Thoughts on India's Nuclear Deterrent

Cartoon courtesy The Hindu

Of course, the cartoon above is somewhat fallacious in a scientific context, but has significance in the political context and exposes how organizations like the DRDO, scientific leaders and erstwhile governments have been in cahoots over India’s nuclear capability and how we project ourselves as a nuclear state. I have been following the recent controversy on India’s 1998 nuclear tests and the question of our nuclear deterrence with great interest. Not only does nuclear “game theory” – and this probably shouldn’t be in quotes – make for interesting coffee table discussions (assuming, of course, that we are at peace with our neighbours and not at war), but it also makes for questions of degree of destruction rather than the type of destruction to come up. When nuclear weapons are discussed, they are generally considered weapons of mass destruction. The reasoning applied here is that since nuclear weapons are capable of wiping our entire cities, they can win a possible war quite decisively. Until recently, I was of the opinion that the deterrent which we use to justify diplomacy and strategy with neighbours like Pakistan is based on a viable nuclear deterrent which can cause annihilation of entire cities if need be. Of course, I intend to discuss this from the perspectives of the governments using such nuclear weapons, because common people on both sides of a potential nuclear conflict don’t want to face the consequences of decisions taken by their nuclear-armed leaders or rival leaders.

With the new nuclear powers – the ones that don’t have hundreds of nuclear weapons – like India, China, France, Britain, Germany and Pakistan (and possibly Israel, South Africa, North Korea and Iran), it is reasonable to consider that the nuclear equations are written in terms of the delivery mechanism of the weapons as well as in terms of the systems that control launch schedules. In recent years, the development of a missile defence shield has become a primary focus. Only four countries are known to have the technology currently, the USA, Russia, Israel and India.  In the seconds or minutes leading to a cataclysmic attack on large populations, it is these delivery mechanisms (missles) and response systems that determine how good one’s deterrent is. This isn’t India’s problem at the moment, despite the fact that the Agni-III missile isn’t quite ready for deployment. India’s problem seems to be the lack of confidence we have in the yield of the weapons themselves. And naturally, this can be a source of grave concern. Not only will a damp squib nuclear device turn things in our enemies’ favour when it comes to actual exchange of bombs and missiles across the border, but the very idea that we have a deterrent becomes a false hope that we rest our strategy upon, and when it comes time to take the difficult decisions and defend our country (by attacking our enemy, if that is the only option left), becomes a contentious issue. Leaders cannot make decisions about everyday things that need their attention – be they border incursions, weapons buildup, political rhetoric or regime change. If India’s nuclear deterrent isn’t as good as it is touted, we are in deep trouble already – because much of our strategy and some of our diplomacy is dependent on the existence of this deterrent.

India’s nuclear deterrent is good enough for 200 kilotons (200 kt, equivalent to a few thousand tons of TNT). The effect of a 200 kiloton device is about 10 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. A sizeably large crater will exist after the explosion, a mushroom cloud that would blank out the sun for days, with the damage to life and property being a statistic, rather than something that can be clearly fathomed or something that can be imagined. To give you an idea of how complete the destruction from a Hiroshima-style nuclear device is, here are two images of Hiroshima itself, before and after the nuclear attack by the US in 1945:

Hiroshima Before the Blast

Hiroshima after the blast

Given that only the most basic features of the landscape are visible, albeit bathed in deadly radiation, a 20 kt like the sort used in Hiroshima is not exactly a lightweight. It is justifiable to expect much more from a 200 kt device, and even more from a multi-megaton class device such as the Tsar Bomba.

And yet, given the extent of destruction that 200kt nuclear weapons can cause, they can only cause so much damage. Given that decision making in a nuclear war scenario is often left to the commander in chief of the armed forces, or the President, it is crucial that the destruction a device is capable of is not half-hearted or feeble, because the price to pay for a feeble nuclear weapon is probably one’s entire country, all its people and all its infrastructure, given the nature of some Doomsday devices like the Soviet Era Perimeter. We don’t yet know if China has a similar doomsday device, capable of acting by itself once it has registered from seismic readings that a nuclear bomb has exploded on its soil. Chances are that if they do have one, we don’t know its inner workings or the location of their missile silos, which makes our nuclear game theory tilt quite lopsidedly in favour of China. This is probably quite true since Indian commanders are considering re-examining the no-first-use option that India has long favoured. Perhaps this is necessary because India’s belligerent neighbours are not likely to launch merely one attack – there will probably a concerted slew of several attacks if at all diplomacy fails and our nations have to go to war.

