Are they really MAD?

The Advisory Committee has unanimously prescribed a credible minimum deterrence for the country. It’s audacious for a country to speak of a minimum credible deterrence when it hardly has anything of a deterrent capability. But precisely it’s for this reason that it’s necessary to have a deterrence doctrine to guide our weapon acquisition. Weapons technology largely determines the security policy of most advanced countries.

We have started the other way round: first thedoctrine and then the capability. For a country as poor as ours, stating a security doctrine first greatly helps in limiting weapon acquisition. We don’t need to go for the best and the latest weapons technology; a limited weapons capability which we think would deter our adversaries is a good enough deterrence for us.

The government has opted for a minimum credible deterrence. In arriving at such a deterrent capability, the first thing we must understand is that credibility in the strategic context is an inherently ambiguous idea. A capability that may deter China may fail to deter North Korea, whose regime has wantonly starved some three million of its own people. Nuclear devastation of a North Korean city is unlikely to deter its leadership from using or threatening to use its nuclear weapons.

Credibility does not solely depend on the size and quality of one’s nuclear force. A statement made by Denis Healy, the most intelligent post-War defence minister of the United Kingdom, in 1964 vividlyillustrated the ambiguity of the concept of credibility. When asked by an MP whether the Unite States would risk the nuclear devastation of Washington to save London from a Soviet nuclear strike, Healy said he could give no such assurance to the MP, but then he added a caveat to his statement: “so long as Nikita Sergevich Krushchev thinks the US might (risk the destruction of Washington), London is reasonably secured against a Soviet strike.”

The mighty US deterrent couldn’t assure the security of an ally as close as Britain, but so long as this deterrent scared the enemy, the Soviet Union, the US deterrent was good enough for Britain and other members of the NATO. Credibility does not wholly depend on weapons capability and K. Subrahmanyam, as an academic and columnist, had understood this point well.

In fact, till the Pokharan-II explosions, he had even believed that there was no need to weaponise our nuclear capability. Non-weaponised deterrence of a very modest size, he thought, would suffice.However, the Advisory Group in its doctrine paper does not clearly opt for such a posture.For example, Section 4 of the paper on credibility and survivability talks of unacceptable damage wrought on the aggressor.

Section 3 calls for an air-, sea-, and land-base delivery system. Are we then for a credible minimum deterrence just large enough to deter our adversaries or are we eventually aiming to build a large nuclear force, comprising thousands of warheads and launchers and aimed at all possible contingencies and all nuclear weapons powers, actual or potential?

Some members of the National Security Advisory Group, a number of defence analysts and serving and retired members of the armed forces are for a nuclear force that would match warhead for warhead and missile for missile of the nuclear force of China and perhaps later of the United States and Russia.

To guard against the development of such a nuclear force, it’s better to set a numerical limit on the number of warheads and missiles our deterrencewould have. The flamboyant General K. Sundarji was restrained when it came to nuclear issues. He seriously thought on the subject of nuclear deterrence and argued for a minimum deterrence. An Indian capability to destroy four Chinese centres of population, after having been struck first, Sundarji thought, gave us a credible deterrence against China. For this he thought some hundred nuclear warheads and 40 land-based intermediate range missiles would suffice.

Somewhere the deterrence doctrine paper of the Advisory Group should have hinted at the size and content of the Indian deterrence. In the final formulation of our overall nuclear posture, one hopes, there is a clear mention of the number of warheads and launchers required to deter our nuclear adversaries. Again the question is what level of destruction we could inflict on our adversary which would deter it from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against us.

It’s impossible to answer the question. Sundarji thought the destruction of fourChinese population centres by us gave us a credible deterrent against China. Some other military planners might say that the destruction of, say, 40 Chinese cities and a third of the Chinese industrial capability by us could secure us against Chinese strike. They belong to the MAD school of thinking.

Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, was an American strategic doctrine which said that the credibility of the American nuclear deterrent rested on its capability to bring forth a massive destruction of Soviet population and industrial centres. First advanced by Defence Secretary Robert Mc-Namara in 1961, the MAD doctrine was later embraced by Leonid Brezhnev. Both the Soviets and the Americans abandoned the doctrine because the force level built on it were massive and conducive to accidents.

Some of the authors of our deterrence doctrine paper seem to be influenced by the MAD doctrine. They seem to favour a comprehensive deterrence based on sea-, land- and air-based delivery systems, and not a minimumdeterrence. They want to match the size of China’s deterrence and over the years the deterrence of all other countries. This would be a great folly. A modest deterrence with an explicit provision that we won’t use it first provides us with reasonable security. Absolute security is impossible in a nuclear age.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi