Debating New Delhi's Nuclear Decision

Correspondence Rodney W. Jones Debating New Delhi’s Nuclear Decision Šumit Ganguly To the Editors: Šumit Ganguly’s article “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II” is a relatively dispassionate effort to rationalize India’s May 1998 nuclear tests and nuclear breakout (i.e., avowal of nuclear weapons).1 His description of the main ingredients of India’s nuclear decisionmaking before 1990 covers much of the relevant terrain. His assessment of the relative weight of nuclear weapon drivers (preferences of top policymakers, impulses in the nuclear and missile technology programs, and external pressures or threats) is open to serious questions, however, as is his interpretation of the reasons behind the fateful decisions of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Ganguly’s explanation of India’s nuclear breakout essentially rests on a retrospective selection of Indian elite statements that purport to reºect “perceptions” of Indian security interests. An Indo-centric perceptual analysis may be one reasonable starting point for explaining Indian decisions, but it is not necessarily the end point of a serious empirical analysis. Moreover, it is a shaky basis for Ganguly’s U.S. policy recommendations . His analysis is not comparably grounded in the perceptions and interests of India’s neighbors, and it begs other issues crucial to designing successful policy responses. Ganguly depicts India’s pathway to overt nuclear weapons as a zigzag response to external threats and to the failure of the big powers to provide India nuclear security, notwithstanding India’s earlier policy renunciation of nuclear weapons (pp. 150–151). He implies that India had to zig and zag because its resources were constrained and developing nuclear and delivery capabilities took a long time (Ganguly describes the process as “haphazard, discontinuous, and ridden with setbacks” [p. 171]), while problems in India’s external security environment rose and fell episodically (see “ªve phases,” pp. 149–171). Ganguly admits that domestic politics occasionally accelerated nuclear weapon–related decisions, but argues that these inºuences were not fundamental . He speciªcally denounces the observation that India’s craving for international International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 181–189© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 181 Rodney W. Jones is President of Policy Architects International, a foreign and development policy consultingªrm in Reston, Virginia. As an ofªcial in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1989 to 1994, Dr. Jones participated in the U.S.-Soviet (and successor state) nuclear arms negotiations. He has published extensively on nuclear proliferation and security issues in Asia and the Middle East. Šumit Ganguly is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, California. 1. Šumit Ganguly, “India’s Pathway to Pokhran II: The Prospects and Sources of New Delhi’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring 1999), pp. 148–177. Subsequent references to this article appear parenthetically in the text. “prestige and status” was a key driver of India’s nuclear decisions (pp. 171–172). Rather, Ganguly argues, nuclear threats from China and Pakistan were pivotal not only in stimulating and shaping the earlier nuclear program, but in driving the ªnal 1998 nuclear breakout decisions (pp. 172–173). The security theme is valid as a subtext in the larger narrative and is part of the explanation of the post-1964 “nuclear option,” but is central only if one looks at security issues exclusively through the eyes of a narrow Indian strategic interest group.2 The evidence otherwise does not support Ganguly’s assertion that security threats were primary factors in India’s nuclear breakout for the reasons discussed below. china and indian security perceptions China’s short-lived invasion of India in 1962 and China’s detonation of its ªrst nuclear weapon in October 1964 gave India a temporary reason to fear China militarily and to view Chinese nuclear weapons as a potential threat. But Chinese dangers receded signiªcantly after 1965 because China’s main external problems were in the north and in the Paciªc rim. Meanwhile, India erased its earlier vulnerability to Chinese incursion by building up its conventional defenses in the Himalayas, as Ganguly...