Indian tactical nuclear weapons are unlikely to motivate Pakistan to demobilize groups that attack India.There is little basis for confidence that additional nuclear capability can resolve this challenge.
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Indian tactical nuclear weapons may increase the likelihood that a future conflict on Pakistani territory will go nuclear. Use-or-lose pressures on Pakistani military commanders would grow if India acquired these weapons, making unintended escalation likelier.
If India opts to develop limited nuclear options, policymakers should refrain from announcing a capability before it exists. There is a tendency in India to announce or publicly discuss operational concepts or weapons systems before they exist. Doing so would prompt Pakistan to develop new countermeasures.
Since 1998, and really since the 1980s, India has been content to build its nuclear arsenal slowly.56 In 1999, the NSAB report indicated that India would pursue a triad of delivery vehicles. Air-delivered bombs were the first option India possessed. Since then it has inducted several variants of the Prithvi and Agni nuclear-capable ballistic missiles into its arsenal, such that it is now able to reach Beijing with nuclear weapons. The sea leg of its triad has been slowest to mature. In late 2014, India initiated sea trials of its first indigenously constructed (with substantial Russian assistance) nuclear-powered submarine, the INS Arihant, which was declared ready for service in early 2016.57 India plans to construct two additional boats in this class before building a larger submarine more suited for lengthy deterrence patrols and capable of carrying missiles with longer ranges.58 India also has been developing short- and medium-range nuclear sea-launched ballistic missiles to be deployed on its submarines.59 Notwithstanding these developments, India still remains years away from a fully operational sea leg of its triad that could give the desired assured second-strike capability.60
During the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. strategists similarly recognized that the all-or-nothing nature of massive retaliation was no longer credible in deterring lower-order threats. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies spent much of the 1960s and 1970s considering a range of nuclear strategies to deter Soviet aggression. From this deliberation emerged the official NATO doctrine of flexible response, the guiding principle of which was to acquire multiple options, both conventional and nuclear, to respond to the range of contingencies that might arise. Flexible response in U.S. policy is often associated with Robert McNamara, secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, who emphasized the role of conventional forces in NATO strategy and questioned the utility of tactical nuclear weapons and limited nuclear war. European countries in NATO, fearing that this emphasis on conventional forces would make conflict more likely, pushed for a greater focus on nuclear options.76 Ultimately, NATO did not undertake the posited buildup of conventional forces that was called for to raise the nuclear threshold.
Notwithstanding U.S. efforts to address the major challenges presented by these concepts, the findings from multiple war games suggested that tactical nuclear weapons were incredibly difficult to integrate with maneuver warfare, raised thorny command-and-control issues, did not ensure victory to the party that used them first, and would result in millions of civilian and military casualties.78 The debate about the correct approach to deterrence continued through the end of the Cold War and persists even today.79
First, fissile material requirements for counterforce targeting can be sizable, given the need to cover a very large set of military targets in addition to cities. Recognizing concerns about escalation and a desire to limit nuclear damage, the target set could exceed 100 locations. Considering the need for some level of redundancy in targeting, India would potentially have to treble its current stockpile of nuclear weapons.94 Growth in the arsenal is limited by relatively modest plutonium production from the Dhruva reactor, which is sufficient to add perhaps five weapons per year to the arsenal.95 (This assumes India would utilize smaller, plutonium-based nuclear warheads given size and weight restrictions for tactical delivery systems.) Thus, to develop limited nuclear options in the short term, India would need additional plutonium production pathways. One option would be to utilize one or more of its larger, unsafeguarded nuclear power reactors. Another future option would be to separate plutonium from the blanket of the prototype fast breeder reactor under construction.96 Finally, India has announced plans to build a Dhruva-2 reactor, which may yield greater plutonium output.97 Any of these options could, with varying degrees of time and cost, satisfy larger plutonium requirements.
Fourth and finally, mastering operation of the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and information fusion requirements for nuclear counterforce targeting, especially against mobile assets, is exceedingly difficult. One way to understand the enormity of this challenge is to consider the steps and systems involved from targeting to detonation. Assuming India might seek to destroy Nasr missile batteries with ballistic or cruise missiles in response to a Pakistani nuclear strike against Indian armored battalions, India would need continuous, real-time visual coverage from drones or satellites, as well as other signals intelligence, in order to identify and discriminate Nasr missiles from other military systems. Once the missiles were identified, information would need to be communicated securely through the Nuclear Command Authority to the Strategic Forces Command for targeting. The NCA would also want to ensure that Indian conventional forces were not in the vicinity so that it could diminish chances of fratricide. This would require constant communications through the Integrated Defense Staff. Additionally, the NCA would need to consider meteorological data to ensure that prevailing winds would not blow radioactive fallout to Indian population centers or agricultural areas. In the interim, it would have placed Indian nuclear forces on alert and dispersed them to the field, making them vulnerable to a broader Pakistani counterforce attack. If Pakistan observed or was concerned that India might be readying to use nuclear weapons, Pakistani commanders, rather than losing their nuclear weapons, might instead opt to use them. This suggests that India would need to perform the above steps in a very short time period, with airtight communications and low visibility.
The second mistake is to default to half measures. It is entirely plausible, based on the history of other states with nuclear weapons, that the DRDO might develop a nuclear version of the Prahaar that would be delivered to the military before there is any attendant process for working through the circumstances under which the system might be used and what it would mean for escalation control. Many Pakistani analysts believe the Prahaar is intended to be just such a system, and the appearance of a nuclear Prahaar on the battlefield could exacerbate the use-or-lose tension and command-and-control vulnerabilities in ways that increase the potential for accidents, miscalculation, and inadvertent escalation. In many ways, this situation could be more dangerous for India than a formal decision to patiently adapt force posture and capabilities in parallel.
13 Pakistan probably would have supported separatist groups in Kashmir regardless of its possession of nuclear weapons, but the nuclearization of South Asian deterrence at that time would have enhanced its confidence.
89 Bluster aside, with its larger territory India has more dispersal options than this view credits, particularly considering that significant portions of Pakistani territory (for example, Balochistan) are probably too insecure for stationing nuclear weapons.
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The documents show that as early as 1958 the CIA was exploring the possibility that India might choose to develop nuclear weapons. The reports focus on a wide range of nuclear related matters - nuclear policy (including policy concerning weapons development), reactor construction and operations, foreign assistance, the tests themselves, and the domestic and international impact of the tests.
As was the case with France, Israel, and a number of other countries, India's path to a nuclear weapons capability was an incremental and prolonged one. Homi Bhabha, the father of the Indian bomb, moved in the same circles as Frédéric Joliot-Curie and other atomic physicists of the pre-World War II era. Bhabha left India in 1927 to study engineering at Cambridge, but the doctorate he received in 1935 was in physics. After he returned to India in 1939 the Second World War began, and Bhabha found himself stranded. He accepted the position of "reader" in theoretical physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. In 1941 he was promoted to professor of cosmic ray research. (Note 1)
From the beginning of the nuclear age, U.S. leaders were well aware that civilian nuclear research could advance a nation's progress toward a nuclear weapons capability. Over the last five decades the United States has gathered intelligence on Indian nuclear activities, civilian and military, through all the means at its disposal - human intelligence, open source collection, communications intelligence, and overhead reconnaissance. Those activities, as demonstrated by the documents below, allowed U.S. intelligence analysts to provide decision-makers with far more detailed assessments of Indian nuclear activities than would be available from public sources. At the same time, other documents show that the collective efforts of the organizations gathering intelligence on Indian nuclear activities -- including the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, and State Department -- did not result in U.S. intelligence analysts warning U.S. officials of India's nuclear tests, carried out in May 1974 and May 1998. 2ff7e9595c
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