The nuclear conundrum

Three months ago, India’s former foreign secretary and current coordinator of the National Security Council Advisory Board, Shyam Saran, took the unusual step of publicly taking on critics of India’s nuclear capabilities. These critics have long cited the inability of successive governments to address the many technical and organisational lacunae in India’s operational capabilities as the reason why they believe India’s nuclear foray is a prestige-driven enterprise.

Contradicting this, Saran maintained that Delhi’s operational nuclear capabilities wererobustand rooted firmly in the realist national security canon.

The critics have rightly drawn attention to glaring deficiencies but their insistence that such deficiencies flow from India’s obsession with the symbolic aspects of nuclear weaponry ignores a decade of developments in technical and organisational capacities. Similarly, Saran’s overly positive appraisal of India’s nuclear muscle glosses over many operational concerns of the military. These concerns span technical reliability, institutional coordination between civilian and military authorities, and intra-military organisational cooperation. Analysts generally assign the Indian arsenal a low reliability score. Reliability simply means the statistical probability with which a weapon will perform according to its designed specifications.

Underperformance

There is credible evidence to suggest that India’s thermonuclear weapon design underperformed in 1998. The evidence also shows that the boosted fission trigger for the thermonuclear device performed below par. The only weapon that performed “like a song” was a simple Hiroshima-type weapon. Nonetheless, India’s nuclear establishment insists that everything is well with India’s nuclear arsenal; that the arsenal consists of fission warheads along with their more lethal thermonuclear and boosted fission cousins. Alongside warhead reliability problems, the launch failure rate of ballistic missiles in India’s Agni series is 20 per cent to 40 per cent, a rough calculation based solely on test-launch data. Flight tests involve many things such as boost-phase spin, stage separation, re-entry, warhead performance and accuracy. Data for each of these categories is unavailable in the public domain. Yet, all things considered, we should reasonably expect that subsystems must suffer failure too. Over time, repeated flight tests can resolve reliability problems. However, India’s scientific agencies insist that computer simulations and tests of components and subsystems on the ground are a cheaper method of solving reliability problems than fullscale launches. The Indian military disagrees but is unable to force the scientific agencies to do its bidding.

Technical reliability apart, the institutional disaggregation between civilian and military agencies remains a major roadblock in the path of smooth operational employment of the nuclear force. During peacetime, two scientific agencies, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the Defense Research and Development Organisation, individually control the non-fissile trigger assemblies and fissile cores that make up a nuclear weapon. The armed services have custody of the delivery systems. Procedures exist to fuse all these components into an integrated force during crisis alerting and wartime.

Divided control

To be sure, this divided system of control is a great passive safety innovation. It prevents the unauthorised use of nuclear weapons. But what works best during peace does not work equally well during war. The famous German strategist Carl von Clausewitz once remarked that in war the simplest things are the most difficult to perform. Assembling a nuclear force under pressure is anything but simple. In India’s case, two different agencies will coordinate warhead assembly from different locations. Delivery systems will deploy from peacetime hides to launch sites simultaneously. The scientific and military teams will then rendezvous to integrate weapons with delivery systems. All this movement will occur over a distance of hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres. Different components of the arsenal and their associated teams will travel by rail, road and air networks separately.

During the Kargil war and the 2001-02 military stand-off with Pakistan, it took the Indian military far longer to bring the nuclear force up to operational readiness than stipulated. Today, neither the military nor the scientific agencies have the authority to coordinate action. Only the national security advisor (NSA) in the prime minister’s office has that authority, in effect making him the institutional bottleneck for all aggregating decisions. The arsenal’s disassembled state superimposed on weakly coordinated organisational links and compartmentalised standard operating procedures, therefore, creates a high risk for logistical failure.

Ironically, weak intra-military cooperation has even greater potential for tensions and gridlock. This is because the army, the air force and the navy each retain independent control over nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft with no central military authority to command them. The three military chiefs of staff sit together in the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) and the seniormost among them serves as the committee’s chairman by rotation. But the chairmanship comes with nominal authority. Each service chief is a co-equal on the COSC and none interferes in the affairs of another service. One proposed solution to this problem is the appointment of a chief of defence staff who would preside over the COSC, coordinate military planning, and command India’s nuclear forces. However, successive Indian governments have allowed this proposal to languish.

Military cooperation

Military cooperation among the three services is the domain of the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS), which serves as the secretariat of the COSC. Within the IDS, nuclear planning and coordination are the province of the Strategic Forces Command (SFC), the organisation created especially to manage nuclear forces. Although the SFC is organisationally part of the IDS, it is kept functionally insulated within it. The SFC commander reports exclusively to the rotating chairman, COSC, who neither has time to devote sufficient attention to nuclear affairs nor the power to order his fellow chiefs around.

This has two negative consequences. First, there is weak coordination between the conventional and nuclear arms of the military. Second, all intra-military conflicts involving nuclear matters are resolved at the level of the NSA. In effect, the NSA has become the de facto commander of India’s nuclear forces, bypassing the military’s operational chain of command.

The state of India’s operational capabilities is a case of glass half-empty or half-full depending on the views of the observer. The critics who believe the glass is half-empty have failed to acknowledge the changes in the way India manages its nuclear business. But Saran’s argument is also problematic, offering a brave front on a critical national security issue. Unless India’s national security managers acknowledge and address problems of operability in India’s arsenal candidly, a continued state of deterrence instability will obtain in Asia.

(Gaurav Kampani is doing his Ph.D. at Cornell University.)

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