Debating India's Pathway to Nuclearization

To the Editors (Gaurav Kampani writes):

In his article, Andrew Kennedy attributes India's nuclear restraint from 1964 to 1989 to (1) implicit nuclear umbrellas extended by the two superpowers and (2) the normative beliefs of Indian leaders.¹ Using newly available declassified documents, he argues that India's apparent absence of nuclear balancing against China and Pakistan until the 1980s was a distortion of reality, because the balancing occurred in secret. Its means were implicit nuclear umbrellas, first extended against China in the mid-1960s by both superpowers and then from 1970 to 1991 by the former Soviet Union. As Soviet power in the mid-1980s waned, India resorted to internal balancing by developing an independent nuclear arsenal (pp. 151-152). Kennedy further claims that Indian leaders first sought security through international disarmament institutions. Only when that quest failed did they proceed with nuclear acquisition (pp. 144-146).

In this letter, I argue that there is no credible evidence to support either of the above two theses. Further, neither provides a consistent explanation for Indian nuclear behavior over the period in question. Hence neither qualifies as a general cause for Indian nuclear restraint.

Kennedy's first claim is contradicted by two events: the 1974 Pokhran test and the aborted plan for nuclear tests in 1982-83.² The 1974 test came in the wake of the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation. The treaty's key clause was article 9, the security clause, which according to Kennedy formally institutionalized the implicit Soviet nuclear guarantee (pp. 136-140). If the implicit nuclear guarantee was the cause for Indian nuclear dormancy, then the 1974 test is a puzzle that needs explaining all over again. Kennedy further links India's revived nuclear program around 1985-86 to the advent of the Gorbachev regime and the sense among Indian officials that the fidelity of Moscow's implicit nuclear guarantee was waning (pp. 141-144). This claim ignores historical evidence that places the revived Indian nuclear weapons program to 1980-81,³ years before Mikhail Gorbachev's presidency or any detectable shifts in Soviet commitments.

Kennedy's implicit balancing claim rests on recently declassified documents included in the Haksar Papers. These consist of two memos written in 1967 by L.K. Jha, principal secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Jha wrote these memos following trips to Washington, Moscow, London, and Paris, which he made with the intent of securing either a formal superpower- or United Nations-supported multilateral guarantee against potential Chinese nuclear threats (pp. 133-134). Although the superpowers and the great powers were unwilling to make formal commitments, both the United States and the Soviet Union privately assured India of their willingness to counter China. Jha subsequently wrote the prime minister that such implicit commitments would suffice. He reasoned that neither superpower had an interest in countenancing Chinese nuclear coercion and the destruction of the Asian balance of power (p. 134). In his second memo, however, Jha contextualized the reasons for this belief. First, he maintained that India ought not to invest in a nuclear weapons program because of its prohibitive economic cost.⁴ Second, he did not foresee large-scale war involving nuclear weapons between the two Himalayan neighbors. China, Jha reasoned, would be more likely to engage in a subversive guerrilla war against India in which nuclear weapons would have no role.⁵ What Jha's second memo makes clear is that the economic burdens of developing an independent nuclear capability and the low-key nature of the Chinese threat rendered implicit superpower nuclear guarantees acceptable, not that the guarantees in themselves were sufficient cause for reassurance.

Kennedy's next piece of evidence is the 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty, with the security clause as its centerpiece. Nowhere does the security clause allude to nuclear guarantees (pp. 136, 138-139). But even if one accepts an expansive interpretation of this clause, Kennedy's own evidence shows that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was reluctant to conclude the treaty for domestic reasons (p. 136). U.S. fickleness...