,but they did not develop operational plans with Air Headquarters to move theweapons from the stockpile to target.63 As the air force’s nuclear air deliverysystem came online at the end of 1995, principals within DRDO such asSanthanam supported operational planning with the air force. Senior air forceofªcials who interacted with them concluded, however, that the scientistslacked the political clout to force operational planning on the political leader-ship.64 “Force synthesis,” as India’s former and longtime weaponization man-ager V.S. Arunachalam informed the author, “the integration of technical,organizational, and ideational elements is a political decision, which must becoordinated from the top. Scientiªc bureaucracies working on the technicalparts of a weapon system cannot on their own undertake such decisions.”65

The Operational Consequences of Institutionalized Secrecy

The organizational dysfunction associated with the regime of internal opacityhad the cumulative effect of stymieing India’s operational nuclear capabilitiesthroughout the 1990s. Some of the problems related to operationalization weretechnical, but the lack of advanced institutional cooperation between thescientiªc and military agencies gave the technical issues even greater salience.Further, India’s skeletal and tenuously institutionalized command and controlsystem and the near-total absence of operational planning between thescientiªc and military agencies to move nuclear weapons from the stockpile totarget during these years were clearly institutional and organizational issues.This meant that although India possessed nuclear weapons, its institutionaland organizational capacity to press them into military operations was farfrom assured. Evidence shows that although the Indian state from the mid-1990s onward was theoretically capable of mounting limited nuclear strikes,the internal regime of secrecy left the technical and organizational likelihoodof their success questionable. Further, for the most part, the political decision-makers seemed unaware of the technical reliability and organizational chal-lenges of operational planning.


62. Ibid.63. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”64. Interviews with senior air force ofªcer “Z.”65. Interview with Arunachalam.

of devices and weapons

When thinking of nuclear operationalization, it is generally useful to drawdistinctions between a “device” and a “weapon.” A device, as Chuck Hansendeªnes it, can commonly be understood as “[f]ission and fusion materials, to-gether with their arming, fusing, ªring, chemical high explosive, and effects-measuring components, that have not yet reached the development status ofan operational weapon . . . system designed to produce a nuclear explosion forpurposes of testing the design, for verifying nuclear theory, or for gathering in-formation on system performance.”66 A weapon system is considerably differ-ent, however. It involves “the conversion or modiªcation of a nuclear testdevice into a combat-ready warhead,” which “includes the design and produc-tion of a ballistic casing (and any required retardation and impact-absorptionor shock-mitigation devices) as well as special fuses, power sources, and arm-ing and saªng systems or equipment.”67

If one uses the above deªnitions as the base for measurement, then India didnot possess a nuclear weapon until at least 1990. To be sure, Indian nuclear sci-entists were working on advanced boosted-ªssion and perhaps even thermo-nuclear weapon designs by the late 1980s. As early as 1982–83, they may haveplanned to test a lighter and more sophisticated version of the 1974 device,but the sequential nature of planning ensured that it was not until 1985–86that Rajiv Gandhi’s government put in motion a plan to develop a weaponsystem of reduced weight and size that was safe, reliable, and deliverable.India did not possess such a weapon system in 1986–87 when the Brasstackscrisis erupted with Pakistan. Nor did it possess such a weapon at the timeof the Kashmir crisis in 1989–90. Indeed, the doyen of Indian strategistsand nuclear consultant to nearly all prime ministers since the late 1970s,K. Subrahmanyam, subsequently disclosed that “in the period between 1987–1990 India was totally vulnerable to a Pakistani nuclear threat.”68

Further, until Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi reached a decision in the late1980s to commence weaponization, the scientiªc agencies did not seriously en-gage the air force to resolve the technics of nuclear delivery. Many observers inthe 1990s assumed that India’s Jaguar and Mirage combat aircraft were capa-ble of performing nuclear missions from the late 1980s. The grounds for suchclaims, however, are suppositions, not facts. In India’s case, Prime Minister V.P.Singh recalls DRDO Chief Arunachalam brieªng him in 1989 that “India couldthen only assemble nuclear weapons but not deliver them.”69 As he put it,


66. Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (New York: Orion, 1988), p. 13.67. Ibid., p. 17.68. K. Subrahmanyam, “Indian Nuclear Policy, 1964–98 (A Personal Recollection),” in Jasjit E.Singh, ed., Nuclear India (New Delhi: Knowledge World, 1998), p. 44.69. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, p. 354.

“[W]e could laboratory test everything . . . but the bomb delivery was still inprogress.”70 More evidence of the lack of a delivery capability comes fromChief of Air Staff S. Mehra, who used the occasion of the 1989–90 Kashmir cri-sis and the prime minister’s concerns about a potential Pakistani nuclear striketo lobby for the removal of internal ªrewalls between the civilian developmentand military user agencies.71 The prototype Indian nuclear device under devel-opment had until then not been shown to the air force.72 But because no posi-tive response was forthcoming from the prime minister or the scientists,Mehra and the two other service chiefs concluded that India did not possess aready arsenal at the time.

the challenges of weaponization

The modiªcation of aircraft for safe and reliable delivery of a nuclear weaponturned out to be a huge technical and managerial challenge that consumed theDRDO’s attention for six years and perhaps more. There was a major problemintegrating the nuclear weapon with the Mirage. Senior Indian air forceofªcials recall that DRDO’s original intent may have been to arm ballistic mis-siles with nuclear warheads and circumvent the air force entirely. The warheaddeveloped was too large and heavy, however, for ballistic missile carriageat the time.73 The trouble, recalls another senior air force ofªcer who served atthe time, was that “the bofªns developed it independently without referenceto the delivery platform.74 There was a problem with carriage because theweapon was too long.”75 This was cause for concern especially during the “ro-tation maneuver during the takeoff stage. A skilled Mirage pilot could havepulled it off . . . but not just any pilot,” a senior air force ofªcer with an inti-mate view of the program told the author.76 The “size of the weapon itself, itslength and weight upset the aerodynamics and center of gravity of the air-


