Inside Nuclear South Asia - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0804762392 ISBN 13 : 9780804762397

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their creation as sovereign states in 1947. They went to the brink of a fourth in 2001 following an attack on the Indian parliament, which the Indian government blamed on the Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist organizations. Despite some attempts at rapprochement in the intervening years, a new standoff between the two countries was precipitated when India accused Lashkar-e-Taiba of being behind the Mumbai attacks late last year.

The relentlessness of the confrontations between these two nations makes Inside Nuclear South Asia a must read for anyone wishing to gain a thorough understanding of the spread of nuclear weapons in South Asia and the potential consequences of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent.

The book begins with an analysis of the factors that led to India's decision to cross the nuclear threshold in 1998, with Pakistan close behind: factors such as the broad political support for a nuclear weapons program within India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the intense rivalry between the two countries, the normative and prestige factors that influenced their behaviors, and ultimately the perceived threat to their respective national security.

The second half of the book analyzes the consequences of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent. These chapters show that the presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia has increased the frequency and propensity of low-level violence, further destabilizing the region. Additionally, nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan have led to serious political changes that also challenge the ability of the two states to produce stable nuclear détente. Thus, this book provides both new insights into the domestic politics behind specific nuclear policy choices in South Asia, a critique of narrow realist views of nuclear proliferation, and the dangers of nuclear proliferation in South Asia.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Scott D. Sagan is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He has authored a number of books on nuclear weapons and international security, including Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (1989 and The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (1993).

Scott D. Sagan is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He has authored a number of books on nuclear weapons and international security, including Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (1989 and The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (1993).

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Inside Nuclear South Asia

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6239-7

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Inside Nuclear South Asia Scott D. Sagan.............................................................................................................11. The BJP and the Bomb Kanti Bajpai...............................................................................................................................252. Testing Theories of Proliferation in South Asia Karthika Sasikumar and Christopher Way..........................................................................683. Contra-Proliferation: Interpreting the Meanings of India's Nuclear Tests in 1974 and 1998 Itty Abraham..........................................................1064. Pride and Prejudice and Prithvis: Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia Vipin Narang.........................................................................1375. Revisionist Ambitions, Conventional Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe S. Paul Kapur.....................1846. The Evolution of Pakistani and Indian Nuclear Doctrine Scott D. Sagan...........................................................................................219Contributors........................................................................................................................................................265Index...............................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

THE BJP AND THE BOMB Kanti Bajpai

ON MAY 11 AND 13, 1998, India exploded a total of five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Since 1974, when India first tested a nuclear device, there had been an expectation that New Delhi would once again test and perhaps go nuclear outright. Yet the 1998 series of tests caught most Indians and the world by surprise. Why did India test after a gap of twenty-four years? Most accounts and explanations of the Indian nuclear tests-including the government's own public statements-have focused on the strategic rationale for India's nuclear program. Much less attention has been paid to the domestic roots of the decision to test. What role did domestic political considerations play in the Indian government's decision?

This chapter addresses two questions about domestic politics and the Indian nuclear bomb. First, what were the domestic political incentives for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in March 1998, to test barely six weeks later? Second, what were the domestic political effects of the BJP's decision to test nuclear weapons? Here, I focus on how the BJP remained politically unscathed despite a series of crises with Pakistan in the Indian part of Kashmir after the party took a series of positions and initiatives that were either palpable failures or that contradicted earlier stands. Why was the party not taken to task by the public and not hurt politically, including in the 1999 elections that occurred just after the Kargil War?

I have put the BJP at the center of my analysis. Although the BJP was only one of the twenty or so parties that made up the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that came to power in March 1998, it was the single largest party in the alliance and indeed the largest party in India in terms of the number of seats in Parliament. The prime ministership and the most important cabinet posts were with the BJP. There was an enormous struggle for domestic supremacy, primarily between the BJP and the Congress. Other parties may have been affected by the tests, but it was the BJP that made the decision to test and that stood to benefit or lose from it.

In bringing domestic politics into an understanding of India's nuclear tests and in asking how the consequences of post-test security policies can be explained, I do not intend to suggest that international politics played no role in the behavior of Indian leaders. It would be bizarre if Indian leaders' decision making on nuclear weapons was completely unrelated to their understanding of international politics and the challenges to national security. Conversely, in an increasingly globalized world, domestic politics are always influenced by the external world-by conflicts, pressures, and ideas stemming from foreign governments and societies. There can therefore be no purely external/ international and internal/domestic understanding of either international or domestic politics. Instead, what is needed is a careful weighing of the influence of different factors on important political decisions.

Put another way, political leaders are influenced both by international structural imperatives to assure the security of their societies in an anarchical world and by domestic constraints and opportunities. The decision to build a nuclear weapons program and to validate its effectiveness by testing may well arise out of the need to assure one's security in a self-help international system where there is no central authority either to adjudicate between member states or to enforce certain norms of behavior. Faced in particular by other states that possess nuclear weapons, especially those who are "rivals," governments will be pressed to seek a deterrent.

