Ashley Tellis at Idea Exchange: ‘India may be compelled to test again, and when it does, it’s in US interest to avoid penalising it’

When I finally put pen to paper, I was struck by a few things. First, the importance of treating ‘Southern Asia’ as a unit of analysis because China had become an integral nuclear player in the Indian subcontinent. Second, the impact that external developments have had on the patterns of nuclearisation in the region, especially, the rise of US-China competition and the disappearance of Sino-Russian rivalry, both of which have shaped China’s evolving nuclear programme. Third, the striking transformations in the nuclear weapons programs themselves in China, India, and Pakistan since 1998.

Documenting these transformations constitutes the core of the book. In 1998, all three countries sought small nuclear arsenals; today, the arsenals are large, albeit with considerable variation, and growing. In 1998, all three countries pursued simple nuclear strategies centered largely on existential deterrence; today, the nuclear strategies are more complex and range from graduated escalation to, in the Chinese case, a growing capacity for counterforce strikes. In 1998, all three countries seemed satisfied with maintaining a placid nuclear posture; today, the shift toward executing speedy nuclear responses has become the norm. Despite these transitions, however, the three countries are also pulling in very different directions. These “asymmetries” have major consequences, including for the safety, security, and effectiveness of the respective deterrents, which the book examines at length.

Shubhajit Roy: This framing of China as part of Southern Asia is a construct we have not really seen. Why has China been included as part of Southern Asia in your thesis?

In the ’80s and ’90s, the United States aggressively pursued non-proliferation policies toward South Asia—aimed solely at India and Pakistan. At the time, India and Pakistan were viewed as the two main problem states for nuclear non-proliferation. The central objective of the United States then was to cap and ultimately roll back the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programmes. Washington’s field of vision was limited to ‘South Asia,’ and that meant India and Pakistan. New Delhi would persistently make the point that looking at just India and Pakistan misses an important part of the non-proliferation problem, which is China.

A non-proliferation policy that overlooked China was bound to fail because China was an integral part of the security competition in ‘South Asia.’ China, of course, hated the idea of ‘Southern Asia’ because Beijing wanted to maintain the fiction that it had no role to play in the proliferation problems of the region. There were many in the United States who unfortunately bought into that argument. My book’s use of the term, ‘Southern Asia’ emphasises the fact that there are three intertwined nuclear actors—China, India, and Pakistan—who each in their own way are responding to wider strategic developments that transcend the region.

India can resist both Pakistani and Chinese aggression adequately with its conventional capabilities… India really does not require nuclear weapons except to prevent attacks and fend off nuclear blackmail

Shubhajit Roy: Can you tell us about the pecking order in terms of nuclear capacity and capability of these three countries?

There is a temptation to rank-order nuclear capabilities in a way that we do with conventional military forces. But one must be careful about what can be inferred from such a rank ordering because there is a big difference between nuclear and conventional weapons. As Bernard Brody famously phrased it, nuclear weapons are ‘absolute’ weapons. Even the least capable nuclear state can inflict horrendous damage on the most capable nuclear state. That is important to keep in mind when thinking about relative capabilities.

Yet, relative capabilities do matter, especially in a crisis. So, if I was forced to rank order the three states, the most powerful would obviously be China. The reasons for China’s preeminence are both historical and power political. Historically, China started its nuclear weapons program first and thus enjoyed a longer lead time over India and Pakistan. Furthermore, China today is challenging the United States, which makes Beijing’s imperative for possessing front-rank nuclear capabilities all the more important.

Pakistan comes next. Pakistan sees itself as a beleaguered state and one whose security is constantly at risk from India, a much more powerful country. Pakistan is thus driven both by its fears, on one hand, and its ambitions on another, to build up the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal possible.

India is last in this game for many reasons. There is still residual discomfort with nuclear weapons in New Delhi. But, more importantly, India is fundamentally secure because it is large and capable country. It can resist both Pakistani and Chinese aggression adequately with its conventional capabilities and, therefore, it has not invested inordinately in nuclear weapons. India really does not require nuclear weapons except to prevent nuclear attacks on itself and fend off nuclear blackmail. Except for the fact that its adversaries possess them, India does not need nuclear weapons. So, it is not surprising to me that India trails its competitors on this count.

If the Russians can successfully get away with such coercion, could the Chinese follow in their footsteps in the future? That is an unsettling thought. And it impacts India directly

Shubhajit Roy: You’ve offered an analysis in your book, that it’s inevitable that India would test a nuclear device at some point to upgrade or test its current capabilities. If India were to test a nuclear weapon tomorrow, what would happen?