70. Ibid.71. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 305; and Shekhar Gupta, “Know What They Did That Sum-mer,” Indian Express, August 12, 2006, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/know-what-they-did-that-summer/10366/.72. Gupta, “Know What They Did That Summer.”73. India began developing the short-range Prithvi ballistic missile as part of its IntegratedGuided Missile Program in 1983. The maiden launch of the missile occurred in 1987. Flight trialsor the Prithvi continued until the late 1990s. There is evidence to suggest that Indian defense agen-cies were able to modify warheads for ballistic missile delivery by 1996–97. It is uncertain if thesystems met operational standards of reliability, however. According to a former commander inchief, Strategic Forces Command, who spoke to the author on the condition of anonymity, even aslate as 2003–04, combat aircraft were the most ºexible and reliable nuclear delivery systems Indiapossessed. See Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, p. 418; and interview with “P,” (commander in chief,Strategic Forces Command), New Delhi, India, April 2009.74. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “Z.”75. Ibid.76. Interviews with retired air marshal “N,” New Delhi, India, January 2010.

craft.”77 Other aspects that needed resolution were the aircraft’s electronic in-terface and sighting systems to enable the arming and release of the weapon.78

The electronic interface could not be reconªgured without what one air forceofªcer described as access to the “manufacturer’s database” and computersource codes. The aircraft also required extensive rewiring for electrical con-nectivity to enable the bomb’s functions.79 The Mirages that India had ac-quired from France in the mid–1980s were not nuclear certiªed. There werethus concerns that a post-detonation electromagnetic pulse could interferewith the aircraft’s computer-controlled ºy-by-wire, communications, andother electronic systems. According to one senior air force ofªcial, “In the early1990s, the air force was thinking of one-way missions. . . . [I]t was unlikely thatthe pilot deployed on a nuclear attack mission would have made it back.”80

Resolution of these technical bottlenecks took six years. Until 1994, DRDOconducted experimental modiªcations on just one Mirage 2000 with a singletest pilot. There was no backup.81 But even after 1994, the internal feedback AirHeadquarters received from its “boys” was that the plane’s modiªed systemshad not achieved the degree of reliability considered de rigueur for perform-ing sensitive nuclear missions.82 A senior participant in the certiªcation of theair platform observed that there was a “hand-hammered quality” to the air-craft that were modiªed for nuclear missions. There were several failures, butwith the passage of time and some introspection, the system was furtherreªned. There were, however, “limitations” in the ªnal product. It was “lesscapable, less reliable, and generated less conªdence.”83 This same individualwith insider knowledge of the program volunteered to the author that oneshould assume that “India could have acquired an air delivery capability by1996.” Prior to that date, the deterrent was a “paper tiger.” To be sure, nuclearweapons existed. He emphasized, however, that “capability is a function notjust of the weapon but what you can actually do with that weapon.” If a nu-clear emergency had arisen in 1994–95, the air force “may have been forced todo something.” But “given the large number of unresolved issues . . . the somany imponderables,” it was difªcult to estimate the likelihood of success.84


77. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “S,” New Delhi, India, December 2009/January2010.78. Ibid.79. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “Z.”80. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “S.”81. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “Z.”82. Ibid.83. Ibid.84. Ibid.

command and control and emergency planning

Given the compartmentalized and sequential nature of planning, politicalleaders did not think through command and control simultaneously with thedevelopment of the weapon itself. Command and control simply refers tomeans that enable the exercise of authority and direction by a group of civilianand military leaders in pursuit of military missions. There are two componentsto any nuclear command and control system: organizational and technical. Theorganizational aspects entail the creation of a hierarchy of individuals and pro-cedures to transform political directions into military operations. The technicalaspects involve the deployment of special communications equipment totransmit directives from the relevant authorities. In the absence of a commandand control system, strategic connectivity between scientiªc agencies that de-velop nuclear weapons, the military that trains in their use and the politicalauthorities who direct their use is broken.

India, however, lacked both the organizational and technical capacities untilthe early 1990s. During the Kashmir crisis, for example, command and controlconsisted only of the prime minister, his principal secretary, and the scientiªcadviser to the defense minister.85 The rufºed prime minister conveyed his con-cerns to his principal secretary saying, “[T]his is scary. This matter cannot justbe between the prime minister and the scientiªc advisor. Supposing someoneattacks Delhi, there is no formal procedure as to who then decides what to do.We have to institutionalize it.”86 Arun Singh, the former minister of state fordefense who the prime minister appointed in the wake of the crisis to reviewIndia’s nuclear preparedness and make recommendations for a command con-trol system, expressed shock at the bureaucratic chaos inside government. Hethought “it . . . crazy that BARC didn’t know where DRDO stood or vice versa.Nothing had been worked out as to who was to control the weapons and un-der what circumstances and time frame we would strike back.”87

A senior ofªcial who served at the highest levels of the Indian governmentduring the Kashmir crisis claims that it would be reasonable to assume that thegovernment had prepared emergency action and coordination protocols bythe mid-1990s. If a nuclear explosion occurred, it would be the DAE’s task tomake an assessment. The DAE, which held custody of the ªssile cores, wouldthen pass them on to DRDO, which in turn would assemble nuclear weaponsand hand them over to the air force. The planners believed that seventy-twohours would be a reasonable time to constitute a nuclear force and launch re-


85. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 354–355.86. Ibid.87. Ibid., p. 356.

taliation. In the event of the prime minister’s incapacitation, power would de-volve upon the Cabinet Committee on Security,88 but the likelihood of thatevent happening was thought low. A Pakistani nuclear attack, the ofªcials be-lieved, would be limited and symbolic and leave the functioning of the federalgovernment relatively undisturbed. But in the worst-case “bolt-out-of-theblue” scenario in which Delhi did go up in a mushroom cloud, power woulddevolve upon a hierarchy of state governors and principals in the state civilservice who would assume responsibilities of the federal government, whilethe military would function under a reconstituted civilian authority. India, theleaders of the nuclear network believed, was a “big country. It would sur-vive!”89 But how, they could not tell.

The trouble with the above protocols was that they remained a secret evenwithin the loose network of ofªcials who constituted India’s principal policyplanners during the 1990s. Above all, they remained “paper exercises.”90 Therewere no written documents or standard operating procedures, a “red book,”for individuals to follow. Barring the special coordinator and the scientiªc ad-viser to the defense minister, who knew of them in their entirety, other mem-bers of the nuclear network, never more than a dozen senior ofªcials in anycase, knew only fragments of them. Because little was committed to paper,the institutional memory of the state beyond this network of ofªcials remaineda blank slate.91 Furthermore, the DAE and DRDO did not practice any emer-gency drills on the ground to test their coordination and response.92 From themid-1990s onward, air chiefs inferred that such protocols likely existed,93 butthey were told nothing of their content. The president, as the constitutionalhead of state, was privy to some of this nuclear knowledge.94 Similarly, a spareoral brief was made to new holders of the prime minister’s ofªce. If, however,they were deemed disinterested, and at least three incumbents in the 1990swere,95 their principal secretaries were briefed instead.96 Beyond prime minis-ters and their principal secretaries, no information was shared with ministerson the Cabinet Committee on Security or with federal governors and provin-cial civil service chiefs who might be called to assume responsibilities of the


88. The committee is composed of the ministers of external affairs, defense, home, and ªnance.89. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”90. Ibid.91. Ibid.92. Interviews with senior Indian air force ofªcer “Z.”93. Ibid.94. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”95. The three prime ministers were Chandrashekhar, Gujral, and Gowda. See interview withArunachalam; and interviews with senior defense ofªcial “X.”96. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, p. 377.

federal government. The military leadership was equally clueless about how itwas to function under a new civilian dispensation. As the senior governmentofªcial with the God’s eye view of the program at the time put it to the author:“Command and control essentially meant gathering all the members of thegroup (nuclear network) under one roof as quickly as possible.”97

near absence of operational planning

Finally, the military’s operational planning constitutes the critical componentof any planned nuclear use. Operational planning essentially involves threelayers. The ªrst concerns procedures to coordinate action among the scientiªcand user agencies. To this category belong time lines for the movement of air-craft, the identiªcation of weapon storage sites, the training of ground crews inweapon storage, and weapon movement and loading procedures. Other rou-tines concern safety and security checks on the aircraft and the weapon. To thesecond category belong target identiªcation and mission planning. Geography,meteorology, demography, and cultural factors all go into target selection.Among other things, the air force would have to identify air bases for potentialdeployments and experiment with combinations of electronic jamming and es-cort aircraft for different mission targets. It would also have to plan decoy mis-sions to divert attention and increase the chances of penetrating a heavilydefended airspace in a country on high alert in anticipation of a second strike.For example, an Indian air force study conducted in the early 2000s high-lighted the logistical challenges of planning nuclear missions against Pakistan.It showed that a single mission alone could tie up as many as sixty aircraft toassist the penetrating nuclear aircraft.98 In the third category are pilot commu-nications protocols to abort missions in response to geostrategic changes andtechnical emergencies as well as procedures for weapon jettisoning and re-trieval in the event of an accident or ºight diversion. Also included in this cate-gory are protocols to fuse and arm the weapon just before release over a targetto minimize the risk of explosion over friendly territory or off target.99

Senior Indian air force ofªcers point to three major challenges of nuclearmission planning that were left unaddressed prior to 1999. First, a nuclear mis-sion would have involved a “nap-of-the-earth” ºight proªle. During such


97. Interviews with senior defense ofªcial “X.”98. For example, a typical nuclear task force would include two nuclear-armed aircraft, three tofour electronic countermeasures escort aircraft, three to four aircraft for air defense, and a similarnumber to suppress enemy ground defenses. A single mission would comprise ªfteen to twentyaircraft, and at least two or three decoy missions would be planned simultaneously. See PravinSawhney, “Bombed,” Force, February 2004, p. 8.99. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “A.”

missions, attacking aircraft typically hug the ground to escape detection by en-emy radar, but the Indian Mirages were not equipped with terrain clearanceradars.100 Hence targets and mission routes would have needed careful identi-ªcation and mapping in advance. No target lists were provided to the air force,however.101 Second, real-time communications are difªcult when combat air-craft execute nap-of-the-earth ºight proªles because the earth’s curvature ren-ders the aircraft invisible to both enemy and friendly radar. Advanced airforces typically overcome the problem of command and control by communi-cating with pilots via satellite or airborne surveillance and command postsperched at high altitudes. Because India lacked both at the time, it would havehad to rely on relay aircraft to keep the political leadership in constant touchwith the pilot during the length of a nuclear mission. The use of relay aircraftcomplicates logistics and mission planning, however. More problematic, theprocess requires written procedures so that all parties share a common under-standing of what those procedures are. If such procedures existed at all priorto 1999, the air force was unaware of them.102 Third, prior to 1999, the air forcedid not know who possessed the codes for arming nuclear weapons and howthose codes were to be deployed during a mission. Indian weapons at this timedid not incorporate permissive action links that would enable arming theweapons at will. The assumption in the air force was that the task of armingthe weapon would fall on the pilot at a designated time during ºight. Theair force and the scientiªc agencies, however, did not conduct practice drillsto test the communication and weapon arming protocols during a potentialnuclear mission.103

