India's Pursuit of the Bomb and Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation

To the Editors (Gaurav Kampani writes):

In "Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation," Vipin Narang develops a typology of strategies that states use to acquire nuclear weapons.¹ Narang's theory privileges external demand-side factors in explaining states' responses to compelling material threats (conventional and nuclear) without adequately accounting for domestic supply-side factors (cultural, material, institutional, and organizational). To probe the plausibility of his theory, Narang examines India's history of pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.

Narang's theory combines changes in states' external material conditions with shifts in their domestic political consensus to explain how states proliferate. According to his theory, China's emergence as a nuclear weapons power in 1964 caused India's domestic political consensus to shift from a "technical" to a "hard" hedging nuclear strategy. Similarly, Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons around 1987–88 led India in 1989 to a "sprint" to develop an operational nuclear force (pp. 136–146).

According to Narang, his theory refutes some of the leading supply-side constraint explanations for India's halting proliferation journey—namely, the normative hesitancy of Indian decisionmakers, the nuclear program's technological weaknesses, and its organizational dysfunction (pp. 146–148). There are two problems, however, with Narang's explanation. First, it fails to demonstrate that supply-side material and technical constraints were not a significant factor as Indian leaders pondered their country's nuclear trajectory during its quarter-century of hard hedging. Second, it cannot account for why India took so long to pursue a nuclear weapons capability once a political consensus for doing so had formed.

The best available historical accounts attribute India's hesitancy in developing an operational nuclear force to the moral qualms of Indian decisionmakers. More significant, however, these leaders feared the material costs of doing so. The material explanation has three components. First, Indian decisionmakers worried that an operational nuclear force would prove exorbitantly expensive. Second, they feared that the international community, led by the United States, would punish India by denying it development loans and capital. Third, the crippling sanctions imposed on India's civil nuclear power sector following its 1974 nuclear test served as a warning of what might befall the country's other high-technology sectors should India begin an aggressive nuclear weapons program.²

As a thought experiment, therefore, Narang might have asked: Would Indian decisionmakers have spent twenty-five years engaged in hard hedging absent the above material constraints? Narang's answer would appear to be yes, but he offers no evidence in this regard. Instead, he bases his discussion of India's years of hard hedging on literature that highlights the role of supply-side constraints in prolonging India's fractured domestic consensus on building a nuclear arsenal (pp. 137–143).

Given India's normative and material supply-side constraints, Indian decision-makers sought to maximize their autonomy from both domestic proliferation and external nonproliferation lobbies during the era of hard hedging. To achieve this, they forced the nuclear weapons program underground, compartmentalizing the organizational actors working on it and stovepiping information to the top. In this regard, Narang argues that Indian leaders imposed excessive secrecy on the nuclear project because of their desire to retain autonomy solely from domestic pressure (pp. 144–145), not because they feared external sanctions or threats. He bases this claim on interviews with Ambassador Naresh Chandra, who served as the lead coordinator of India's nuclear weaponization efforts during the 1990s. Narang does not discuss, however, supply-side factors that might have compelled Indian leaders to so jealously guard their autonomy against other domestic proliferation lobbies. Based on interviews with Chandra and other members of India's nuclear network in the 1990s, I continue to maintain that the excessive secrecy in this period resulted largely from external nonproliferation pressures—specifically, the United States' threat of economic sanctions and a new round of technology denials.³ Because data sources in the elite interview method are scarce, our differing claims can be resolved only as more data become available.

India's excessive centralization and secrecy around its nuclear program...