We talked earlier about the absolute weapon. But even ‘absolute’ weapons are accompanied by an asterisk because there is a fundamental distinction between atomic weapons and thermonuclear weapons. Crudely speaking, atomic weapons produce smaller yields, usually in the few tens of kilotons. Thermonuclear weapons, in contrast, can produce yields in the hundreds of kilotons and beyond into the megaton range. Hiroshima and Nagasaki admittedly were destroyed by 15-20 kiloton atomic weapons. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small towns. They were nothing in size compared to the megacities of Southern Asia — Beijing, Shanghai, New Delhi, Bombay, and Karachi.

Early in the nuclear era, it was concluded that high-yield weapons, which bestow ‘one city, one bomb’ destructive capabilities, made the most effective deterrents. Thermonuclear weapons are thus unique because their enormous destructive capabilities can produce successful deterrence despite small numbers. During the Cold War, for example, China had probably fewer than 200 nuclear weapons, but these were largely thermonuclear devices and hence were deemed sufficient for deterrence.

India attempted to acquire similar capabilities in 1998. I think that test failed. In the normal course of things, if a stable relationship exists with adversaries such as Pakistan and China, India may not, at the end of the day, need thermonuclear weapons. There are very few Pakistani cities that require high-yield weapons for extensive destruction. China, however, is a different matter. It has a huge landmass, very large cities, and significant nuclear advantages.

I conclude, therefore, that, depending on where Sino-Indian relations go in the future, India could feel the need to retest its thermonuclear weapons in order to deploy a powerful deterrent. When that happens, there will be consequences for US-India relations, because the entire US-India civil nuclear deal and India’s integration into the global nuclear order, particularly with respect to the Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) waiver, were both premised on the assumption that India would not test nuclear weapons again.

Shubajit Roy: There are two provocative set of conclusions from your book: one is that India’s nuclear test was a failure or did not yield optimum results. The second is that in case India tests a nuclear device, you would want the US to not respond the same way as it did post 1998.

Yes, that is correct. There was widespread international consensus after the 1998 tests, including within the US government, that India’s thermonuclear test had fizzled, that is, it had failed to produce its declared yield. Several Indian nuclear scientists who had intimate knowledge of India’s thermonuclear design, such as P. K. Iyengar and K. Santhanam, subsequently admitted to this failure. Today, the main divide is between those who know that the 1998 thermonuclear test really failed and those who feel compelled to pretend otherwise because of understandable bureaucratic or political necessity.

None of this would matter if China was not engaged in a major nuclear expansion of its own and if Sino-Indian relations had remained amicable. Because both these problems will intensify, I think India may be compelled one day to test again. And when that happens, I believe it is in US interests to avoid penalising India in any way. In fact, I would go further: it is in US interests now to help India to build a survivable nuclear deterrent. And the best avenue for doing that is foreign assistance to India’s nuclear submarine program. And the best candidate to offer that cooperation is France—with US support.

Nirupama Subramanian: Going by what is happening around the world, between India and Pakistan in 2019, between India and China since 2020, and also moving away from, as you described it, Southern Asia, between Ukraine and Russia, and on the other side between China and the US around Taiwan… do we need to understand deterrence differently?

Nuclear weapons hopefully deter nuclear conflicts, but even as they can deter such threats, they stimulate other kinds of conflicts. What the Russians have now reminded us of is what the Pakistanis actually first taught us in the 1980s: while nuclear weapons can prevent full-scale attacks on a nuclear-armed defender, they do not guarantee the eradication of dangerous revanchist impulses. The Russians, in effect, are pursuing a revanchist conventional war against Ukraine while brandishing their nuclear weapons to prevent other countries from supporting Kyiv’s defence. This is unadulterated nuclear blackmail.

If the Russians can successfully get away with such coercion, could the Chinese follow in their footsteps? That is an unsettling thought. And it impacts India directly. As long as Sino-Indian relations remain stable, India does not have to worry too much about the character of the relative nuclear balance. And as long as there is no US-China competition, there will be few knock-on effects on India’s nuclear deterrent. But both these elements appear to be changing fundamentally, and that leads me to the conclusion that India needs to think seriously about both the character of its nuclear capabilities and how they stack up against the Chinese threat. These realities take me in the direction of saying that India has to think about nuclear deterrence in a more sophisticated way.

Nirupama Subramanian: We haven’t seen an operationalisation of the India-US nuclear deal so far. What has gone wrong with that deal? Or was the agreement more symbolic signaling an acceptance of India into the nuclear club?

I would disagree with that conclusion substantially for several reasons. It was, of course, symbolic because it was meant to signal to the international community that India was different, and that the United States was prepared to treat India differently. But the US-India nuclear deal was far more important than that: it created the preconditions for the NSG waiver, which allowed the international community to resume nuclear trade with India. The biggest benefit of the nuclear deal actually has been that it has allowed India’s Department of Atomic Energy to buy nuclear fuel abroad to run its domestic reactors and to participate once again in international nuclear R&D cooperation. The US-India nuclear deal thus gave India’s civilian nuclear energy program a new lease on life—not to mention all the other strategic transformations that came in its wake.

Nirupama Subramanian: In 2020, you wrote that China’s actions at the LAC were actually triggered by what India did in Kashmir through the reorganisation and reading down of Article 370, revocation of the special status and also the speech that the Home Minister gave in Parliament, which mentioned Aksai Chin. Three years later, is there reason to reassess that? And, how has it changed India-Pakistan relations?

I think that Pakistan will continue to complain about the changes that India made to Article 370 but it is really not Islamabad’s prerogative, because these changes pertain mainly to the relationship between the Indian union and the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan is involved only to the degree that it claims ownership of the state. But I think Islamabad is also realistic enough to know that this is a done deal—and that Pakistan has to live with it.

There was a Sino-Indian crisis in the making long before the changes to Article 370. That crisis was brewing because of China’s monadic vision of itself in Asia and the world, China’s growing confidence stemming from the widening power gap with India, China’s unrequited expectations of deference from India, and China’s increasing anxiety about India’s deepening ties with the United States. These factors created the preconditions for a crisis. The events surrounding Article 370 merely provided the trigger. The Chinese government misread this decision completely, thinking not about the domestic exigencies that provoked it but rather viewing it as the leading edge of New Delhi’s evolving challenge to China’s control over Tibet, a neuralgic subject in Beijing.

When bilateral protests cut no ice, China upped the ante by working with Pakistan to force a discussion and a resolution in the UNSC that would condemn India. This effort was jointly defeated by the United States and India in partnership with other friends, which produced a humiliation for Beijing. China wanted to use the UNSC to embarrass India, but it failed spectacularly. And publicly. These things didn’t go down very well in Beijing and, as they say, the rest is history.

Shubhajit Roy: Do you think India’s relationship with the US and Europe is being tested for the first time in the last two decades in a way that it has possibly not been done so far in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

There is no doubt about that. For the first time in a long while, the West is deeply at odds with Russia at exactly the time when New Delhi is attempting to protect its longstanding relationship with Moscow. It is clearly a stress test, and we cannot pretend otherwise. And as Russian-Indian relations persist, even if they do so only in narrow areas like energy and defense, the anxieties in Western capitals will increase, especially as Putin doubles down on egregious behavior like issuing nuclear threats.

Western policymakers are sophisticated enough to know that they cannot pursue a singular agenda with an important country such as India. So, they will balance their discomfort with India’s relations with Russia against the benefits that India brings to the concurrent competition with China. That is the tightrope that different Western capitals are trying to walk currently, but it could be severely buffeted again depending on the character of future Russian escalations in Ukraine and India’s response to them.

Shubhajit Roy: What is that one thing that surprises you that you would have thought could never take place in the Indo-US relationship?

I think it would be how fast the relationship has evolved. I always imagined that we would get to where we are today someday, but I thought it would take much longer. We had always envisaged such a relationship when we first began thinking about its transformation in 2001-2004. But I never thought we’d be able to pull this off in 20 years.

In retrospect, I think we’ve been lucky on two counts. First, both in India and in the United States, we’ve lucked out with having broad bipartisan support for this objective. Congress and BJP governments essentially pursued the same policy in Delhi, and Republican and Democratic governments pursued the same policy in Washington, which is really surprising given the differences that otherwise mark the two sides in each country. Second, the transformation of the global system has occurred much faster than I expected: China’s intensifying rivalry with the United States and its Asian neighbors has produced the glue that has bound New Delhi and Washington ever more deeply and so, I guess, we have to be grateful to Xi Jinping after all.

Shubhajit Roy: Any disappointments?

We have not moved as quickly on the economic front as we should have. I would also like to see a broader set of constituencies that have a stake in a strong US-India relationship on both sides. For all the new entrants, it is still driven primarily by strategists. And, finally, there are still unresolved differences about global order—I wished we had made more progress in bridging those divides.

Why ASHLEY J. TELLIS

The Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ashley Tellis specialises in international security and US foreign policy with a special focus on Asia and the Indian subcontinent. His new book, Striking Asymmetries: Nuclear Transitions in South Asia examines the nuclear policies of China, Pakistan and India and how the three are responding to wider strategic developments