Inside Nuclear South Asia

Scott D. Sagan, Scott D. Sagan

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN SOUTH ASIA

4

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND PRITHVIS Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia

Vipin Narang

SOUTH ASIAN SECURITY SCHOLARSHIP has overwhelmingly focused on the causes and consequences of India’s and Pakistan’s nuclearization. Insufficient attention has been paid to the other components of these states’ strategic weapons decisions, a portrait of which may reveal a richer understanding of the motivations driving them. The May 1998 nuclear tests were certainly major strategic events, but there are multiple plausible explanations for these decisions. A more complete and accurate understanding of Indian and Pakistani strategic behavior can be gained by analyzing their ballistic missile flight-testing patterns, patterns related to nuclearization that can provide insights into the motives for both the nuclear tests and their broader strategic weapons decisions. Instead of weighing alternative explanations for one event—the 1998 nuclear tests—I examine the series of ballistic missile flight tests in the region that occurred repeatedly across a two-decade time frame under a variety of systemic and domestic conditions, providing new insights into the motivations for India’s and Pakistan’s strategic weapons decisions.

I begin with a survey of the South Asian nuclearization debate, demonstrating in particular that there are multiple plausible explanations for India’s decision to cross the nuclear weapons threshold in May 1998. This debate focuses on several possible security, domestic political, and normative or prestige variables that might influence India’s and Pakistan’s strategic weapons behavior; but it is unable to resolve which variables are the most important, and when, due to limited observations. My examination of ballistic missile flight tests in the region relies on a greater number of data points, allowing me to confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses generated by the nuclearization debate. The empirical analysis that follows employs events-data and content-analysis methods to test which variables produced these states’ ballistic missile flight-testing decisions.

The evidence suggests that Pakistan is indeed motivated primarily by security concerns, forced to keep pace with India’s strategic weapons advances since it is the much weaker of the two powers. I show that the variables that best account for India’s strategic weapons decisions, however, are a combination of domestic political ideology and position. Specifically, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) conceive of Indian pride in different ways. For the dominant political party, the Congress Party, Indian pride takes the form of a “techno-nationalist” pride, seeking to demonstrate that India’s technological capabilities are indigenously developed, sophisticated, and world class; its conception of pride is self-referential and derivative of the Nehruvian emphasis on Indian self-reliance. The BJP, on the other hand, conceives of Indian pride in highly oppositional and competitive terms, seeking to repudiate the perceived malignant agents—both Pakistan and a hypocritical international community writ large—that it believes aim to keep India weak. The position of these parties relative to each other determines which form of “prestige” India seeks at a given moment. This domestic political dynamic captures both India’s ballistic missile flight-testing pattern and its 1998 decision to nuclearize and suggests that the Indian preference for prestige needs to be disaggregated to fully understand New Delhi’s strategic weapons behavior.

The analysis in this chapter has significant implications for how India’s strategic weapons decisions may unfold and how Pakistan might respond in the future. In particular, one should largely expect the BJP to be more provocative in its strategic weapons behavior than its Congress counterpart. Motivated by a techno-nationalist pride that privileges the indigenous development of what a superpower is believed to have—above all, technological and economic prowess—future Congress governments are unlikely to develop and test strategic weapons at times of potential international political offense, instead supporting the technical imperatives and testing sequence requirements of its prized strategic weapons programs. However, future BJP governments, motivated by an “oppositional nationalist” ideology, may be more likely to develop strategic weapons at a more rapid pace than Congress governments and test or deploy them in response to challenges from perceived malignant entities, notably Pakistan and the Western powers. The consequence is that the South Asian arms race is likely to be more intense when a strong BJP government is in power.

