LEADER ARTICLE: An Unnecessary Burden

It is unlikely that the present government will mark the tenth anniversary of Pokhran II with much fanfare. Despite the public rants of some self-appointed strategic analysts about the regime's failure to pursue a more robust nuclear weapons programme, the government's choice is laudable. What the proponents of an expansive nuclear arsenal tend to forget is that all national governments, regardless of ideological orientation, have insisted upon the pursuit of a finite nuclear deterrent.Even one of the earliest and most knowledgeable of India's strategic analysts, K Subrahmanyam, from the outset argued for a limited, credible and survivable deterrent. Despite the extant threats from China, and to a far lesser one from Pakistan, India need not acquire a massive, cumbersome arsenal, which would be fiscally imprudent and strategically unsound.
Some evidence from the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, should give the exponents of an extensive nuclear arsenal some pause. In 1998, when Stephen Schwartz published his extraordinary and comprehensive book, Atomic Audit, on the costs of the US nuclear weapons programme, he estimated that the country had spent some $35 trillion altogether. The opportunity costs of this level of spending were, to put it mildly, monumental. Today, as the US increasingly confronts an antiquated civilian air traffic system, decaying bridges, cluttered ports and overcrowded airports, one is forced to wonder if too high a price was paid to build, expand and sustain the massive nuclear weapons infrastructure.
The burden that the US nuclear weapons programme imposed on the country's economy is daunting enough. Given the acute secrecy that still envelops the history of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme and the lack of market pricing of goods and services in what was a state-controlled economy, it is much too hard to estimate what costs the Soviet arsenal inflicted on the country's anaemic economy and contributed to its ultimate dissolution.
India has finally and quite belatedly embarked upon a fitful effort to address its creaking national infrastructure of ports, airports, highways and railroads. Under these circumstances, pursuing an open-ended nuclear weapons programme designed to match China's long march towards greater strategic standing and to overwhelm an increasingly insecure and beleaguered Pakistan hardly seems to be a counsel of fiscal wisdom. Indeed New Delhi can ill afford financial fecklessness at a time when the global economy is in the doldrums, domestic inflation is on the rise and the exchequer faces a yawning fiscal deficit.
The fiscal arguments are relatively easy to explain even to those who have little grasp of macroeconomics. The strategic arguments against the pursuit of a substantial nuclear weapons programme are more complex and subtle.
Contrary to the views of some western nuclear strategists who gleefully referred to themselves as nuclear war fighters, the only viable purpose of nuclear weapons, as the eminent American strategist, Bernard Brodie, spelled out in his wise book, War and Politics, is to deter conflict. To that end, all a nuclear-armed state needs to possess are sufficient capabilities to deter a nuclear attack on its homeland or its vital assets.
To achieve this it needs to have credible and survivable nuclear weapons capabilities and to explicitly communicate its willingness to use them in extremis. This situation, as was characterised early in the Cold War, is known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Seeking to acquire nuclear capabilities beyond these would amount to what Robert Jervis, a leading American international security scholar, once aptly characterised as the "madness beyond MAD". After one manages to develop a credible, finite nuclear deterrent the further acquisition of capabilities is not merely a wasting asset, but downright destabilising.
They are destabilising because they can convince an adversary, weak or strong, that one is intent on pursuing possible first-strike goals. Such a strategy is designed to decapitate an adversary's nuclear assets in a "bolt from the blue" nuclear strike. Faced with such a possibility any adversary will immediately seek a range of countermeasures and almost inevitably provoke an arms race with devastating fiscal and strategic consequences.
Consequently, this is a situation that India should seek to avoid at all costs with both its nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and China.
To cope with the threat from China all India needs are sufficient nuclear assets to hold some of the country's key industrial and population centres at risk. With the recent successful launch of the Agni III the country is on its way to reaching that goal. More to the point, given that Pakistan can ill afford to either cope with India's growing conventional capabilities, let alone match its nuclear arsenal, India needs to continue the nuclear confidence-building measures despite on-going differences on the vexed question of Kashmir. To cite the sage counsel of yet another noted strategic thinker, Sir Michael Howard, the flip side of deterrence is reassurance.
India's policymakers would be wise to heed that principle.
The writer is director of research at the Center on American and Global Security, Indiana University, Bloomington.