Indian history has a thousand lessons to offer. Two of them stand out—not counting the one that says that those who don’t know history are condemned to re-live it. The first lesson is well-known: India is a tempting target for marauders of every kind. The second is less known: India is never quite prepared to defend itself. It is particularly slow at manufacturing weapons. Even today it imports them, a whole lot of them, acquiring in the process the dubious distinction of being one of the biggest importers of weapons in the world—and creating, as a result, a host of problems for itself. No branch of the Indian armed forces is ever satisfactorily equipped with the weapons, spare parts and ammunition that it needs. It is almost as if India loves to live dangerously.
To be sure, defence production is not the only area in which our performance falls short of our need or potential. Education, health, garbage disposal, dispensation of justice, eradication of corruption… There are plenty of areas in which we are like that only, that’s to say, unable to get our act together. Yet, there is one truly remarkable thing that we have done, that too in the field of defence. We have achieved nuclear deterrence. No country can attack us with its nuclear weapons without taking the risk of being attacked by our nuclear weapons in return.
The obvious question that comes to mind is, how have we managed to do this?
The answer to the question is as surprising as the deed itself: our search for nuclear deterrence was driven not by our political leaders, as in other countries, but by our nuclear scientists, starting with the great Homi Bhabha. It is they, the scientists, who created India’s nuclear programme, nurtured it, sustained it over seven decades and when the time came, gave it the direction and thrust that it needed to ‘go nuclear’. And all this in the face of a relentless opposition from the most powerful country in the world, the USA, and, not infrequently, strong headwinds in India itself. One shudders to think of what might have happened if the scientists had not stepped into the driver’s seat, or had buckled under pressure, or had been incapacitated in some other way. India then might not have developed nuclear weapons at all, with consequences too fearful to contemplate.
For India is located in a most dangerous part of the world. To our north lies expansionist, aggressive, nuclear China, with which we have had troubled relations for well over six decades now, and which views India as an obstacle to whatever it is striving to get in Asia and beyond. To our west lies Pakistan, with its deep hatred of India, daily watered by the poisonous stream of bigotry. Pakistan is also a country with nuclear weapons, thanks to the help that it has received from China, its ‘enemy’s enemy’, as well as to the nimble fingers of the late Dr AQ Khan, a Pakistani nuclear scientist who has earned a permanent place for himself in history by stealing nuclear material and secrets from unsuspecting laboratories in Europe (and then trying to pass them on to other countries)! There have been a number of occasions in recent years when either of these two neighbours of ours could have caused incalculable harm to us if we had not had nuclear deterrence. Beyond Pakistan lies Afghanistan, the happy hunting ground for ‘the great game’ of big powers. Then there is the coastline of over 7,500 kilometres that India has to guard. As everybody in India knows, it is by sea that the last of the marauders in history came to India.
Much credit for India’s nuclear programme also belongs to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that science was the key to India’s economic and social development and regarded Homi Bhabha as just the man to usher in the Age of Science in India. Indeed, without Nehru’s support, Bhabha’s plans would have remained just one of the many wish lists of Indian history. Together the two of them created a programme so well-structured that it could withstand all the onslaughts on it—there were plenty of those—in the years that followed Bhabha’s sudden death in 1966. Nehru also let the programme acquire the capability to produce nuclear weapons …But he never gave Bhabha the go ahead to produce them. The reasons for Nehru’s reluctance to go nuclear range from the innate pacifism of Indian civilization to a hope that India would be able to prevail upon the world to renounce nuclear weapons—every international initiative in nuclear arms control can be traced back to India—to a belief that India, in those early years, could not afford the cost of going nuclear. Moreover, since none of the four nuclear weapons countries at that time (USA, Soviet Union, UK and France) represented a threat to India, India did not need nuclear weapons, or so Nehru must have felt.
In October 1964, however, China tested an atom bomb, and suddenly India realized that it had a major security problem on its hands. Nehru had passed away a few months earlier. It fell on his successors, especially Indira Gandhi, to handle the clamour in India to go nuclear. Not wishing to take that path, Indira Gandhi tried to tackle the problem by getting the USA (and other big powers) to guarantee India’s security against a possible Chinese nuclear attack in future. The USA looked away. Indira Gandhi then tried to get the USA (and the others) to renounce nuclear weapons. The USA was not interested in that either. Nor were any of the other nuclear weapon powers.
