Michael Krepon
In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union and the United States were regularly conducting atmospheric nuclear tests and spreading radioactive debris, India took the lead in seeking to end testing and promote nuclear disarmament.
New Delhi still talks about nuclear disarmament, but India’s influence has waned on such topics because it is caught betwixt and between: India still has the potential to command moral authority, but this is very hard to do as an outlier from global nuclear compacts. Contemporary advocates of nuclear abolition and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty owe a considerable debt to Jawaharlal Nehru and Indian strategists who laid out these arguments decades ago.
To those who argue that nuclear weapons cannot be “disinvented,” K. Subrahmanyam has offered telling rejoinders of other eternal verities that are no longer true: “Concepts and institutions which were considered inescapable and having no alternatives have become totally unacceptable and discarded into the dustbin of history. Slavery was a hoary institution… Monarchy and the divine right of kings had their day… No one today will fight for a king… The colour bar and discrimination based on it was prevalent even a couple of decades ago, but is no longer defended as a way of life… Colonialism is indefensible today — though in its heyday it was hailed as a civilising mission… All that has changed within our lifetime.” Subrahmanyam and other strong supporters of nuclear disarmament in India were also convinced of the need for an Indian bomb to deflect coercive diplomacy, gain international standing, and deter nuclear-armed neighbours. But India makes momentous decisions slowly, and by the time New Delhi conducted its first nuclear test, the Nonproliferation Treaty was already in force.
Under its terms, India could not join as a nuclear weapon state. Decades later, when the negotiating endgame for the CTBT was finally underway, India still had not resumed testing, a reflection of its deep ambivalence about the Bomb and its economic vulnerability to sanctions. And so New Delhi divorced itself from its own progeny. Two years after the CTBT gained its first signatories, India carried out a series of underground tests.
Today, India still finds itself “an intermediate caste” on nuclear matters, to use M.C. Changla’s old characterisation. While New Delhi now prides itself as being a responsible state with nuclear weapons, its sense of exceptionalism, the absence of a domestic consensus, and perhaps less than perfect nuclear test results make it hard for India to join decent company by signing the CTBT.
And so India remains a fence sitter, unable to take a leadership position on nuclear disarmament as long as it remains apart on nuclear testing. Subrahmanyam has always been clear that H bombs are “essentially terror weapons,” and that lower yields would suffice for instruments of such limited utility. Another brilliant Indian strategic thinker, now deceased, K. Sundarji, also wrote against the need for thermonuclear weapons, “Very large yields to compensate to some extent for the lack of accuracy are also not required. As to which zone in a city gets hit, this is not of much consequence.
The yield need not be very high. The weapons that struck Nagasaki and Hiroshima were between 15 and 20 kt, and the world knows the result.” During the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons became the calling cards of the P-5, but even their nuclear weapon strategists acknowledged, when they stopped testing in the atmosphere, that yields are militarily meaningless beyond a certain point.
By signing the CTBT, New Delhi could, in effect, declare that larger yields matter far, far less than the global cessation of nuclear testing and the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. Pakistan would then surely sign the CTBT, removing one driver of the nuclear competition in southern Asia. No major power with nuclear weapons has been so bold as to declare, in effect, that thermonuclear weapons are not required for minimum, credible, nuclear deterrence.
Doing so would be the most exceptional act of Indian leadership on nuclear issues since Jawaharlal Nehru led global efforts stop nuclear testing and abolish the Bomb.
Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Stimson Center and the author of “Better Safe than Sorry, The Ironies of Living with the Bomb”, (Stanford University Press, 2009)
Mohammed Abbasi 