At the recent BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, India and China held formal talks for the first time in five years. While Beijing and New Delhi are major trading partners, that partnership is characterized by a lopsidedness that weighs in China’s favor. In recent years, their relationship has also been tense. Unsettled border disputes led to skirmishes in 2020, 2021, and 2022, with the former arguably the worst confrontation between the regional powers in decades.
The countries are natural rivals, with the two largest populations in the world – together comprising approximately 36 percent of the global population — and with starkly contrasting political systems and social cultures. China has been a one-party state since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, while India is the world’s biggest democracy, and has been since its independence in 1947. With China’s meteoric rise, India has been orienting its strategic position with the aim of elevating its own global standing.
Indeed, China’s ascendancy comes about as India is concurrently planning its own. Hence, it would be unwise to be wholly convinced by the BRICS Summit’s optics. These fractious neighbors are also nuclear powers and are actively seeking to expand and modernize their nuclear forces. China’s nuclear journey plays a considerable role in India’s own strategic outlook. While Pakistan has always been India’s greatest security concern, China’s threat has imbued military and political strategists in New Delhi with a renewed focus. To compound New Delhi’s concerns, Islamabad and Beijing have a longstanding strategic partnership. The perceived threat from China has initiated developments approximating a regional security dilemma. These realities should not be ignored, regardless of the BRICS Summit.
While the nuclear community speculates over what drives China’s nuclear expansion, the role India foresees for its own nuclear capabilities merits close examination, too, particularly as we enter unchartered waters in the global security landscape. In a previous article, I explored the provenance and trajectory of China’s nuclear strategy. In this article, I assess India’s nuclear journey and establish the factors that inform how the South Asian powerhouse approaches nuclear strategic decision-making.
India has been a latent nuclear power since 1974, and an overt one since 1998. Its approach to deterrence has been informed by direct threats on its borders, first from Pakistan and second from China. It maintains strong civilian command and control of its nuclear capabilities, due to a deep distrust of the military. The posture India adopts is a deterrence-by-punishment posture, coupled with an assured retaliatory capability to ensure retaliation for any attacks against its vital interests.
Pakistan is India’s main regional security threat, but increasing tensions with China has made India’s nuclear forces feature greater long-range strategic capabilities. Indeed, India’s intercontinental missile capabilities can reach targets deep within China.
India’s Nuclear Policy: The Three Pillars
India’s commitment to a retaliatory posture is reflected in the three pillars guiding its nuclear policy.
The first pillar is a commitment to no first use (NFU). A strategic cultural explanation for India’s commitment to NFU suggests that India has a tradition of non-violence. A military strategic reading suggests that in fact, India perceives nuclear weapons strictly as instruments of deterrence, employable only if India suffers a first strike.
The second pillar is assured massive retaliation. India’s recessed posture indicates that should India feel the need to retaliate with a nuclear strike, it would reserve the option to determine when and where to employ nuclear weapons. For logistical reasons, India’s recessed posture complicates its ability to assemble its weapons rapidly. As the late Air Commodore Jasjit Singh wrote, the purpose of India’s strategic deterrence posture is to make “nuclear weapons politically available at any given time, but militarily recessed.”
However, the concept of massive retaliation indicates that the full force of India’s nuclear arsenal would be employed if India were attacked. For deterrence to be effective, this factor needs to be credible. The adversary needs to believe that India would be willing to employ the full force of its nuclear capabilities if a threshold was crossed. Nevertheless, India’s efforts to enhance force survivability has bolstered its deterrence capabilities. India has also begun enhancing its missile defense capabilities, to complement the strategic importance with which it regards survivability and being able to absorb a first strike. As Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda have written, “India has also converted some of its ballistic missile technology into an anti-satellite interceptor.”
The final pillar of India’s nuclear posture is that under no condition would India ever conventionalize its nuclear forces. This, too, demonstrates that India does not perceive nuclear weapons as instruments of war, but strictly as coercive instruments of strategic deterrence. In other words, India’s nuclear weapons are designed to prevent aggression, not initiate it. As India’s declaratory doctrine makes clear, its strategic objectives are to “deter the use and threat of nuclear weapons.”
Furthermore, as former Vice Adm. Vijay Shankar once intimated, India does not possess a launch-on-warning posture, referring to a pre-emptive and escalatory posture, but rather could only retaliate with a nuclear strike after it has absorbed a nuclear hit. Shankar described this as a “launch after hit” posture, indicating that India possesses what it believes to be secure second-strike capabilities.
India’s efforts to expand its nuclear forces under Prime Minister Narendra Modi certainly show that it is developing more robust assured retaliatory capabilities, with survivable forces that encompass multiple domains, including land-based forces and sea-based forces. Since 2016, India has also developed several new categories of land-based ballistic missiles, further indicating India’s efforts to enhance its second-strike capabilities. As of 2022, India is estimated to possess 160 nuclear warheads.
India’s Nuclear Posture: Assured Retaliation
As mentioned above, India adopts an assured retaliation posture. Assured retaliation is a deterrence-by-punishment posture that requires assured second-strike capabilities, enabling India to conduct nuclear retaliatory strikes on enemy targets after it has absorbed a nuclear attack on its vital interests. The deterrent role of its nuclear weapons demonstrates that India seeks to protect its vital interests by threatening to use its strategic or tactical nuclear forces, to impose costs that would significantly outweigh any potential gains made by its adversaries.