What the USA was interested in was something entirely different. It wanted India to sign a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the famous NPT, that would bar all the countries in the world, minus the five countries that had already gone nuclear, from possessing nuclear weapons. The other four nuclear ‘have’ powers did not say much to push the NPT down the throats of the ‘not have’ countries; they did not need to; in what was to become a pattern for ‘international cooperation’ that would last decades, they just hummed and hawed, and nodded every time the USA or any of its closest friends, such as Canada, or Australia, or Ireland spoke about the virtues of nonproliferation. India refused to sign something so disdainful of India’s security concerns—and so patently discriminatory. Indian diplomats in international bodies openly described the treaty as seeking to perpetuate a nuclear apartheid. India’s objections to the treaty were brushed aside; the treaty was brought into effect (in 1970), and India was warned that it could not now make nuclear weapons, no matter that it had rejected the treaty.
India’s relations with the USA, often troubled, were particularly prickly at that time. They hit rock bottom in December 1971 when, ignoring American wishes, Indian forces liberated Bangladesh. For years after that, relations between the two great democracies stayed there, at rock bottom, even as the USA’s relations with China began to take great leaps forward. It was then, when India was left to its own devices, that Indira Gandhi at last allowed the scientists to test a nuclear explosive (May 1974).
To deflect American wrath, India dubbed the test a peaceful nuclear explosion, or PNE. The attempt did not work. The USA launched a barrage of attacks on India’s nuclear programme, starving it of uranium and spare parts which the USA was contract-bound to supply to it, as well as technology and even what the USA deemed dual use items. The USA also took punitive measures against the still fragile Indian economy. And it gave Pakistan billions of dollars’ worth of military aid, forcing India to divert to defence resources it could ill afford.
The USA had taken no action against Communist China when that country went nuclear. And it would take no action against an army-ruled Pakistan in the 1980s, when that country would go nuclear. The American nonproliferation policy, Indira Gandhi said, seemed designed to ‘hit’ India only (Even today, when much of what happened in those days has become history, the policy that the USA followed—of hitting India—is hard to understand. Unlike China and Pakistan, India had no designs on other countries that would require it to use nuclear weapons. India needed nuclear weapons only for its defence. Moreover, there was no likelihood of India and the USA ever having a conflict of interests between them, whereas there was every likelihood of American interests clashing with those of a revanchist China in East Asia, and of Pakistan in Afghanistan and elsewhere.)
As for India’s nuclear programme, without doubt the American ‘hit’ sent it reeling. (To give but one example, it choked India’s production of nuclear power for residential and industrial use, increasing India’s carbon footprint in the process.) But the programme had strong foundations; it survived, and even acquired a significant degree of self-reliance. Moreover, Indira Gandhi, while she never again allowed the scientists to carry out a nuclear test, never stopped them from improving the ‘explosive device’ they had already tested. She also supported the development of missiles, which would become vehicles for India’s nuclear weapons.
Remarkably, the template created by Indira Gandhi—of letting the scientists develop nuclear and missile capabilities without going overtly nuclear—was continued by every one of her many successors, even when the times were hard. The policy of forcing India to renounce nuclear weapons was also continued by the USA, even under ‘friendly’ Presidents. An American strategist called the Indo-US disagreement on India’s nuclear programme a problem of ‘two rights’, therefore one that could not be solved. The problem continued to bedevil relations between the two ‘estranged democracies’ (to use a phrase coined by an American diplomat) and in fact reached a crescendo in 1995, when the NPT came up for renewal and, once again, India refused to sign it. The USA then tried to cap, reduce and eliminate India’s nuclear programme through other measures (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, a special safeguards agreement between India and International Atomic Energy Agency). Fortunately, Indian diplomats in Washington, New York, Vienna, Geneva and elsewhere could deflect the pressures, and give the scientists the space that they needed to go overtly nuclear. That happened, at long last, in May 1998, soon after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the ultra-nationalist BJP, became Prime Minister. The five bombs that the scientists tested that month included a thermonuclear bomb.
The USA was outraged, but on the whole its reaction this time was muted. The world was changing. And soon enough the USA accepted India as a nuclear weapons power. By and by, it even signed an agreement with India on nuclear cooperation, closing a long and turbulent chapter in the history of relations between the two countries, and opening another, hopefully promising, chapter.
Not many people in India and, equally importantly, in the USA, know the story in the chapter that has closed a saga really filled with great events and great people. That is a pity, for the story has a thousand lessons to offer (not counting the one that is best read in French: ‘Surtout pas trop de zele’, which can be roughly translated as ‘Above all, avoid too much zeal; that leads to folly’).
Yes, the story has a happy ending: India achieved nuclear deterrence. The achievement has not made us a great country, as many people had hoped it would. To become great we need to achieve many more things. But it has made us a safe country, at least a safer country . . .
Kiran Doshi, a retired Indian diplomat, was India’s Permanent Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna from 1995-1997.