A number of senior air force ofªcials, including those who served at thehighest levels, are unanimous in their account that operational plans and pro-cedures to execute nuclear missions are a post-1998 phenomenon. They con-cede that civilian ofªcials and the scientiªc agencies had likely thought someof these issues through before, but did not share them with the air force.Nor was the air force given tasking orders to prepare internal proceduresto program its own response to a nuclear emergency. Former DRDO chiefArunachalam’s view was “the numbers are so small . . . the system could bebeautifully worked out.”104 A principal staff ofªcer at Air Headquarters esti-mated, however, that the chances of mission success in the ªrst half of the


100. Interview with retired air marshal “N.”101. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “A.”102. Interview with Ajit Bhavnani (air marshal and commander in chief, Strategic Forces Com-mand), New Delhi, India, February 2010.103. Ibid.104. Interview with Arunachalam.

decade “at less than 50 percent.”105 Another senior air force ofªcer, who partic-ipated in the air delivery platform’s certiªcation trials and left ofªce in the lat-ter half of the 1990s, demurred from even speculating on the probability ofmission success. According to him, nuclear missions were the “nightmare sce-nario” because so little was “shown to the air force on the ground.”106

The negative path-dependent effects of such institutional legacies continuedeven after India conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 and formally claimed nu-clear weapons power status. In the summer of 1999, India suddenly found it-self at war with Pakistan over the latter’s occupation of Indian territory alongthe Kargil mountain ridges in Kashmir. As the Indian government secretly pre-pared for an all-out war with Pakistan, the spotlight turned to the nuclear as-pect and the lack of operational planning with the Indian military. A seniorIndian defense ofªcial privy to this effort disclosed to the author that, untilthen, the air force had no idea (1) what types of weapons were available; (2) inhow many numbers; and (3) what it was expected to do with the weapons. Allthe air force had was delivery capability in the form of a few modiªed Mirage2000s. At that point, only the air chief, the vice air chief, and two other individ-uals at Air Headquarters had knowledge of the program.107 The ofªcial wenton: “My educated guess is that a directive to bring the military in the loop mayhave been issued by the prime minister’s ofªce. However, given that nucleardecisionmaking until then was conªned to the prime minister and a small setof ofªcials in BARC and DRDO, the directive may have languished. Or alter-natively, the prime minister and his top aides may have been told that the airforce was in the know . . . without their understanding that tactical operationalplanning requires information sharing, coordination, and planning on an en-tirely different level. Politicians sometimes focus on the big picture and don’tpay sufªcient attention to details.”108

As Carl von Clausewitz famously observed, “Everything in war is simple,but the simplest thing is difªcult.” Indeed, the 1999 Kargil War demonstratedjust how complex the task of nuclear force reconstitution and employmentreadiness was in the absence of well-developed interagency managementstructures and protocols.109 Until 1999, the scientiªc agencies and the airforce had not rehearsed any emergency drills on the ground. The scientiªcagencies had assumed, for example, that seventy-two hours was a reasonablewindow within which the nuclear force could transition from recessed to em-


105. Interviews with retired air marshal “N.’106. Interviews with senior Indian Air Force ofªcer “Z.”107. Interviews with senior defense ofªcial “A.”108. Ibid.109. Ibid.

ployment mode. According to a senior participant in the planning process,however, it took “nearly a week” before the air force and the agencies wereable to ready the weapons.”110 Members of the nuclear network, the seniordefense ofªcial explained, had to orally ratify all actions in the absence of insti-tutionalized standard operating procedures, a process that added to the logis-tical friction.111 The Kargil War began in early May 1999, but only toward theend of June did the air force achieve a modicum of operational readiness tocommence nuclear operations against Pakistan.

The data in this section conªrm that India’s capacity to explode a nuclearweapon during the 1990s was not in doubt. Prior to the summer of 1999, how-ever, its institutional capacity to explode nuclear weapons instrumentally overa target in pursuit of political goals remained very much so.

Alternative Explanations

There are four alternative explanations in the literature for India’s disag-gregated operational nuclear posture in the 1990s. The ªrst three ºow from anormative understanding of India’s nuclear behavior in the pre-1998 era. Thefourth argument is institutional and centers on civil-military relations. In addi-tion, scholars have speculated on two other arguments as plausible explana-tions for India’s dysfunctionalism. Because data and literature to support theselatter arguments do not yet exist, I appraise them preemptively.

