Summary
Since their inception, nuclear weapons have multiplied at an alarming rate, leaving everyone from policymakers to concerned citizens wondering what it will take to slow, stop, or even reverse their spread. With clarity and expertise, Joseph Cirincione presents an even-handed look at the history of nuclear proliferation and an optimistic vision of its future, providing a comprehensive survey of the wide range of critical perspectives.
Cirincione begins with the first atomic discoveries of the 1930s and covers the history of their growth all the way to current crisis with Iran. He unravels the science, strategy, and politics that have fueled the development of nuclear stockpiles and increased the chance of a nuclear terrorist attack. He also explains why many nations choose not to pursue nuclear weapons and pulls from this the outlines of a solution to the world’s proliferation problem: a balance of force and diplomacy, enforcement and engagement that yields a steady decrease in these deadly arsenals.
Though nuclear weapons have not been used in war since August 1945, there is no guarantee this good fortune will continue. A unique blend of history, theory, and security analysis, Bomb Scare is an engaging text that not only supplies the general reader and student with a clear understanding of this issue but also provides a set of tools policymakers and scholars can use to prevent the cataclysmic consequences of another nuclear attack.
Country or Region: India
Salik, Naeem
Summary
The Genesis of South Asian Nuclear Deterrence is an attempt to provide a complete picture of the dynamics of South Asian nuclearization. It covers the historic evolution of the technological developments of the Indian and Pakistani programs and the nuances of the countries’ respective policies towards the international non-proliferation regime. The book also covers developments since May 1998 in the two countries with respect to the development and articulation of their nuclear doctrines, setting up of command and control systems and the creeping operationalization of their nuclear capabilities.
Naeem Salki provides an overview of the rapidly developing nuclear delivery systems in India and Pakistan as well as their efforts at stabilizing the nuclear environment by agreeing on some significant nuclear and missiles related Confidence Building Measures. Given the controversies, myths and misconceptions surrounding the A.Q. Khan network the book attempts to provide a realistic and balanced view of the episode. It also addresses issues related to international concerns about safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
Chambers, Michael, ed
Summary
Whither South Asia? This is not a question that has troubled many Americans, although the number has been growing over the last few years. The nuclear weapons tests of 1998 and the Kargil crisis of 1999 helped to increase that number. But as this is written in June 2002, perhaps more Americans than ever are concerned about the future of South Asia. This, of course, is a result of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (9/11 as it is often referred to) and the resulting war on terrorism that has been conducted in part through Pakistan. It is also a result of the December 13, 2001, attack on the Indian Parliament by Islamic militants out of Kashmir, and the escalation of tensions that followed between India and Pakistan. By June 2002, these two nuclear-armed neighbors seemed on the threshold of war.
In an attempt to answer this increasingly pressing question, the Asia/Pacific Research Center and the Center for International Security and Cooperation of Stanford University joined the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to cosponsor a conference on January 4-5, 2002. This volume consists of revised versions of papers presented at that conference.
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Tellis, Ashley J
Summary
On May 11, 1998, after a hiatus of more than two decades, India conducted a series of nuclear tests that signaled a critical shift in its strategic thinking. Once content to embrace a nuclear posture consisting largely of maintaining the option — i.e., neither creating a nuclear arsenal nor renouncing its right to do so — India is now on the threshold of adopting a posture that, while stopping short of creating a ready arsenal, will take as its goal the establishment of a minimum but credible deterrent, known as a force-in-being. This book examines the forces — political, strategic, technological, and ideational — that led to this dramatic policy shift and describes how New Delhi’s force-in-being will be fashioned, particularly in light of the threat India faces from its two most salient adversaries, China and Pakistan. The book evaluates in detail the material, infrastructural, and procedural capabilities India currently possesses as well as those it is likely to acquire in its efforts to meet the needs of its evolving force-in-being. Finally, the volume concludes by assessing the strategic implications of India’s posture both on the South Asian region in particular and on the global nonproliferation regime in general.
Talbott, Strobe
Summary
On May 11, 1998, three nuclear devices detonated under the Thar Desert in India shook the surrounding villages –and the rest of the world. The immediate effect was to plunge U.S.-India relations, already vexed by decades of tension and estrangement, into a new crisis. The situation deteriorated further when Pakistan responded in kind two weeks later, testing a nuclear weapon for the first time. Engaging India is the firsthand story of the diplomacy conducted between the United States and the two South Asian neighbors after the nuclear tests. In this book, the American point man for the dialogue takes us behind the scenes of one of the most suspenseful and consequential diplomatic dramas of our time, reconstructing what happened –and why –with narrative verve, rich human detail, and penetrating analysis.