THE NUCLEARIZATION DEBATE

Much has been written about the nuclearization of South Asia, with particular focus on India’s decision to test nuclear weapons when it did, since it was the region’s first-mover on nuclear weapons in both 1974 and 1998.¹ In comparison to the literature on India, there is very little debate about Pakistan’s decisions to initiate a nuclear weapons program and to finally test in 1998.² Once India openly demonstrated its nuclear capabilities, many scholars argue that Pakistan had no option but to develop and test nuclear weapons to demonstrate the reliability of the Pakistani deterrent to India and the rest of the world.³ Although Pakistan had lived under a cloak of nuclear ambiguity for almost a decade, India’s May 1998 tests forced Islamabad’s hand. For two weeks in May 1998, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he “carefully considered” what was in Pakistan’s security interest, but “Indian belligerency . . . made the retaliatory action inevitable.”⁴ According to Samina Ahmed, the armed forces, “which were still in charge of the overall direction of Pakistan’s nuclear policy,” held the “predominant belief that Pakistan had no choice but to test. . . . [A] tit-for-tat response was almost inevitable.”⁵ Arguments that Pakistan tested for prestige purposes or to wield an “Islamic bomb” are difficult to square with the timing of the test—immediately after the Indian tests—and with the widespread belief that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was the product of considerable Chinese assistance.⁶

There is substantial consensus that Pakistan’s decision to nuclearize was an overwhelming product of Indian-generated security imperatives. The implication is that any other Pakistani leader faced with the same security pressures would have done the same. Although there was some initial internal debate about whether to respond, the discussion quickly turned to how many tests Pakistan would conduct and how best to weather the international sanctions that would follow.⁷ As Pakistani foreign minister Shamshad Ahmad penned in Foreign Affairs, “[T] o restore strategic balance to South Asia, Pakistan was obliged to respond to India’s May 1998 nuclear blasts.”⁸ When Pakistan finally responded, Sharif spoke of settling the score with India and of facing the “manifest Indian [nuclear] threat” with resolve and with nuclear-tipped Ghauri missiles.⁹ The summary judgment on Pakistan’s motivations to nuclearize is captured by Lowell Dittmer: “Pakistan’s motive for the acquisition of nuclear weapons is . . . far less complex and more conventional: national security. As India’s weaker rival, defeated in nearly all their military encounters and dismembered in the third, Pakistan has reason for concern.”¹⁰ Šumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty concur, arguing that the “core aim of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is to prevent a repetition of 1971 [when Bangladesh was born out of East Pakistan] . . . to deter an Indian attack that might reduce Pakistan’s size even further, or perhaps even put the country out of existence entirely.”¹¹ The critical puzzle is what therefore compelled India to openly test in May 1998, for the scholarship on Pakistan’s nuclearization almost unequivocally concludes that no matter when India chose to test, Pakistan would have had little choice but to follow suit.

In contrast to the literature on Pakistan, the debate about India’s motivations for nuclearizing in 1998 is quite wide ranging, with several plausible explanations for the BJP’s decision. Realists, for example, emphasize the security pressures emanating from both international and regional actors that drove India to test. They argue that a confluence of security factors in the late 1990s created system incentives for India to exercise its nuclear option: the permanent extension of the NPT in 1995, the prospect of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) forever foreclosing India’s capability to generate live test data, and the persistence of an increasingly powerful nuclear China (despite a short-term thaw in relations) assisting a thorny Pakistan on India’s borders.¹² The organizations responsible for India’s nuclear development—the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO)—pressed for tests because of the looming CTBT;¹³ and Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, days after the tests, cited China as the primary motivation for nuclearization in writing to President Clinton: “[W]e have an overt nuclear-weapon state on our border, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962 . . . [and which] has materially helped another neighbor of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state.”¹⁴ Indeed, an Indian test would force Pakistan’s hand, with only net security gains for India: if Islamabad successfully tested in response, it would simply confirm what New Delhi already believed to be a de facto reality; if Islamabad failed to respond, the credibility of its nuclear deterrent would be severely undermined, to India’s security advantage.

In response, those partial to the constructivist school of thought in political science have argued that India’s quest to be considered a legitimate global power and concurrent desire for prestige on the international stage drove it to test in 1998 to break into what it perceived to be an exclusive club of great powers. To India, this exclusivity is legitimated by the fact that the five declared nuclear po...