The leading explanation for the slow pace of Indian weaponization and op-erational planning during the 1990s is the normative one that Indian leaderssought prestige by abjuring what would be considered the normal behavior ofsecurity-seeking states in the international system. Scholars maintain thatIndian leaders prior to 1998 sought to position India as a moral exemplar;as a country that stood aloof and above the security maximizing states in theinternational system.112 Indeed, Indian prime ministers until the late 1970s—Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Morarji Desai—had a strong aver-sion to nuclear weapons and institutionalized their preferences through the


110. Interviews with senior defense ofªcial “A.”111. For example, Air Marshal Krishnaswamy, the lead test pilot in the DRDO’s nuclear air deliv-ery program in the 1990s, was not authorized to share information about the technical aspects ofnuclear operations with his superiors at Air Headquarters. When the Kargil War broke out in May1999, Krishnaswamy was commander in chief of the air force’s southwestern command facingPakistan. He was summoned from his headquarters in Gandhinagar (Gujarat) to New Delhito personally vouch for the chief of air staff’s designated representatives before DRDO liaisonK. Santhanam prior to the commencement of joint operations planning between the two agencies.Air Marshal Krishnaswamy went on to serve as India’s chief of air staff from 2001 to 2004. See ibid.112. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, pp. 448–449.

state’s public advocacy of global nuclear arms control and disarmament aswell as by rejecting domestic pressures for nuclear armament.113 There is alsoevidence to show that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi opposed weaponizationon normative grounds during the mid-1980s.

The evidence, however, is muddied. Although senior policy planners whointeracted with Rajiv Gandhi have described him a “reluctant believer” in thenuclear cause,114 his mother and immediate predecessor’s motives appear tobe a mixed bag of economic realism and political risk-aversion.115 But evenRajiv Gandhi followed a Janus-faced approach, which coupled moralism withan insurance strategy of allowing work on the weapon program to proceed.116

More substantially, however, prime ministers who succeeded the Gandhis af-ter 1989 do not appear to have shared their normative predilections. India hada succession of six prime ministers in the period 1989–98. At least three amongthem, V.P. Singh, Narasimha Rao, and Deve Gowda, cited economic con-straints for not conducting nuclear tests.117 Further, all prime ministers from1989 onward, including Rajiv Gandhi, privately supported the weaponizationprogram. Thus the historical evidence shows variation between decision-makers’ public statements and private actions.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars added an institutional twist to theabove normative argument and developed what might be characterized as anormative-institutional explanation for Indian restraint. For example, NeilJoeck maintained that India and Pakistan were engaged in a regime of “tacitbargaining” and cooperation,118 whose central objective was to maximize “se-curity and prestige” while minimizing the likelihood of “an unrestricted armsrace that could more fundamentally jeopardize their security.”119 Indian nu-clear restraint, he explained, was tied to both strategic-realist and moral-Gandhian anchors. Devin Hagerty seconded Joeck’s claim that India andPakistan were locked in a tacit regime of cooperative restraint.120 The restrain-ing element in this competition according to Hagerty was the conscious avoid-ance of crossing the threshold of assembly and deployment of nuclear


113. Rajesh M. Basrur, Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security (Redwood City, Calif.: Stan-ford University Press, 2006), pp. 60–62; and Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, pp. 83–85, 199–204,209–216.114. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 291–305.115. Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb, pp. 242–244; and Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 246–261.116. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, pp. 303–305.117. Ibid., pp. 353–361, 367–371, 396–400; and H.D. Deve Gowda, “Dear Prime Minister SriVajpayeeji,” Rediff on the Net, May 22, 1998, http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/may/22deve.htm.118. Joeck, “Tacit Bargaining and Stable Proliferation in South Asia,” pp. 78–80.119. Ibid.120. Devin T. Hagerty, “Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Cri-sis,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Winter 1995/96), pp. 79–114.

weapons. Its tacit element was the insinuation of nuclear capabilities to eachother, which was indirectly conªrmed by the United States and other inde-pendent third parties.121 Similarly, Perkovich popularized the concept of“nonweaponized deterrence” in the early 1990s by arguing that, although In-dia was capable of building an operational arsenal, it had consciously adoptedwhat he described as a “nuclear third way,” which was a halfway house be-tween a deployed force and nuclear rollback.122

Historical evidence that has surfaced since 1999 shows that Indian policyplanners were acutely aware by the spring of 1988 that the window of op-portunity for preventing Pakistani nuclearization had closed.123 And instead ofpracticed restraint, there was urgency among them to bring weapons online.124

The difªculty with these normative-institutional arguments is their presumedfunctionalism. Joeck, Hagerty, and Perkovich imagine a liberal regime of re-straint and cooperation, treat it as an end point, and then work their way back-ward to inject it with norms and instrumental rationality. They assume that,because the regime appears to be performing some function or serving the in-terests of the actors, it must be designed to do so. They do not consider the al-ternatives: that the regime was perhaps never the consequence of rational ornormative design or that the actors may have unwittingly stumbled onto anunstable equilibrium that was transitional. It is necessary to ask why actors en-gaged in tacit cooperation did not elect to make that commitment explicit andlock in the gains of cooperation.

Alongside normative reasons for India’s restraint, several scholars have ar-gued that India’s normatively freighted strategic culture exercises explicit andtacit restraints on military maximalism.125 Although this argument is generallypopular with academics and policymakers, considerable confusion aboundson whether the sources of cultural preferences that inform Indian strategicthinking are institutional or normative. It is also unclear if the strategic cultureargument applies to grand strategy, which is the “purposeful employment ofall instruments of power available to a security community,”126 or the nar-rower military strategy, which pertains to the planning and execution by mili-


121. Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 53–56.122. Perkovich, “A Nuclear Third Way in South Asia.”123. Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 190.124. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, p. 336.125. The most recent articulation of this argument is contained in Stephen P. Cohen and SunilDasgupta, Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization (Washington, D.C.: BrookingsInstitution Press, 2010).126. Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History(Oxford: Routledge, 2007), p. 283.

tary organizations of strategic goals.127 In the absence of such speciªcations,the usefulness of the strategic culture argument is unclear.

