India will continue with Nuclear weapons Untill All Others Too Give Up
Nuclear weapons, unlike other armaments, are the most brutal manifestation of man’s ability of annihilation. It is not just the offensive obliterating capabilities, but the horrific nature of these weapons which makes them a subject of moral abhorrence and should ideally be rejected for military purposes.
However the United States of America not only managed to produce the first nuclear weapon but went ahead to use it against Japan for the first time. This first act may have been a MISTAKE as no one knew its obliterating capabilities. However the second one dropped on Nagasaki was a crime against Humanity and nothing else because it was a very deliberate cold blooded act.
Naturally the Soviet Union too speeded up on its research and became nuclear armed in no time. USSR exploded its own in the year of Stalin’s death in 1953. The transition to a post-Stalinist USSR was marked by a debate around the future war against capitalism. The advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that the competition between socialism and capitalism would have to become a peaceful one whereas the latter labelled this position as revisionist and argued that the end of capitalism would come through war, therefore to say otherwise was to reject Marx.
Fearful of the Soviets, the Americans passed the technology to the British. Earlier the US under President Truman, had already used the bomb against the hapless civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily to impose an immediate end to the war before the Soviet Union could seize northern China, Manchuria, Korea, the Kurile Islands, Hokkaido in northern Japan and insulate his political future.
Since then, the US had on 30 occasions prepared/threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises, confrontations, and wars— primarily in the Third World. For instance, in 1954 the US offered France the option of two bombs to break the Vietnamese siege at Dien Bien Phu which the latter fortunately declined (Of course later the French came out with their own bomb for self protection). On another occasion in 1969, notes the late radical journalist Christopher Hitchens, the notorious US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger contemplated, in the face of the Vietnamese revolutionary intransigence, the use of nuclear weapons just to clear the pass through which ran the railway link from North Vietnam to China.
The Chinese took a bit longer and exploded their first bomb only in 1964. At that time India was fully capable of conducting the test of its own nuclear bomb. This was openly stated by the top Indian nuclear Scientist Dr Homi Bhava. Though mysteriously he died in a freak air crash of Air India’s international flight, soon after.
India on its own chose not to go nuclear, till it was directly threatened during the 1971 Indo Pak War by a nuclear armed US Naval Task Force led by USS ENTERPRISE. Thereafter India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. However it still kept deliberating and became openly nuclear only in 1998 when it saw that no matter what, the World nuclear powers were help bent on retaining their nuclear arsenal.
However now when India has become fully nuclear, has attained Second Strike capability and will soon be having full 14000km ICBM and SLBM of similar range, some of the other nuclear powers are feeling very uneasy. India rightly claims civilizational status for itself and therefore has gone nuclear to protect the civilization against actions of any of the other nuclear powers …..already demonstrated twice by one of them.
In 1947 before leaving the Sub Continent, the Brits though tried to split the sub-continent into multiple nation-states but could succeed into doing it into two only. Later Pakistan managed to split itself into two again in 1971. Though India had many economic inequalities and challenges, the nuclear threat given directly to us in 1971, forced us to go for the barbaric Weapon and consciously acquire it to save the World from any future unilateral barbaric actions of any of the Nuclear Powers. No wonder it has been elevated to the level of national pride – nuclear weapons.
Till now the Indian doctrine was of ‘no first use’ but the late Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar’s statement of ‘responsible use’ of nuclear weapons and his declaration of “why bind ourselves to the no first use doctrine” sent shivers into Pakistan and China, ever ready to threaten India with their different doctrines. Even USA and UK who always like to brand themselves as a ‘responsible’ user of nuclear weapons had to take note of the changed Indian position.
This was not the first time that a senior national leader questioned the no first use doctrine. In 2011, ex-foreign and defence minister Jaswant Singh had gone one step ahead and said: “I am of the view that the policy framework that the NDA devised in 1998 is very greatly in need of revision because the situation that warranted the enunciation of the policy of ‘no first- use’ or ‘non-use against nonnuclear weapons’, ‘credible deterrence with minimum force’, etc. has long been overtaken by events.”
Now Pakistan, which always relied on tactical nuclear weapons with a weak command, a radicalised military, a lack of strategic depth and conventional military weakness which made it more susceptible to ‘first use’ is now in no position to blackmail India. The Indian deterrence doctrine is now very clearly directed towards China and this was so actually right from the beginning. After the 1998 Pokhran tests, this has come out in open. Others must stop equating India with Pakistan any more.
After establishing its nuclear weapons triad, India is Now slowly reducing expenditure on importing armaments. Now day by day India us becoming not only more ATMANIRBHAR but also closing the technological gap with the most developed.
Presently China, Russia and the US are all engaged in extensive and expensive programmes to modernise their nuclear warheads, missile and aircraft delivery systems, and nuclear weapons production facilities.
For instance, in late 2019 the US started to deploy a new low-yield warhead on some of its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. The nuclear arsenal of China is in the middle of a significant modernisation program whereas both India and Pakistan are thought to be increasing the size of their nuclear arsenal. These trends are even more baffling given the fact that the US and Russia have 1,750 and 1,570 deployed warheads respectively with 4,050 and 4,805 readied for further deployment. Whereas China, India, and Pakistan are said to have 320, 150 and 160 warheads.
So for a nuclear free world, as a first move, all the above 5 countries must come down to 150 nuclear warheads. Then France, UK and Israel too can join in and start reducing the weapons Score by Score.
