Managing India's Nuclear Forces

Nuclear Strategy

194 M Managing India’s Nuclear Forces 9 Nuclear Strategy The basic purpose of nuclear strategy is to clarify the role nuclear forces should play in enhancing a country’s security and delineate how that role should be played. A nuclear strategy is both influenced and constrained by the other strategies that a country pursues. It must therefore be anchored in the country’s overall national security strategy. Major powers, because of their greater spread of interests and superior resources, need a well integrated national security strategy much more than smaller countries. The overall national security strategy should bring political, economic, diplomatic, defence, deterrence, and internal security strategies together. This is necessary to guide and co-ordinate policies and actions in different spheres, and to pursue national security objectives in a coherent way. The nuclear strategy must fit well within the overall national security strategy and must also relate closely to the country’s conventional defence strategy. There is still some haziness in India about what the country’s nuclear strategy should aim at. Should it be, as in the case of other NWS, a deterrence strategy linked to the country’s defence strategy and thus oriented towards specific adversaries, current and potential? Or should it be a political strategy aimed at enhancing the country’s broad global standing? Deterrence effect and political effect are not mutually exclusive. A strategy aimed at producing deterrence will inevitably, as an outgrowth, produce political effects that enhance the country’s global standing. Similarly, a nuclear strategy aimed at boosting the country’s global standing will, as a fallout, produce some deterrence effect. Yet, despite the effects produced by the two approaches overlapping to an extent there are major consequences to the choice made between the two. If the primary objective of nuclear capability is deterrence, the state will seek to create the necessary deterrent effect in the most efficient way. This approach will call for, within the political bounds set by Nuclear Strategy  195 national security strategy, a military-strategic rather than a politicalstrategic approach to the development of nuclear capability. There will be serious top level involvement in the development process, and military expertise will constitute a major input into the process. Nuclear forces will be adequately operationalised, and the national leadership will take good care to ensure that a robust C&C system, which will stand up well in crises and during a possible deterrence breakdown, is in place. If, on the other hand, global political standing is the chief objective, the national leadership is likely to prefer a minimally operationalised capability that is adequate to showcase the country’s political and technological prowess. A nuclear strategy, unless esteem promotion is its only objective , cannot be a standalone one. In dealing with adversaries, deterrence is only one of the tools a country has in its kit. Two others — diplomacy and defence — are even more important, and employed oftener and more visibly. Deterrence, except on the very rare occasion of a nuclear crisis, plays only a supporting, background role to the other two. Deterrence strategy must therefore mesh well with the country’s diplomatic and defence strategies. Moreover, between deterrence and defence, strategic level co-ordination is not enough. There has to be attunement at the level of operational plans, and joint adaptation to a largely common military infrastructural base. In contexts involving India it is impossible to visualise nuclear weapons use except in relation to conventional war. Unlike other strategies — economic, diplomatic, and even conventional military — a deterrence oriented nuclear strategy needs to be developed with specific adversaries in mind. The nature of the conflict relationship with an adversary, and the nature of that adversary , both factor in determining how best to combine diplomacy, conventional capability, and nuclear deterrence in dealing with him, and also in figuring out what kind of a nuclear capability is needed to deter him. The idea that strategies should aim at creating power, and that a country should seek as much power as domestic resources and external constraints permit, is a very unwise guiding principle in the case of nuclear strategy. It is the understanding of what is required to deter an adversary (or adversaries), currently and potentially, that should guide the development of nuclear forces. The intervention of political prestige and technology glamour in these assessments can lead to strategically unwise actions. It is now accepted globally that nuclear intimidation 196  Managing India’s Nuclear...