As Kenneth Waltz and other structural realists have argued, the incentive to follow such a course is strong. It is not, however, inevitable. States may choose to ignore structural pressures to balance themselves against rivals. They may eventually, as a result, be eliminated as sovereign entities in the international system or else, at the limit, be physically destroyed. Agents do have choices, however limited these may be. They must at some point make a decision to ensure their survival by investing in the requisite forms of military power (whether they do so by seeking another's protection or by their own efforts)-or face the possibility of capitulation or destruction. The point at which they take this decision, indeed the nature of the decision itself (to seek protection or to rely on one's own strength, to seek security guarantees or to build a nuclear deterrent) depends on a variety of domestic resources, self-understandings, conjunctions, and circumstances.

Specifically, in respect to building a nuclear weapons program, a state must at the very least possess the science and technology and natural resources (e.g., uranium), the financial resources, the military sophistication, and the public's support to construct a deterrent. Public support for a nuclear deterrent may come from an understanding of national security imperatives, but it may also come from deeper wellsprings of identity-from nationalism, from the desire to display one's sovereignty, from conceptions of modernity. Leaders may use national security arguments and/or powerful social-psychological emotions to affirm a national identity in their own narrower political interests-in the cut and thrust of domestic politics, to outmaneuver political rivals, ensure their own survival, enlarge their power, and stifle opposition. It is this last domestic perspective that we shall put forth in this chapter. The argument is that India's decision to develop a nuclear weapons program may well reflect the long-term structural imperatives of security in a self-help world, but the timing of the 1998 tests, the tipping point, is better explained by domestic political considerations arising out of certain internal conjunctions and circumstances, including notions of political and national identity. The evidence presented in this chapter shows that the party interests of the BJP and, more specifically, of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee were critically important to the nuclear test decision of 1998 and that the domestic political situation after the tests influenced the public reception of the NDA government's handling of a series of national security decisions thereafter.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS / STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES AND THE DECISION TO TEST

The policy community and the academic understandings of the Indian nuclear tests have focused on "first image" or "security model" analyses, that is, on the nature of international politics and the security imperatives facing New Delhi in 1998. There are three basic first image explanations. The first relates to the increase in international pressure against nuclear proliferation in the aftermath of the Cold War and a closing window of opportunity for India in terms of testing and going nuclear. The second explanation focuses on the collapse of the Soviet Union-India's Cold War ally-and India's more vulnerable strategic position in the world in the 1990s. The third explanation is that the geopolitical changes in India's more immediate environment, in particular, military growth and increased cooperation between China and Pakistan, which directly impinged on Indian security, caused the tests.

How do we treat these explanations from the point of view of building a case for a domestic politics explanation of the tests? Are public officials who make these arguments simply lying? Are they ignorant of the "real" (i.e., domestic) reasons for the tests? Is all the first image scholarship on the tests wrong?

In this chapter, I sketch out each of these security model explanations and show that there are grounds for questioning each of them. Very little has been written from the domestic politics perspective on the 1998 tests and their after math. There are many difficulties in developing a domestic politics view of India's nuclear tests. The empirical "base" is too thin. The principal actors involved in the tests will not speak openly enough. Their recollection of their own motives and interests may not be altogether credible. Documentation is therefore always difficult at best. By definition, nuclear politics is perhaps the highest of "high politics" and therefore the most shrouded in secrecy. There are few if any documents here, and even if documentation existed, India's secrecy laws are so stringent that virtually no one can get access to anything important. It is tempting therefore to "fall back" on first image security analyses and to throw up one's hands in terms of research possibilities. Research on the domestic politics of nuclear decision making cannot be suspended, however, for it is simply too consequential an area of public policy to be let alone. The researcher, like a detective deploying the tools of forensic science, must piece together the best evidence he or she can obtain in order to derive some conclusions. I will, like a good detective, therefore begin by raising questions about alternative explanations of the facts.

Closing Windows of Opportunity

The most common explanation of why India tested in May 1998 is that proliferation politics were closing "windows of opportunity" for India. This is a view that Indian government officials and senior scientists expressed at the time of the tests. R. Chidambaram, the head of India's atomic energy establishment, reportedly told Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, for example, that with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) due for review in September 1999, "the more we delay, the more the danger grows of India losing its option altogether." Those who make this argument suggest that the global nonproliferation effort had reached a tipping point. India's ability to conduct tests and to move forward in terms of a credible nuclear weapons program would have been severely constrained if it had not tested in 1998. A series of developments, some of them explicitly aimed at India, were putting tremendous pressure on India. The Argentina-Brazil nuclear rapprochement; South Africa's opening up of its nuclear program; the dismantling/ repatriation of Soviet nuclear remnants in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine; the four-power deal on North Korea's nuclear program; the accession of China, France, and South Africa to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the indefinite extension of the NPT; the conclusion of the CTBT; the start of the Fissile Materials Control Treaty (FMCT) talks; a tightening of nuclear proliferation export controls (both nationally and multilaterally)-all these in combination presented New Delhi with a global nonproliferation regime in which it would have been diplomatically much more costly to test.

