National security adviser (NSA) Shiv Shankar Menon was at an Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) meet on August 27 to launch a revived Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for nuclear disarmament. In his speech, he teased the audience with his claim that pre-1998, India faced “explicit or implicit” nuclear coercion on three occasions “to try and change India’s behaviour”.

Making informed guesses, two obvious instances are, of course, the 1971 episode of the Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise armed with a battle crew with nuclear ordnance steaming into the Bay of Bengal holding out an explicit threat. Another equally explicit threat was, perhaps, made in 1995 thwarting Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s decision to conduct a nuclear test. The third instance is the tricky one but it happened, I believe, in 1974 immediately after the first nuclear test. Indira Gandhi had approved an open-ended series of underground tests but abruptly cancelled testing after just the first Pokhran explosion on May 11. The question why had troubled a number of senior nuclear scientists at the time, who were aware that Dr Homi Bhabha, the nuclear visionary, was killed by an American timed-explosive on board his Geneva-bound flight, which has since been borne out by an admission by the alleged agent who admitted placing the explosive on the plane. Both because stopping the Indian bomb was a Washington priority and it was surprised by the Indian test, an implicit threat was likely conveyed to the Indian government to halt testing or face action. There was no further testing in Indira Gandhi’s lifetime.
Hard pressure and dire threats have always been part of the standard operating procedure of the nuclear haves to keep the nuclear club manageably small, and a way of imposing disarmament on the nuclear have-nots. Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 Action Plan for a nuclear disarmed world was a quaint attempt to replicate Jawaharlal Nehru’s championing nuclear disarmament in the Fifties. Except, Nehru cleverly sought “general and complete disarmament”, which required all countries to disavow nuclear weapons, of course, disband their conventional militaries and retain only small constabularies for internal law and order purposes. The thinking behind Nehru’s stratagem was that general and complete disarmament being an unrealistic and unachievable goal, it allowed India to take the moral high road while providing cover for an India furtively pursuing the weapon option and reaching the weapon threshold by 1964 with the commissioning of the plutonium reprocessing plant in Trombay.
The main difference between the Nehruvian initiative and the Action Plan was that the latter lacked the former’s realpolitik foundations. People around Rajiv Gandhi actually believed that the Action Plan was a practicable proposition and that nuclear weapon states would rush to zero out their thermonuclear arsenals as per a definite timetable. The same people, with Rajiv Gandhi’s confidante Mani Shankar Aiyar in the van, are now seeking to revive that Plan at a time when US President Barack Obama’s Prague initiative, eventuating in two nuclear summits in Washington in 2009 and in Seoul two years later, packs far greater international weight and credibility. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been a regular at these summits, and endorsed this US-led effort. With the Indian government on the Obama bandwagon and the nuclear summits trumping the Action Plan, not only does the latter not have a chance, it does not even pack much moral heft that Nehru’s advocacy did 60 years ago. It is rather like a tired, old mare being whipped to go round the track one more time.
As to why Congress party stalwarts, like Mr Aiyar, see political value in reviving the Rajiv Plan is hard to say except in terms of trying to remain relevant in a Nehru-Gandhi party because, in the real world, more countries are inching towards the safety and security afforded by nuclear weapons.
Actually, with uncertainty and spreading international anarchy, nuclear weapons are a security comforter for nations. In the event, Mr Menon’s straight talk on the subject at the ICWA event — “Until we arrive at that happy state (of) a world truly free of nuclear weapons”, India will not disarm — was the firmest official declaration to date. It also torpedoed the refloated Action Plan.
Alas, the NSA stuck to the establishment view revolving around the minimum deterrence concept, which seriously needs to be junked. Derived from this concept is the view that Mr Menon dutifully mouthed that nuclear weapons are not meant for “war fighting”. Naturally, a small nuclear force cannot perform diverse strategic roles other than try and deter the adversary with the threat of “massive retaliation”. But this is a manifestly incorrect take on the military aspects of the bomb incessantly propagated by the late K. Subrahmanyam. Unfortunately, it has put down deep roots in the higher bureaucratic and military circles.
In the nuclear realm, as in the conventional military sphere, the greater the variety of armaments and the more of them a country has in its nuclear weapons inventory, the larger will be the array of options available to meet different military contingencies, and why is that not preferable to limiting one’s choices?
Because for every incident, the Indian response is “massive retaliation”, it didn’t take Pakistan, for instance, long to work out that it can get away with “small” provocations and, hypothetically, even initiation of low-yield nuclear weapons use on Indian formations on its own territory because massive retaliation is simply too disproportionate a reply to be credible. This is the reason why “minimum deterrence” and secondary precepts (No first use, etc.) are worth discarding in substance, if not as rhetoric.
There’s a desperate need, moreover, for a large and diverse arsenal with nuclear weapons in every yield bracket, and tactical doctrines for their use. Deterrence may be the desired end state, but nuclear war fighting and the Strategic Forces Command practising and preparing for this eventuality are the means of enforcing it. Parroting the “not-for-war fighting” mantra may be the politically correct thing to do, and reassuring to the political leadership, but to actually stick to it would be for India to lose the strategic nuclear game before it begins.

The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi