SOUTH ASIA’S NEW NUKE ASYMMETRY
Twenty-five years after India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests in May 1998 and declared themselves as nuclear weapon states, it’s a good time for stocktaking. There is no better expert than Ashley J. Tellis, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, to do that. Tellis has been involved in the evolving nuclear scenario in the greater South Asian region for over four decades. His book, Striking Asymmetries: Nuclear Transitions in Southern Asia, goes beyond the nuclear dyad of India and Pakistan and rightly brings in the China factor. For it was China, not Pakistan, that drove India into developing its own nuclear arsenal after its defeat in 1962. By juxtaposing the two dyads, Tellis reveals fascinating parallels. As he puts it, in each case, the weaker state—Pakistan vis-àvis India and India vis-à-vis China—is far more concerned about the stronger one, yet the stronger entity is compelled to keep the weaker in its strategic view. In both dyads, the disputes involve struggle over territory, besides ideological antagonisms and a quest for parity or primacy. These get further complicated by the larger geopolitical contest between China and Russia vis-à-vis the US.
While tracing the history of the Chinese and Indian quest for nuclear weapons, Tellis points out how both were reluctant nuclear powers. Mao Zedong, China’s supreme leader, had famously disparaged nuclear weapons as “paper tigers” but came to understand their importance, describing them as “defensive weapons because we don’t want to be bullied by others”. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru was against making nukes but sanctioned the infrastructure for developing them. The go-ahead was given by Lal Bahadur Shastri a year after China exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964, as a deterrent against the country’s military capability. To this day, China and India hold on to a vision of global nuclear abolition, maintaining what they call a credible minimum deterrence and follow a policy of no-first use. In contrast, Pakistan’s rationale for having nukes was primarily to deter a conventional military attack by India. In doing so, Pakistan has a policy of “first use, but at the last resort”, which has emboldened it into indulging in egregious acts of nuclear-shadowed terrorism against India.
The value of Tellis’s book is that apart from narrating nuclear history, he does a superb, detailed contemporary analysis of each country’s nuclear capabilities—from nuclear doctrines, weapons designs and inventories to operational posture and force employment options. His book acts both as a lucid primer and an authentic and updated reality check for experts.
Many of Tellis’s conclusions are controversial, but important. He believes that Chinese nuclear superiority over India is so pronounced, especially after Xi Jinping has accelerated and broadened the range and lethality of its arsenal, that India should focus on increasing its capacity to conduct nuke strikes on key Chinese cities to limit nuclear threats from Beijing. He deduces that India’s 1998 hydrogen bomb test was a failure (India’s atomic establishment disagrees) and this has crimped Delhi’s ability to project a credible deterrence against Chinese military adventurism. His advocacy that India, France and the US, or INFRUS as he calls it, enter into a compact similar to what Australia, the UK and the US did under the AUKUS in 2021, is an eye-opener. If AUKUS is intended by the US to equip Australia with nuclear submarine capability, INFRUS could see France help India develop a similar capability, thus enabling the US to balance Chinese power.
On the India-Pakistan dyad, Tellis concludes that while the growth of India’s nuclear forces has been slow, Pakistan has moved with alacrity, expanding not only its strategic weapons but also tactical or battlefield nukes. Next to China, Pakistan has emerged as the second most capable nuclear power in South Asia, pushing India to third place in the regional nuclear sweepstakes. But he believes this has so far not significantly affected the deterrence balance in China or Pakistan’s favour because India’s modest nuclear reserves are sufficient to protect Delhi’s interest in all plausible threat scenarios involving these countries. Tellis says the perception of nuclear weapons as essentially political instruments rather than war-fighting ones in all three countries produces a measure of strategic stability that is more robust than their expanding arsenals would suggest. While that is reassuring, India must never be complacent. ■
AFTER CHINA, PAKISTAN IS THE SECOND MOST CAPABLE NUCLEAR POWER IN SOUTH ASIA, PUSHING INDIA TO THIRD PLACE