A rider to his argument is that Indian scientists would have gradually lost interest in nuclear weapons design as the nonproliferation regime tightened its hold. The longer India did not test, the more likely that the younger generation of Indian scientists would have turned away from a career in nuclear weapons laboratories. A day would have come when India would simply not have had enough bomb engineers.

This argument assumed several things. First, it assumed that the various nonproliferation measures were primarily aimed at India. Second, it assumed that even if they were, India would be unable to resist pressures to cap or eliminate its weapons program and that India in particular would have been unable to test, which was crucial for the deterrent it was trying to build. Third, it assumed that without testing, India's nuclear weapons program would have lacked credibility as a deterrent. Fourth, it assumed that unless India's nuclear scientists carried out a series of test explosions, they would lose interest in a bomb program. All these assumptions are questionable.

Was the ramifying nuclear nonproliferation regime aimed primarily at India? There were countries far more worrisome in terms of proliferation in 1998: Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea, to name those of greatest concern. The Western powers led by the United States would certainly have liked to end India's and Pakistan's nuclear programs-the Clinton administration spoke publicly about its aim to "cap, rollback, and eliminate" South Asia's nuclear capabilities-but this was not regarded as a serious, practical goal, and from an absolutist view of nonproliferation, there were more pressing concerns in the Middle East and Northeast Asia. The assertion that India was the major target of the NPT extension, the CTBT, and the putative FMCT was an exaggeration.

Would the Indian government have buckled and given up any hope of testing, and therefore of going nuclear, confronted as it would have been by these various treaties and measures? In the first place it is worth noting that since India had refused to sign the CTBT, India was not legally bound to refrain from testing. It is probably true that with only a few holdouts, the treaty would have made testing more difficult for India. However, although the leading powers and many others were keen that New Delhi should give up its right to test, the Indian government's refusal to sign the CTBT had demonstrated that India was not ready to give up testing and a weapons program. Calls for India to wind up or limit its nuclear program continued, but this was hardly new. During the time that the so-called window of opportunity was closing, successive Indian governments did indeed consider testing. The fact that they pulled back from such a drastic decision suggests that their assessment of the pressures of nonproliferation, if that was a consideration, was not so alarmist as to cause them to authorize testing. One reason that earlier Indian governments perhaps resisted testing was that it is unclear how the international community could have forced India to end its bomb program.

Was testing vital for a credible nuclear deterrent? This is a difficult question to answer definitively, but we can note that New Delhi had not tested for twenty-four years after its first test in 1974, yet it was widely credited with having a nuclear weapons capability. An influential group of Indian analysts continued to argue in this period that India did not necessarily need to test, given what its scientists and engineers had learned in 1974 and given that a crude form of deterrence-the only kind, it was argued, that anyone needed-thereby already existed. If so, India would have had the capacity to deter its enemies even if it had signed the CTBT. To the extent that testing was vital, there were credible nonexplosive forms of testing, such as subcritical tests or simulations. During the CTBT debates, Indian analysts had argued that these forms of testing, which the older nuclear powers had already perfected, were just as effective as the real tests and that the CTBT therefore would not achieve its nonproliferation goal. Indeed, leading Indian scientists were confident that they had the ability to use nonexplosive, subcritical tests such as hydronuclear and hydrodynamic testing.

Finally, there was plenty of challenging work for nuclear weapons scientists and engineers to do, including the development and use of simulations and other forms of weapons design and testing. If India could not carry out nuclear test explosions, research in nonexplosive testing would become vital. Here was a huge field of investigation, inquiry, and experimentation, one that should be capable of enlivening the professional careers of Indian nuclear scientists.

Post-Cold war strategic vulnerabilities and uncertainties

The second explanation of why New Delhi tested is related to the view that the world was a much more dangerous place after the Cold War and that India was far more vulnerable. The tests were a sign to the international community at large, particularly the great powers, that India could defend itself and that it would take steps to redress a growing imbalance in power, real or perceived.

With the end of the Cold War, and specifically the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, India no longer had diplomatic support of the kind it had enjoyed during the Cold War. Coincident with the disappearance of an ally was the rise of China, an old rival. Another rival, Pakistan, which had helped defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, had come out of the Cold War with great confidence and had been part of the winning coalition along with the West and China. Most important, the United States had emerged as more powerful than ever before. India's relations with the United States were ambivalent at best in 1998. One of the most contentious areas between the two countries was nuclear nonproliferation. The Clinton administration saw nonproliferation as a major area of diplomatic effort with India and was determined to curtail New Delhi's nuclear program. Washington was also ranged against India on a number of other issues, most important, the Uruguay round of trade talks and human rights. On India's relations with Pakistan, Washington often tilted toward Islamabad's view of Kashmir. All in all, the broader geopolitical situation had deteriorated for India. The tests, in this view, were an attempt to recast the balance of power, arrest India's decline, and reduce its vulnerability in the larger geopolitical game.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0804762392
• ISBN 13: 9780804762397
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 281
• Éditeur: Sagen Scott D.
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Pays-Bas