To date, Rajesh Basrur has applied the strategic cultural argument to the nu-clear question most rigorously. Basrur restricts his argument to a select histori-cal window, narrows its scope to nuclear weapons excluding all other strategicquestions, and develops a credible methodology of speciªed open-source con-tent analysis and elite interviews to support his case.128 Basrur identiªes threeelements in Indian strategic culture that he argues are the basis for the continu-ing nuclear minimalism and restraint from the late 1970s until the early 2000s.These are (1) a limited acceptance of nuclear weapons as a source of nationalsecurity; (2) political as against the technical/operational understanding of nu-clear weapons; and (3) incremental responses to systemic-level structural pres-sures to expand nuclear capabilities.129 It is this restrained strategic culture, the“habits of mind, traditions, and preferred methods of operation,” arguesBasrur, that explains the slow institutional changes in India’s nuclear re-sponses: the options posture in the 1980s; the recessed posture in the 1990s;and the overt posture post-1998.130 Thus, cultural preferences in his view arethe connective thread that tie three nuclear institutional postures and explainoverall restraint.

Basrur’s methodology, however, unearths something entirely at odds withhis argument. It shows that the Indian elite’s nuclear beliefs and preferencesare dichotomized along two lines: between the politicians who view nuclearweapons as political weapons and the strategic experts and the military wholean in the direction of espousing an operational framework for those sameweapons.131 In essence, Basrur’s methodology reveals evidence of the exis-tence of two competing subcultures within the Indian state that uneasily co-habit a common political space. Although Basrur’s data are restricted to thepost-1998 years, his methodology when applied to earlier historical periods—the decades of the “option” and “recessed” posture—shows a similar culturaldichotomy between the political generalists and the professional military.132

In advancing the cultural argument, Basrur ignores the obvious institutionaland organizational ones. In a regime of competing subcultures, which condi-tions enable one set of cultural beliefs to prevail in the policy marketplace?


127. Scott Sigmund Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 1999), p. 163.128. Basrur, Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security, pp. 57–59.129. Ibid., p. 58.130. Ibid., pp. 60–65.131. Ibid., pp. 67–73.132. See, for example, K. Sundarji, Blind Men of Hindoostan (New Delhi: UBS, 1993).

Similarly, in a system characterized by cultural differences, why is there a sys-temic bias in favor of the status quo? Basrur indirectly answers these questionsby showing that pre-1998 nuclear decisionmaking in India was the preserve ofthe prime minister, to the exclusion of parliament, the civilian bureaucracy, themilitary, and public opinion. By his own admission, India’s strategic cultureis reduced to a set of cultural preferences held by prime ministerial incum-bents,133 a process that black boxes the state. Culture tends to be sticky andcannot explain India’s tectonic shift in favor of operational nuclear forces inthe last decade.

Finally, scholars including Stephen Rosen have pointed to institutional fac-tors such as the distrust that pervades India’s civil-military institutions asa possible cause for the lack of nuclear planning with the military.134 If civil-military institutional tensions were the cause, however, one would see greateraggregation of information among civilians, but the regime of informationscarcity operated with nearly equal severity on both the civilian and militarysides of the nuclear equation. As a senior Indian defense ofªcial at the heart ofthe nuclear network put it:

Yes, the military was kept out of the information loop. There were no seriousreasons to bring the military into the loop because of the danger of secrecy be-ing compromised. The chiefs of staff are trustworthy. But who can vouch forthe trustworthiness of their staff, their drivers? The latter could be spies andthe weak link in the chain. The military’s complaints have more to with a senseof privilege and pride. Why should they be told? The cabinet ministers weren’ttold, the defense minister, their political boss was not told. So why should thearmed services chiefs be told? Until the system is to be put into operationalpractice, the services don’t come into the picture. There were no reasons toshare India’s most precious secrets.135

Further, if distrust of the military were the cause, it would also manifest itselfthrough other observables, especially in conventional war operations and inmilitary aid to civilian authorities. One observes contrary trends in both cases,however. The Indian military enjoys near-total autonomy in conventional waroperations. The exception to this was the 1962 border war with China when ci-vilians directly interfered in operations, with disastrous results. In its after-math, the military demanded and obtained operational autonomy, and thisstate of affairs has obtained since then. In all wars that followed, civilians setstrategic goals allowing the military autonomy to plan and execute opera-


133. Ibid., pp. 66–67.134. Rosen, Societies and Military Power, pp. 251–253.135. Interviews with senior Indian defense ofªcial “X.”

tions.136 India’s civilian leadership has also not hesitated to use the military tomanage India’s internal crisis of governability. Successive Indian governmentshave in the past used the military and now increasingly paramilitary forces toquell domestic insurgencies and rebellions. As Shashank Joshi points out, ofthe seventeen major military campaigns the Indian military has conductedin post-independent India’s history, twelve were domestic in nature. From1982 to 1989, for example, the army deployed 721 times to assist civilian au-thorities.137 Surely, these data do not indicate civilian distrust of the military.More signiªcant, India’s civilian leaders have shown little hesitation in insti-tutionalizing the military’s role in nuclear planning post-1998, once Indiastepped out of the nuclear closet. This change has occurred without any funda-mental rewrite in the DNA of India’s civil-military relations. The evidencetherefore undermines civil-military distrust as the cause for the lack of opera-tionalization argument.

Beyond these cultural and institutional explanations in the literature onSouth Asia and nuclear proliferation, some scholars speculate that India’s slowpace of weaponization and operationalization emanated from a bureaucraticmalaise speciªc to India. One way of testing this argument is by looking forweaponization and operational observables prior to 1998, the period of se-crecy, and the post-1998 decade, the period when India stepped out of the nu-clear closet and claimed nuclear power status. Secrecy, or its lack thereof in thiscase, serves as the determining condition for a natural experiment in stateplanning. The data from the last decade show rapid technical advances in thedevelopment and deployment of delivery systems, the creation of new organi-zations to manage nuclear forces, and new institutional routines to ºex opera-tional muscle.138 Indeed, so startling are the differences between then and nowthat proliferation scholars such as Vipin Narang believe that many Indian tech-nical developments, postures, and operational changes have begun to mimicthe worst U.S. examples from the Cold War and will likely trigger deterrence,crisis, and arms control instability in South Asia and the Asia-Paciªc.139

Other scholars do not doubt secrecy as the cause for India’s dysfunction ar-


136. Srinath Raghavan, “Soldiers, Statesmen, and India’s Security Policy,” India Review, Vol. 11,No. 2 (May 2012), pp. 116–133.137. Shashank Joshi, “The Indian Mutiny That Wasn’t,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/05/the_indian_mutiny_that_wasn_t.138. See Bharath Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International,2008).139. Vipin Narang, “Five Myths about India’s Nuclear Posture,” Washington Quarterly,Vol. 36, No. 3 (September 2013), pp. 143–157, http://web.mit.edu/polisci/news/pdf/NarangFiveMyths.pdf.

gument. What they doubt is the cause for Indian secrecy, which they believewas conditioned by the need to hide the program not only from the pryingeyes of the United States but also from China and Pakistan, India’s regionalnuclear bêtes noires. Their assumption is logical and entirely plausible. Theevidence to support the claim that China and Pakistan were the cause forIndia’s secrecy, however, has not yet surfaced in the open source domain. Nordid it emerge during interviews the author conducted in the ªeld for thisarticle. The plausibility of this reasoning would be higher if Indian decision-makers and policy planners believed that China’s and Pakistan’s intelligence-gathering capabilities were equivalent to or of a higher order than those of theUnited States. Further, the focus of India’s weaponization program throughthe 1980s and 1990s was Pakistan, not China. With a single nuclear test and noknown means of nuclear delivery to attack China, it is doubtful whetherIndian planners believed that China took their nuclear capabilities seriously.Pakistan was another matter. India had reason to hide its vulnerability from anuclear Pakistan. India’s window of vulnerability remained open from 1988until about 1995, however. It is hard to fathom why, once technical hurdles ofdelivery were resolved in the mid-1990s, Pakistan’s discovery of any potentialIndian operational planning would endanger Indian security.

Conclusion

Five implications arise from this study. The ªrst pertains to the normative ver-sus realist basis of India’s nuclear policy. The second concerns scholars’ under-standing of the sources of slow weaponization in India and proliferating statesin general. Related to this is the more subtle attenuating effect of the nonprolif-eration regime on the technical and organizational quality of nuclear weaponprograms in clandestinely proliferating states. A fourth implication has to dowith the link between the attenuated quality of secret nuclear weapon pro-grams and the robustness of regional deterrence. And ªnally, from an interna-tional relations theory perspective, there is a question whether observations ofsecrecy from India’s weaponization program are transportable to other statesin the international system.

Scholars have generally sought to explain India’s slow pace of weaponiza-tion in the 1990s as resulting from the normative beliefs of its leaders and astate elite culture of restraint. The evidence presented in this article clearlyshows that Indian leaders in the 1990s followed a Janus-faced strategy. Whileciting normative reasons for restraint in public, they secretly authorized aweaponization program. It is also evident that India’s political leaders and na-tional security managers understood that the signiªcance of nuclear weapons


went beyond political symbolism. This is the reason why they devoted inordi-nate attention to developing mechanisms for the safe and reliable delivery ofnuclear weapons. The lack of soft operational routines had little to do with thesocialization of India’s scientists and national security managers into best insti-tutional practices drawn from the lessons of the Cold War. Rather, it had a lotto do with managing India’s relationship with the United States. The conclu-sion that emerges is that India’s long road to weaponization was the conse-quence of technological challenges that stemmed from secrecy-inducedorganizational pathologies as well as the difªculties of persuading the UnitedStates to accept its de facto nuclear status. These are realist and not normativeor cultural reasons for restraint. Indeed, India’s case is a cautionary tale of theperils of making compelling explanations when data are scarce.

This leads to the inevitable question: What implications does India’s slowpace of weaponization have for emerging nuclear weapon powers such asNorth Korea and possibly Iran in the future? Scholars and analysts generallycite structural reasons for their lack of technical progress. These include weak-nesses in industrial capacity, the quality of scientiªc personnel, and insufªcienteconomic resources. India’s case suggests, however, that causes for delay areoften institutional and organizational. It shows that secrecy hinders weaponi-zation and operationalization in covertly proliferating states. Top decision-makers tend to hoard and compartmentalize information. They also hesitatein delegating tasks across multiple actors and agencies. Both conditionswork against holistic planning and parallel processing within the state. Theycreate institutional incentives for sequential decisionmaking, which slowsthe program’s progress. Further, information scarcity, which is the inevita-ble consequence of secrecy, exacerbates principal-agent management dil-emmas, often leaving top decisionmakers unaware of the technical andorganizational challenges of developing an operational nuclear force. TheIndian case also shows that a state possessing nuclear devices might lackthe means of delivering them reliably and safely. Further, in the absence of softoperational routines, the state might even lack the means to use existing weap-ons instrumentally.

