M. V. Ramana

India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, Perkovich, George, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1999, ISBN 0-520-21772-1, 597 pp., $39.95

Published in IEEE Spectrum March 2000

The nuclear tests conducted by India in May 1998 sparked a dangerous dynamic. In a tit-for-tat response that mirrored the behavior of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R during the cold war, Pakistan - with which India has fought three wars in the past
50 years - tested its nuclear weapons. Barely a year after their tests, the two were involved in bitter fighting over a mountain ledge in Kashmir. The peace that nuclear weapons were to have secured was nowhere in sight. Thankfully, the war did not escalate into a nuclear one. Use of just one nuclear weapon against a densely populated South Asian city would have eclipsed Hiroshima.

Understanding how India got to this point and the effects of India’s tests on the global proliferation of nuclear weapons is of great importance. George Perkovich’s India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation therefore comes at an opportune moment. To explore the subject, which he does in great detail, he wears two hats: as a close observer of India’s nuclear history and policies for many years and as the director of the Secure World Program of the W. Alton Jones Foundation that supports a lot of work on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. Perkovich's careful research, experience and contacts have yielded useful scholarship and valuable insights.

Among the themes he develops and elucidates: the collusion of Homi Bhabha, theoretical physicist and chief architect of India's nuclear complex, with Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, in creating a nuclear program that was nominally oriented towards peaceful purposes but always available for military purposes; the growth of a nuclear estate that is covered with a thick veil of secrecy; the cynical manipulation of so-called security threats by a pro-bomb lobby; the hypocritical, multiple standards followed by the United States in its foreign policies; and decision making by a small coterie of scientists and other advisers around the Indian prime minister's office in ordering the nuclear tests of both 1974 and 1998.

In the early 1940s Bhabha, started a small institute in Bombay to conduct research in the nuclear sciences. At Cambridge University, as a Ph.D. student, and later on, Bhabha had interacted with Europe's leading physicists, many of whom went on to play important roles in the Manhattan Project. With the support of Nehru, Bhabha succeeded in expanding his institute into a large hush-hush complex. As in all the other nuclear-weapons and near-nuclear states, the infrastructure that was built, ostensibly to produce electricity, could also be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. Despite Nehru's personal opposition to nuclear weapons, Perkovich notes that he "also accepted, albeit reticently and ambivalently, the potential military deterrent and international power embodied in nuclear weapon capability."

With the first Chinese nuclear test of 1964, politicians, scientists, and influential individuals in the Indian bureaucracy joined forces to advocate developing a nuclear arsenal to counter so-called security threats. Their arguments paralleled those made by U.S. and Russian strategists. Though this advocacy failed to obtain endorsement for developing a full-fledged arsenal, it did result in the sanctioning of work toward a "peaceful nuclear explosion," culminating in the 1974 nuclear test in north-western India, close to the border with Pakistan.

Many scholars - including, most notably, Itty Abraham in his 1998 book The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb (St. Martin's Press, New York) - have emphasized the role of the atomic energy establishment in pushing for the 1974 test. Others besides Bhabha - Homi Sethna, Raja Ramanna, P. K. Iyengar, and R. Chidambaram, all of whom went on at various times to head India's Atomic Energy Commission-contributed to the momentum to test. As summarized by Perkovich, "Whatever [Prime Minister Indira] Gandhi's calculus [in conducting the test], the fact remained that conducting [it] was not her idea. She disposed what others proposed."

Little or no attention has been paid in the literature to changes in U.S. policy toward India during this period. Perkovich's contributions, therefore, are extremely valuable. In 1964, at the behest of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and, independently, the State Department and the Pentagon, were contemplating two possibilities to "offset China's bomb." The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission considered potential cooperation with India on peaceful nuclear explosives (a technology that the United. States would denounce as dangerous nonsense just ten years later!).

Around the same time, a State Department study considered "providing nuclear weapons under U.S. custody" for use by "friendly Asian" military forces, including India. The primary objective of such an "assistance offer to India would be to preclude an independent national nuclear development program." In the event, neither proposal was approved, but they reflect the international climate in which India was operating during the decade before its first test.

For a variety of primarily domestic political reasons, no further tests followed the 1974 one, though on a couple of occasions they were almost sanctioned. In the early 1980s, apparently, Indira Gandhi authorized a test only to change her mind the next day. Once again, only a handful of people - scientists and senior bureaucrats - were involved. It was during this same period that India embarked on an ambitious program to develop ballistic missiles.

But it took more than these material capabilities to bring about the tests of May 1998. In addition to continued pressure from scientists in India's nuclear and missile establishments, and advances in Pakistan's nuclear capabilities there were two crucial, new factors: one international and the other purely domestic.

At the international level, a conference of the states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was held in 1995. At stake was the future of the treaty, which in Article 6 contains a commitment by the nuclear weapons states to take steps toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons. As Indian leaders and indeed most Indians saw it, the NPT had clearly been successful in containing "horizontal proliferation" (the spread of weapons to additional countries) but not "vertical proliferation" (the multiplication of weapons within states).

At the time the NPT was negotiated, the world contained some 40,000 nuclear weapons. This number rose to 70,000 in 1987, before falling back to around 36,000 (deployed and nondeployed) in 1998. When the treaty came up for review in 1995, India, not being party to it, did not participate in the conference. Nonetheless, its outcome was important to India.

As Perkovich observes, "If the non-nuclear weapon states, a huge majority of more than 170, could win firmer commitments to nuclear disarmament by the five nuclear weapon states, India's moral and diplomatic stance would be buttressed. If, however, the nuclear weapon states could rebuff disarmament demands and win instead a strong international consensus for maintaining the existing regime of nuclear haves and have-nots, the conference would be a major setback."

For reasons too numerous and complex to analyze here, the conference went the way the nuclear weapon states wanted, and India found itself isolated. Following this and the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, Indian officials and commentators began to fear that India would have to give up the option to weaponize its nuclear capability. This led to a renewed bid by Indian partisans of nuclear weapons for further tests.

The domestic factor was the ascent to power by Hindu right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which believed in the use of violence, both at home and abroad, to achieve its ends. Mostly, Perkovich only skirts around the role of the BJP and its brand of belligerence in winning elite support for the nuclear weapons program. But the Hindu right had advocated India's acquisition of these weapons since 1951, before China or Pakistan even embarked on nuclear programs. And, "the rise of Hindu nationalism has completely altered the discourse of Indian politics and it is beginning to transform the character of Indian society," as independent commentators Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik observed in the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July, 1998). They wrote that "nothing else so fully explains why India took the decision to shed its nuclear ambiguity."

No explanation of events and trajectories with multiple causes is ever satisfactory. Nevertheless, the lessons that Perkovich draws from India's nuclear trajectory serve to explode many "illusions of the nuclear age." One is precisely this importance of domestic factors, as opposed to the external security environment, in determining nuclear policy in India and other states. (Though Perkovich does not get into this, similar factors can be seen at work in the United States and the other nuclear weapons states as well.)

Perkovich lists different considerations that pulled India's policy toward and away from the building of nuclear weapons. The high economic cost of building an arsenal of this nature, both direct and indirect, was chief among the elements that stopped Indian decision-makers short of building and deploying nuclear weapons. As stated, pressure from scientists and technologists working in the nuclear and missile programs was probably the most important component in India's drive to further its nuclear capabilities.

The rough balance between these forces prevented India from either developing a full-fledged nuclear arsenal or forgoing the option entirely. Scholars and journalists, Perkovich included, usually characterize that outcome as the result of "restraint" on the part of Indian policy makers. This terminology suggests that leaders are expected to conform to a standard pattern-the behavior of leaders in the five nuclear weapon states. That the vast majority of countries around the world have not developed nuclear weapons demonstrates that the actions of the five are abnormal rather than standard.

The behavior of the nuclear policy makers in the nuclear weapon states, however, does beget like behavior. The importance of changing this state of affairs is underlined by what Perkovich terms the "grandest illusion of the nuclear age"-the illusion that global nuclear disarmament is not necessary if additional states are to be dissuaded from going nuclear. The way to a future free from nuclear danger is through the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, locally and globally.

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M. V. Ramana is a research associate at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University. His work is supported in part by a grant for research and writing from the MacArthur Foundation.