Testing diversion

The controversy over the validity of Indian scientists’ claim to have conducted a low-yield thermonuclear test in 1998 is interesting, but of little strategic significance. K Santhanam’s call for India to stay out of the forthcoming Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations rests on the untenable argument that India still does not have a “credible” deterrent against China.

That may be true from the standpoint of missile development, but the notion that warhead yield must be higher in order to deter effectively involves the unquestioning internalisation of American norms, which many Indian nuclear scientists and strategists tend to do. The crux of the critics’ argument is that the actual yield of the test was only 25+2 kilotons (KT) and that this is wholly inadequate for credible deterrence.

Let us assume for the moment that the test was indeed a failure and that India has a capacity to build warheads of no more than 25 KT yields. What kind of damage do such warheads do? Robert Batcher’s paper on The Consequences of An Indo-Pakistani Nuclear War, published in the winter 2004 issue of International Studies Review, shows that a single 50 KT warhead dropped on Islamabad would cause well over 500,000 fatalities. The toll exacted by a 20 KT attack on the same city centre would do less damage, but the figure would still be very high. Batcher does not calculate this, but he does show that a 20 KT attack on the Peshawar cantonment (not the city centre) would produce over 173,000 fatalities and that a simultaneous attack with 20 KT warheads on nine cantonments would result in over 545,000 deaths. These are staggering numbers.

Though Chinese targets are much farther than Pakistani ones, the level of damage caused by 20 KT strikes on major Chinese cities will be comparable because of two factors. First, the accuracy of the Agni missile has shown significant improvement over time, with current levels in the region of an estimated 20 metres Circular Error Probable (CEP), that is, the probability that half of a given number of warheads will fall within this radius.

Second, a high degree of accuracy is not even necessary, since the Indian retaliatory strategy is one of countervalue strikes (a euphemism for targeting cities). In short, an arsenal of 20 KT warheads is capable of unleashing enormous damage. It is hard to imagine that an adversary state, say China, will not be deterred by the possibility —let alone the certainty — of such levels of damage within minutes of the outbreak of nuclear conflict.

It is a common fallacy drawn from our uncritical reading of American nuclear deterrence literature that “credible” deterrence must be based on the capacity to do damage in the many millions; and that we therefore need to have sufficient numbers and types of nuclear weapons that are certain to inflict such levels of damage even if the adversary has struck first.

History reveals the opposite. In the early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in two major crises when the possibility of war was high — in Berlin (1961) and Cuba (1962). At the time, the United States had more sophisticated weapons and a numerical advantage in warheads to the tune of 10:1. Yet president Kennedy’s overriding concern was to avoid nuclear war.

When Soviet leaders considered a nuclear strike against China, they had an even bigger advantage, but refrained. Most remarkably, in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration considered a pre-emptive strike against North Korea’s fledgling arsenal, which was believed to number in single figures. But the idea was dropped. The fear, an American official told a New York Times reporter (July 10, 2006), was that there was no certainty that the North Koreans could be fully prevented from retaliating. All the experts’ operational concerns counted for nothing in the face of the possibility that a single bomb might have been used by the North Koreans.

The inescapable conclusion is that it does not take much to deter and that rejecting the CTBT for security reasons does not make sense (though it might be for other reasons). India’s warhead capacity is adequate. But our experts do not seem to know it.

War, it is said, must not be left to the generals. Equally, the instruments of nuclear war must not be left to generals and strategists. If it does not take much to deter a nuclear attack, then excessive spending on superfluous weapons will needlessly encourage arms racing — already evident vis-à-vis Pakistan — and deprive millions from a more productive allocation of resources.