This means that the nuclear nonproliferation regime has a far greaterrestraining effect on the activities of proliferating states than is normally un-derstood. These effects are more subtle and go beyond the legal and normativefetters that are generally considered the principal constraints imposed bythe regime. Both signatory and nonsignatory states to the NPT are aware of thelogic of consequences that are likely to follow from their quest for nuclearweapons. That potential logic of consequences is negative and has worsenedwith the passage of time. Technology denials and export controls from the


1970s and 1980s have made way for more aggressive counterproliferationstrategies that involve a spectrum of actions from cyber and physical sabotageto the assassination of scientists. Hence the demand for secrecy with its debili-tating consequences for institutional and organizational efªciency has ex-panded. This does not mean that the nonproliferation regime will necessarilyprevent states from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it does seem to have theeffect of stretching out the weaponization and operationalization processes.The longer development time span in turn creates opportunities for changing astate’s course of action through diplomatic means, through sabotage, sanc-tions, or simply a turn of fortune resulting from changes in the targeted state’sleadership. Hence, just the act of maintaining consistent and intense scrutinyon a state can have retarding effects on its proliferation effort. The UnitedStates and the international community have far greater leverage in prevent-ing negative proliferation outcomes than they imagine.

The other implication is that “existential” deterrence is a blanket concept forminimal capabilities with virtually no operational military value. This raisesthe question: How can the mere existence of weapons deter if a state lacks themeans to transport and explode them reliably? Similarly, how can deterrenceoperate if the nuclear possessor state lacks the soft organizational routinesto use weapons instrumentally? The argument in support of existential de-terrence is that weaponization and operational capabilities or the lack thereofon the part of possessor states do not matter because deterrence is a mindgame. No adversary is likely to run the risk of testing a nuclear possessor’scredibility because of the catastrophic risk and consequences of a potential nu-clear event.

The irony of such thinking is that emerging nuclear weapon powers do notappear to believe that existential deterrence has much purchase. If they did,they would sit tight on their plateau of crude devices and feel little compulsionto resume the hard upward climb toward more sophisticated operational capa-bilities. The data from India, Pakistan, and North Korea show compellinglythat states care about sophisticated and reliable delivery systems. The Indianand Pakistani cases also show that emerging nuclear powers believe that softinstitutional and organizational capabilities are imperative for deterringadversaries credibly. One therefore needs to rethink notions of “existential” de-terrence and whether setting the conceptual bar low for potential proliferatorsactually encourages proliferation. On the other hand, if “existential” capabili-ties do not actually threaten in the military sense, one ought also to rethinkwhether they could become an acceptable compromise with states such asNorth Korea or possibly with Iran in the future, if a viable inspection regimeensures no further development in hard and soft capabilities.


This subject of soft routines is also one that is routinely ignored in the assess-ment of proliferation threats. In the study of proliferation cases, the focus isgenerally on the nuclear fuel cycle and the development of the weapon itself.Scholars and analysts pay far lesser attention to the human and organizationaldimensions of proliferation. The former are relatively easy to identify andmeasure. The latter are subtler and often poorly visible, but their general invis-ibility should not be cause to ignore them. Hardware and weapons on theirown are incapable of giving agency to a nuclear possessor state. Agency is acondition of the human and organizational element. The issue of agency is alsocentral to understanding why states seek nuclear weapons and also how theypropose to leverage them in the international system. Material objects aremute. They imply power, but they cannot exercise it on their own.

Finally, from a theory development perspective, the challenge of generaliz-ing the secrecy argument from the Indian case to other cases in the interna-tional system is a vexing one. Secrecy is a characteristic of all nuclear weaponprograms. The data do, however, show that the gap between device develop-ment and weaponization has expanded signiªcantly in the post-NPT era.Jacques Hymans’s recent work also highlights the high failure rate of prolifera-tion programs in this period.140 In Iraq’s case, data suggest that the pall of se-crecy that shrouded the uranium enrichment effort in the wake of Israel’sdestruction of the Osiraq reactor, especially constraints on horizontal commu-nications within teams working on different uranium enrichment processes,caused those programs to stall.141 Further, secrecy-induced weak oversightmechanisms within Iraq kept Saddam Hussein and his henchmen in thedark about the true state of Iraq’s progress toward obtaining a nuclearweapon. It is still unclear whether secrecy produced similar disruptive effectswithin Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, but that is because granular dataon Pakistan’s weaponization program are still unavailable.142 There is newevidence, however, to suggest that Pakistan lacked the means to deliver weap-ons until 1994–95,143 far beyond the date many analysts believed. In Iran’scase, the linkage between secrecy and sequential planning has become increas-


140. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions.141. Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, “The Centrifuge,” The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets ofSaddam’s Nuclear Mastermind (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), p. 53; Hymans, AchievingNuclear Ambitions, p. 99; and Imad Khadduri, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions (Toronto:Springhead, 2003), p. 74.142. Khadduri, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage, p. 82.143. Feroz Khan’s Eating Grass is the ªrst serious data-collection effort on Pakistan’s nuclearweapons program, but it paints the program in the best possible light (i.e., as a linear series of pro-gressions). It does not provide a critical historical narrative similar to Perkovich’s work on India orAvner Cohen’s history of the Israeli program. Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb(Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 185–186, 229–232.

ingly salient. International scrutiny, fears of assassination of nuclear scientists,and cyberattacks have all narrowed the focus of the program to primarily ura-nium enrichment. No credible data have emerged after the early 2000s of aparallel Iranian nuclear weapon design and weaponization program. At thevery least, therefore, scholars and analysts need to pay more attention to theprocess of proliferation beyond simply proliferation outcomes and their imag-ined consequences.


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