From June 1998 to September 2000, in what was the most extensive dialogue ever between the United States and India, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Indian Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh met fourteen times in seven countries on three continents. They discussed both the immediate items on the security and nonproliferation agenda, as well as their wider visions for the U.S.-India relationship and the potential for economic and strategic cooperation between the two countries. As the relationship improved over the course of the talks, the United States was to able play a role in averting the possibility of nuclear war over the contested territory of Kashmir in the summer of 1999 –the specifics of which are included for the first time in this book, told in way only a protagonist can. The Talbott-Singh diplomacy laid the groundwork for the transformational visit of President Bill Clinton to India in March 2000 and helped end fifty years of estrangement between the world’s two largest democracies. As pursuit of Islamic militants continues across South Asia, the increased cooperation established by Talbott and Singh will be an invaluable asset for current and future leaders of both countries.
This book provides, for the first time, an insider’s perspective on the ground-breaking efforts to build a cordial relationship between the United States and India. The general reader will find it accessible, and more important, an indispensable tool for understanding America’s current role in South Asia, and the prospects for improved relations.
Singh, Jaswant
Abstract
Since independence, India’s nuclear policy has been to seek either global disarmament or equal security for all. The old nonproliferation regime was discriminatory, ratifying the possession of nuclear weapons for the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council while preaching to the nuclear have-nots about the virtues of disarmament. India was left sandwiched between two nuclear weapons powers, Pakistan and a rising China. The end of the Cold War has not ushered in an era where globalization and trade trump old-fashioned security woes. If nuclear deterrence works in the West, why won’t it work in India?
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SarDesai, D. R., and Raju G. C. Thomas, eds
Summary
This book provides an important picture of India’s nuclear intentions and capabilities at the beginning of the 21st century. Academic and governmental experts from both the United States and India explore the strategic, technological, military and economic dimensions of India’s nuclear world. The contributors bring their expertise together in an unusual mix of viewpoints from three continents on the several dimensions of a nuclear India at the turn of the century. It is an important resource in the United States to help policymakers respond to the regional and global proliferation problems that have resulted from India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests of 1998. It is an important aid to India in exploring and evaluating its nuclear strategy and the political, economic and military consequences of its nuclear decisions.
Ramana, M. V
Summary
Nuclear power has been held out as possibly the most important source of energy for India. And the dream of a nuclear-powered India has been supported by huge financial budgets and high-level political commitment for over six decades. Nuclear power has also been presented as safe, environmentally benign and cheap.
Physicist and writer M.V. Ramana offers a detailed narrative of the evolution of India’s nuclear energy programme, examining different aspects of it and the claims of success made on its behalf. In The Power of Promise he makes a historically nuanced and compelling argument as to why the nuclear energy programme has failed in the past and why its future is dubious.
Ramana shows that nuclear power has been more expensive than conventional forms of electricity generation, that the ever-present risk of catastrophic accidents is heightened by observed organizational inadequacies at nuclear facilities, and that existing nuclear fuel cycle facilities have been correlated with impacts on public health and the environment. He offers detailed information and analysis that should serve to deepen the debate on whether India should indeed embark on a massive nuclear programme.
Perkovich, George
Summary
In May 1998, India shocked the world–and many of its own citizens–by detonating five nuclear weapons in the Rajasthan desert. Why did India bid for nuclear weapon status at a time when 149 nations had signed a ban on nuclear testing? What drove India’s new Hindu nationalist government to depart from decades of nuclear restraint, a control that no other nation with similar capacities had displayed? How has U.S. nonproliferation policy affected India’s decision making?
India’s Nuclear Bomb is the definitive, comprehensive history of how the world’s largest democracy, has grappled with the twin desires to have and to renounce the bomb. Each chapter contains significant historical revelations drawn from scores of interviews with India’s key scientists, military leaders, diplomats and politicians, and from declassified U.S. government documents and interviews with U.S. officials. Perkovich teases out the cultural and ethical concerns and vestiges of colonialism that underlie India’s seemingly paradoxical stance.
India’s nuclear history challenges leading theories of why nations pursue and hang onto nuclear weapons, raising important questions for international relations theory and security studies. So, too, the blasts in Rajasthan have shaken the foundations of the international nonproliferation system. With the end of the Cold War and an even more chaotic international scene, Perkovich’s analysis of an alternative model is timely, sobering, and vital.