India has also maintained a recessed nuclear posture, which signals its commitment to NFU. The downside for India is that rapid retaliation would be logistically complicated. Nevertheless, a recessed capability does not preclude rapid retaliation, and Indian nuclear posture affords it the flexibility to conduct massive retaliatory strikes whenever it deems fit.
However, as Yogesh Joshi and Frank O’Donnell argue, India’s recent nuclear force expansion is geared toward demonstrating India’s prowess as a highly advanced military power and is motivated by political as well as security considerations. This suggests that India’s posture may be moving away from assured retaliation.
Unlike Pakistan, India’s nuclear deterrent is oriented toward two nuclear powers, the other being China. Nonetheless, India’s nuclear targeting consistently indicates that it adopts an assured retaliatory posture toward Pakistan, despite being able to reach several targets in China. Hence, Pakistan remains the primary target of India’s assured retaliatory forces, as wars and crises between the two countries have occurred recurrently since 1948. Furthermore, the threat Pakistan poses to Indian security extends beyond border disputes, with Pakistan repeatedly providing military aid to violent non-state actors seeking to undermine Indian national security from within. Consequently, India considers Pakistan as the greater threat to its national security.
India has adopted an assured retaliation posture ever since it became a latent nuclear state in 1974. Despite militarized crises with Pakistan in the 1980s, India’s strategic ambiguity did not compromise its assured retaliatory posture, as its peaceful nuclear explosion test in 1974 signaled its ability to assemble a nuclear weapon relatively rapidly. This capability proved sufficient to deter its adversaries and prevent all-out regional war. As Vipin Narang wrote, “in demonstrating the ability to retaliate against China and Pakistan in the event of a nuclear attack, [China and Pakistan] believed [India] had the capability to assemble and deliver [a nuclear weapon] within weeks of a decision to do so.”
The Brasstacks Crisis of 1986-87 with Pakistan was the turning point in India’s nuclear trajectory, compelling a shift in Indian nuclear strategy, from latent to overt. The subsequent decision to develop 60-130 nuclear warheads in 1987, deliverable by aircraft, demonstrates the importance of survivability in Indian strategic thinking.
Survivability is a prerequisite to possessing an assured second-strike capability. However, India’s superior conventional and strategic nuclear capabilities have not made it invulnerable to Pakistani probing. In 1999, Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control into India-controlled Jammu and Kashmir enclaves. What followed was the Kargil War. India elected to exercise restraint, opting not to retaliate with nuclear force over Pakistani breaches, further demonstrating India’s commitment to NFU. That the conflict did not escalate to the nuclear level also highlights the robust deterrent role nuclear weapons played – and continues to play – between the two countries.
On Strategic Culture: India, Hinduism, and Non-Violence
Strategic culture alludes to the historical, cultural, religious, and ideational precepts that inform the practices and behaviors of a state. While there are different definitions of strategic culture, according to scholars Jeffrey Lantis, Jack Snyder, and Colin Gray, two consistent characteristics are commonly agreed: strategic culture is indicative of deep roots, and it is semi-permanent. Strategic culture, according to Lantis, also combines “a set of general beliefs, attitudes, and behavior patterns with regard to nuclear strategy,” and encompasses a distinctive style with “deep roots within a particular stream of historical experience.”
India’s commitment to NFU correlates with its Hindu ideals of non-violence. As Ashley Tellis has argued, NFU “is remarkably pervasive in Indian strategic thought.” The tradition of non-violence can also be traced back to Gandhi’s own traditions of resistance in the face of British imperialism. NFU has been a consistent feature in India’s nuclear strategy, comprising every iteration of its doctrine; Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty argued that “India’s nuclear doctrine rests on its pledge never to be first in the use of nuclear weapons.”
The eventual decision to produce nuclear weapons suggests that the role of strategic culture waned in the face of increased security threats. Yet, becoming a nuclear weapons state has not diminished India’s ambition to envisage a world free of nuclear weapons. Its first published nuclear doctrine, from 2003, details seemingly non-violent ideals, such as the need to exercise nuclear restraint; to advocate for strict controls on the development of nuclear fissile material; to adhere to the moratorium on nuclear tests; and to call for universal nuclear disarmament.
Maintaining recessed nuclear forces also points to India’s aversion to nuclear weapons use. The arduous and time-consuming operation of assembling strategic nuclear weapons components stored in distant parts of India’s landmass suggests that this safeguard also serves as a form of self-deterrence. Coupled with pronounced notions of a responsibility to humanity, the safeguarding against nuclear weapons use indicates that fundamentally, the limitless destruction that nuclear weapons would inflict is anathema to Indian values.
While the juxtaposition of nuclear weapons and adherence to benign ideals has endured, the extent to which non-violence will remain an indefinite feature in Indian nuclear strategy is debatable. India’s drive for force expansion and modernization since Modi became prime minister points to growing bellicosity in Indian strategic culture and decision-making, standing in stark contrast to India’s benign culture and religious precepts.
Conclusion
An understanding of how New Delhi perceives its own strategic environment vis-a-vis Islamabad and Beijing is a serious geostrategic issue. As China’s regional dominance shows no signs of abating, and the global security landscape continues to change in dangerous ways, India is unlikely to adhere to a strategic logic its strategists hold to be diminishing in salience. To protect its vital interests against threats emanating from Pakistan and China, strategists in New Delhi will have to adapt their outlook to meet the challenges of the present.
As the adage goes, when the facts change, opinions change with them. As the Asian geostrategic landscape continues to evolve, so too will India’s nuclear strategy.