Looming Change in India’s Nuclear Postures

Looming Change in India’s Nuclear Postures

From ‘No First Use’ to ‘No, First Use

India’s ‘No First Use’ (NFU) doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons is open for change in the future, defence minister Rajnath Singh has indicated, reflecting thinking within the establishment that no policy is writ in stone and could be modified to deal with current realities. On August 16 stated that it would stick to the No First Use doctrine, however, what happens in future would depend on the /circumstances’. Singh’s statement has raised apprehensions on the likely revision of India’s NFU policy and nuclear doctrine.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently reaffirmed a long-standing tenet of India’s nuclear weapons doctrine: that it would not be the first to use the devastating weapons in a conflict. But he subsequently questioned how much longer that commitment would remain. He told the media that while India had “strictly adhered to” the doctrine thus far “what happens in future depends on the circumstances”.

He was signalling that India’s “no first use” commitment is neither absolute nor permanent, and implying that in a conflict, nothing would compel India to abide by it. His statement came after India revoked the special constitutional status of the part of Kashmir it controls – prompting a furious reaction from Pakistan, which, like India, claims the entire territory.

These were not off-the-cuff remarks. Mr Singh was speaking at Pokhran, the site of India’s nuclear weapons tests in the late 1990s. He tweeted the seemingly scripted remark from his official account and the government’s Press Information Bureau put out a press release quoting the statement.

As such, it was the most official signal to date that India’s “no first use” doctrine might give way to something more ambiguous. The implication was that one day India might decide that it would have to use nuclear weapons first to safeguard its security.

What is the ‘no first use’ doctrine?

During the Cold War, the US, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom all reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first in a severe conflict. There were two classical scenarios for first use:

(1) that a country in danger of conventional military defeat on the battlefield would employ so-called tactical nuclear weapons against adversary military forces to forestall that defeat, or

(2) that a country fearing an adversary would attack it with nuclear weapons would pre-empt that attack with a nuclear first strike designed to destroy as much of the adversary’s nuclear arsenal as possible.

When India announced its nuclear status with weapons tests in 1998, it rejected the idea of “nuclear war fighting”. It would design its nuclear forces for “retaliation only” and as a consequence, it said, it could have a more limited arsenal.

India joined China in offering a no first use doctrine.

When China first tested nuclear weapons in 1964, it declared it would “never at any time and under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons”. The fact that India never fully believed China’s commitment was one ironic reason behind India’s own decision to overtly test nuclear weapons in 1998.

Except for China, no other country besides India currently offers a no first use declaration.

North Korea at one point floated one, but few believed it, given that Pyongyang’s stated motivation to pursue nuclear weapons included defeating a combined South Korean and American invasion through nuclear first use.

While periodically the US has considered the wisdom of a no first use pledge as a means to lower Russian and Chinese fears in a hypothetical crisis, and as part of a general commitment to reducing the political salience of nuclear weapons, it has refused to do so to date.

India’s most likely adversary, Pakistan, explicitly preserves the right to use nuclear weapons first.

It has threatened to use battlefield nuclear weapons to forestall a conventional military defeat at the hands of the Indian army – a deterrent threat that has so far constrained India’s ability to retaliate to a stream of terrorist and militant violence in India that Delhi has blamed on Islamabad.

Why is India reconsidering no first use now?

Mr Singh’s statement was hardly the first sign of internal debate about the wisdom of the two decade-old policy, but coming from a sitting defence minister it was the most authoritative signal to date.

Shortly after India tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, senior Indian officials declared India would follow a no-first-use doctrine.

In 2003, India revised that commitment in releasing a revised official doctrine that explicitly maintained the option to retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of a chemical or biological weapons attack. While many noted that India’s move to “no first use of weapons of mass destruction” was a less expansive commitment than it had originally made, it was not regarded as a major shift.

In 2016, India’s then-defence minister Manohar Parrikar wondered why India should “bind” itself by declaring no-first-use. Better, Mr Parrikar argued, for adversaries not to know what India might do, though he subsequently clarified that these were only his personal views. Mr Singh, by contrast, has made no such clarification.

Meanwhile, India began developing the technological elements that might make first use attractive as a means to disarm an adversary.

In 1998, India had only a handful of ballistic missiles, limited intelligence capabilities, and a modest set of precise conventional air-dropped munitions. Today, it has a much wider array of ballistic and cruise missiles, several space-based imagery satellites as well as similar sensors aboard manned and unmanned aircraft, and a growing range of precision-guided munitions, many of them capable of being launched at targets some distance away.

Additionally, India has invested in developing indigenous ballistic missile defences and acquiring expensive Russian- and Israeli-origin missile defence systems, which could theoretically be used to intercept any “residual” forces that the pre-emptive first strike failed to destroy.

While unlikely, it is no longer impossible to imagine a leader in Delhi concluding that with concerted effort, India might be able to pre-empt any first strike by an adversary and meaningfully limit the damage to Indian cities by doing so.

Why does this matter?

Mr Singh stressed that “India attaining the status of a responsible nuclear nation is a matter of national pride”. Part of that reputation was built through careful messaging about Indian restraint and the choices it could have taken but did not.

Now critics, such as retired Lt Gen Prakash Menon, argue that abandoning that high-ground “taints India’s image as a responsible nuclear power”. The Pakistani state, somewhat unhinged in recent rhetoric emanating from the office of Prime Minister Imran Khan, has taken to questioning “the safety and security of India’s nuclear arsenal in the control of the fascist, racist Hindu supremacist [Prime Minister] Modi”.

The real impact of India’s eroding no first use pledge will not be in the realm of symbolism or rhetoric, however. Rather, it will be in Pakistan’s material response. Pakistan’s nuclear stewards have stressed privately in the last week that they never believed India anyway – but this rhetoric shift, combined with growing Indian capabilities, will heighten Pakistani interest in making more nuclear weapons, dispersing them in a crisis, and using those weapons before India can destroy them on the ground.

The nuclear option will be on the table much quicker during a time of crisis, and Pakistan’s peacetime posture may have to be prepared for more rapid use.

The net effect on safety and security, accidents and potential misunderstandings will not be clearly understood for some time, but it’s likely that South Asia will be unable to fully avoid the costly and dangerous arms races that characterised the Cold War competition.

 What is No-First Use Policy or Pledge?

To safeguard their national security interests, several states have developed nuclear weapons capabilities and have devised their nuclear policies and doctrines to deter adversaries. Due to their threat perceptions, and due to the catastrophic consequences of use of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon states have adopted different nuclear weapon use policies, including the defensive use or the No First Use (NFU) policies.

Most states with nuclear weapons maintain policies that would permit their first use in a conflict. Pledges to only use these weapons in retaliation for a nuclear attack — or a no-first-use (NFU) policy — are rare. Where these pledges have been made by nuclear states, their adversaries generally consider them not credible. Strategic planners for nuclear weapons powers see the credible threat of the first use of nuclear weapons as a powerful deterrent against a range of significant nonnuclear threats, including major conventional, chemical, and biological attacks, as well as cyberattacks. Even states with significant conventional military forces, such as the United States, consider it necessary to retain nuclear first use as an option. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, under the administration of President Donald J. Trump, retains the option of nuclear first use.

A so-called NFU pledge, first publicly made by China in 1964, refers to any authoritative statement by a nuclear weapon state to never be the first to use these weapons in a conflict, reserving them strictly to retaliate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack against its territory or military personnel. These pledges are a component of nuclear declaratory policies. As such, there can be no diplomatic arrangement to verify or enforce a declaratory NFU pledge, and such pledges alone do not affect capabilities. States with such pledges would be technically able to still use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, and their adversaries have generally not trusted NFU assurances. Today, China is the only nuclear weapon state to maintain an unconditional NFU pledge.

 Postures of Nuclear Powers

Today, eight states acknowledge that nuclear weapons play a role in their national defense policies. Each of these states—China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—has conveyed through official statements and documents a certain declaratory nuclear policy, detailing the conditions under which they might use these weapons. Another state, Israel, has not publicly acknowledged that it possesses nuclear weapons but is widely considered a nuclear state.

United States: The United States has considered but has never declared an NFU policy and remains the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons in war—twice against Japan, in 1945. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review expands the range of significant nonnuclear strategic scenarios in which the United States may contemplate nuclear weapons use. Notably, it does not rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in response to cyberattacks.

Russia: In 1993, Russia released a military doctrine that formally abandoned a 1982 pledge by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev not to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. This pledge was never seen as credible by NATO leaders in the final years of the Cold War.

China: Under stated Chinese posture, the country would expect to first absorb a nuclear attack before using its own nuclear forces to retaliate. While this has held constant since China’s first nuclear test, there is a debate today in the country over the continuing advisability of an NFU posture.

UK: The country maintains an ambiguous nuclear posture that does “not rule in or out the first use of nuclear weapons. In 1978 and 1995, the UK reiterated a commitment to not use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states in the NPT.

France: France has maintained a first-use nuclear posture since it first developed and tested nuclear weapons during the Cold War. France’s posture emerged from its Cold War–era fears of abandonment by the United States, which led to the country’s withdrawal from NATO in 1966 to pursue an independent nuclear capability. France pioneered the concept of a prestrategic strike for a conventional invasion.

India: India maintains a declared NFU posture, with exceptions for chemical and biological weapons attacks. In its 1999 draft nuclear doctrine, India announced that it “will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.” But, a statement by India’s defence Minister Rajnath Singh has suggested that India may abandon this policy on the basis of the ‘circumstances’.

Pakistan: Pakistan has not ruled out nuclear first use to deter what it sees as an overwhelming Indian quantitative advantage in conventional forces. Islamabad has left the exact threshold for its nuclear use ambiguous. Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Major General Asif Ghafoor recently stated that there is no policy of ‘no first use’ of strategic capability saying that use of nuclear capability is political but the nation should have the trust that Pakistan has that capability.

North Korea: North Korea has not ruled out nuclear first use to deter a preemptive strike or invasion by the United States and its allies. If the country were to detect an imminent U.S. or allied attack, it would use nuclear weapons on military installations in East Asia and in Guam.

Israel: In line with this policy of nuclear opacity, Israel has made no authoritative declarations on how it would use nuclear weapons. In the late 1960s, Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon came to an understanding, with Meir offering assurances that Israel would “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East” but that it would also “not be the second to introduce this weapon.”