Moshaver, Ziba
Summary
This book examines nuclear proliferation in the two major threshold countries in the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan. Both countries are at the forefront of international concern over weapons proliferation for being involved in nuclear activities which could provide the capability to produce nuclear weapons, and for having retained the political and diplomatic option to do so. The subject is tackled from an international relations viewpoint. It looks at the issue of proliferation in terms of the evolution in the two countries’ perception of national, regional, and international security imperatives. Each country’s civil nuclear program and its arms control diplomacy is also examined to see whether they facilitate or inhibit a decision to proliferation, and it what way. The study concludes that while India and Pakistan are strongly determined to retain their nuclear option, and that they are both engaged in perfecting this option, neither country is yet committed to a weapons program. thus there is a nuclear stalemate in the subcontinent and any change of policy would take into consideration complex political, strategic, economic, and diplomatic interests. These interests have so far discouraged nuclear proliferation. The future depends on national, regional and international stability on the one hand, and global perceptions of nuclear deterrence and trends in the nuclear arms race and disarmament on the other.
Matinuddin, Kamal
Summary
Tracing the nuclear and missile programs of India and Pakistan from their inception, this book places an important focus on their present state. It highlights security models, shedding light on the role of outside powers in promoting or retarding nuclear weapon status. It also discusses theories of nuclear deterrence and suggests that the likelihood of their failure is strongest in South Asia.
Lavoy, Peter René
Summary
This study examines the evolution of India’s approach to nuclear weapons from the country’s independence in August 1947 to its detonation of a nuclear explosive device in May 1974. There are two main objectives of this work. The first goal is to explain how the Indian government managed to develop an indigenous capability for producing nuclear explosives in the face of tremendous technical, financial and political constraints. The second aim is to develop a general model for analyzing the process of nuclear proliferation in any country.
The model developed here emphasizes the creation and diffusion of normative and causal beliefs, or myths, about the political and military uses of nuclear force; and it calls attention to the methods by which individual myth makers work to legitimate and popularize these beliefs inside domestic political and military institutions. Whereas other scholarly approaches portray security, prestige or technology as the main cause of nuclear proliferation, and thus have difficulty in accounting for anomalous cases, the myth making model enables observers to examine how nuclear technology becomes associated with national security and status in some countries but not in others. This approach illuminates the processes shaping the pace, scope and timing of nuclear weapons acquisition.
The myth-making model is used to show how India’s nuclear program took shape in the late 1940s and evolved over four distinct phases. In particular, I explain why the Indian government decided to acquire the infrastructure required to build nuclear weapons but then stopped short of actually producing them. The study clarifies the puzzling nuclear behavior of one of the world’s emerging military powers. It also offers a fresh perspective for analyzing the patterns of nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation elsewhere in the world.
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Koithara, Verghese
Summary
For a variety of political and organizational reasons, India has a nuclear force management system that is largely incapable of handling the country’s needs. Managing India’s Nuclear Forces examines why things are as they are and what management changes are needed to improve matters.
When India became a nuclear weapons state, the military was actually excluded from policy-level force management —the political leadership maintained control, laying the groundwork for a poorly functioning system. The longstanding vigorous public discourse that ensued has been shaped in large part by political factors —international prestige and domestic confidence.
Author Verghese Koithara explains and evaluates India’s nuclear force management against a backdrop of similar information available with respect to other nuclear states, encouraging a broad public conversation that can perhaps act as a catalyst for change.
Kapur, S. Paul
Summary
Does the proliferation of nuclear weapons cause ongoing conflicts to diminish or to intensify? The spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia offers an opportunity to investigate this crucial question. Optimistic scholars argue that by threatening to raise the cost of war astronomically, nuclear weapons make armed conflict in South Asia extremely unlikely. Pessimistic scholars maintain that nuclear weapons make the subcontinent war-prone, because of technological, political, and organizational problems. This book argues that nuclear weapons have destabilized the subcontinent, principally because of their interaction with India and Pakistan’s territorial preferences and relative military capabilities. These findings challenge both optimistic and pessimistic conventional wisdom and have implications beyond South Asia.
Hoodbhoy, Pervez., ed
Abstract
Authored by scientists from both sides of the Pakistan-India divide, ‘Confronting the Bomb’ fearlessly explores tabooed, but urgent, nuclear issues. Concerned citizens, policy makers, and nuclear experts are presented with a rich range of complexities, political and semi-technical. Beginning with the coming of the atomic age to India, and later to Pakistan, the book looks at the furious nuclear racing after the 1998 nuclear tests. What are the principal drivers and where lies the future? It goes on to examine Pakistan’s changing strategic nuclear objectives, the Kargil conflict, and the fact that ownership of the bomb is now claimed by Islamic political parties. The worrying issue of the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is considered in the background of an ideological divide within the military. The somewhat more technical articles deal with early warning issues, the battlefield use of nuclear weapons, problems related to the fissile materials treaty, and the likely effects of a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India. Two essays deal with nuclear electricity generation, making the point that this may not be the promised panacea for the subcontinent’s energy problem. Rejecting nuclear nationalism, this is a unique work by Pakistanis and Indians working together to warn of nuclear dangers.