For this and other reasons, the test yield targeted by most modern nuclear bombs is of the order of a few megatons (equivalent to a few thousand tons of TNT). In addition to the explosive force of such a blast (of a few megatons, a few thousand times more powerful than India’s current nuclear deterrent) the radiation levels are significantly higher in case of larger explosions, as is the radius of the blast, which will effectively put paid to a few hundred square miles of terrain for several years and possibly decades. The key question that the users of the deterrent (the strategists) will ask, however, is whether the deterrent is good enough to take care of multiple targets whose destruction is crucial to the survival of India if and when a nuclear fusillade begins.

Let’s look at the nuclear capabilities from our two immediate (hostile/semihostile) neighbours. China has 3-5 megaton yield devices, which are capable of being delivered by their DF-5 Dong Feng missile which has a range of around 12,000 miles and is therefore a viable deterrent against all of Europe and the east coast of the USA. Pakistan has the Ghauri and the M-11 missiles for medium/long range strikes, which can reach Delhi and Mumbai from Pakistan with ease as per theoretical range calculations. In reality, although China has full nuclear capability over all sovereign Indian land, Pakistan doesn’t have nuclear delivery capability over most of our territory in addition to the fact that they have lower yield nuclear weapons (although more nuclear weapons than India). That said, the present controversy puts us at par with only Pakistan in terms of nuclear bomb yield, which is disappointing news for India as we should have the capability to approach China in terms of our yield. Our launch vehicle technology and of its hitherto largely successful operation, however, is something ISRO and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre have to be lauded for, apart from their efforts in the Chandrayaan – I moon mission.

The present controversy also has a unique political flavour. K Santhanam and PK Iyengar, the scientists who consider the tests a failure and call for more nuclear tests are figures in the scientific community, presumably, and don’t have any apparent connections with the Congress party or the Left. Even the Congress and the Left have gone out of their way to make it clear that they believe the tests were successful. The BJP of course will have to claim it was successful because they were the ruling party at the time. While Abdul Kalam, Rajagopala Chidhambaram and other prominent scientific and political figures contest Santhanam’s claims,  other scientists support his claim – probably also the ones at Lawerence Livermore National laboratories who measured seismic data from the May 1998 nuclear tests in both India and Pakistan. I find it difficult to believe that Santhanam’s claims are a sort of opportunism, but it cannot be ruled out. Neither can it be ruled out that the Congress could be allowing Santhanam to rake up the issue because they would like to see a dead BJP rather than a beleagured one. The BJP’s other controversies notwithstanding, they were seen by the nationalist party’s supporters as a party which wouldn’t compromise the military strength of the Indian nation, and an exposé in this regard will be a blow for the BJP.

Without actually having the deterrent that we say we have in our journals and in our press conferences, we could strategically adopt the dark horse strategy of possessing greater capability that we are seen to have, which is almost always an advantage, rather than bragging about our capabilities. We could also end up destroying confidence in a government whose stability is essential for a stance on issues such as Kashmir, terrorism, border incursions and other issues that determine our policy towards our neighbours. I believe that being the dark horse is a great idea in the context of nuclear conflict (look at Israel), but that we have neither the capability nor the integrity to accomplish something like this if we don’ t stand with our scientists on the state of nuclear technology and instead only seek to manipulate their accomplishments to benefit from our respective vote banks.

What does all this mean? I guess I, like all citizens expect the scientists’ peer reviewed word to prevail and not  be hijacked by propaganda. If propaganda says that India has 200kt devices and a viable nuclear deterrent, they should be backed by strong agreement in terms of scientific evidence for this claim. Pushing the idea of a deterrent at the citizens to make them feel secure in the face of a confused, beleaguered, Islamic fundamentalist uprising in one of our neighbours and a zealously expansionist communist, aggressive, oppressive regime in our other neighbour makes for bad strategy, especially when we don’t have the quality of the deterrent we talk about. When the Congress government has to make a decision now on whether to conduct another nuclear test to make the technology reliable, the nuclear opportunism that the BJP exhibited when they were in power will haunt the present government. Were they to make the mistake of not carrying our another set of nuclear tests to ensure our country’s deterrent against potential nuclear assault from Pakistan or China, we would be lying to ourselves and compromising the well being of our entire nation in the event of a conflict.

Links:

FAS article on India’s nuclear arsenal

Indian Express article on India’s current nuclear deterrent controversy

Lawerence Livermore National Labs report (PDF) on yield of nuclear tests conducted in 1998

FAS’ nuclear forces guide