Reviews
March 11-17, 2000
South Asian Mode of Weaponisation M V Ramana India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation by George Perkovich; University of California Press, published in India by Oxford University Press, pp 597, Rs 645.
History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. - James Joyce in Ulysses Studying India's nuclear history and policy is no easy task. With the government unwilling to allow access to most of its records and the imposition of secrecy through the 1962 Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act, obtaining documentary evidence is all but impossible. For the most part, what passes off as history, as scholar Itty Abraham points out, is the Indian state's "sanitised official narrative of scientific and peaceful progress... interspersed with diplomatic feats of non-aligned and non-nuclear India". In the face of such odds, George Perkovich has produced a detailed history of India's nuclear policy from the 1940s to the May 1998 tests. Perkovich utilises a variety of sources, ranging from Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) publications to documents from the National Security Archives (an NGO in Washington, DC that sets a great example in using the American Freedom of Information Act to bring out facts otherwise not publicised) to interviews with Indian and US policy-makers. What results are 468 absorbing pages (not to mention 130 pages of useful notes), at the end of which one is left wanting more - the mark of a well-written book. The broad contours of the story are well known enough: the collusion between Homi Bhabha, theoretical physicist and chief architect of India's nuclear complex, and Jawaharlal Nehru in creating a nuclear programme that was nominally oriented towards peaceful purposes, but never ruled out the potential application of this infrastructure for military purposes; the growth of a nuclear estate that is covered with a thick veil of secrecy; The cynical manipulation of so-called security threats by a pro-bomb lobby; the hypocritical, multiple-standards followed by the US in its foreign policies; and decision-making by a small coterie of scientists and other advisors around the prime minster's office in ordering both the nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998 (and the aborted test in the early 1980s). But, as one would expect in a work of this magnitude, several hitherto unfamiliar facts are revealed. One example (pp 36-37) should suffice to whet the appetite of the reader. In 1960, K D Nichols, a US military engineer and an important participant in the Manhattan Project, had come to India to sell American (light water) nuclear reactors and met with Nehru and Bhabha. After his 45-minute presentation about the advantages of American reactors, Nehru, according to Nichols, turned to Bhabha and asked him if he could develop an atomic bomb and how long it would take him to build it. Bhabha replied that he could do it in about a year. Upon which Nehru turned to Nichols and asked him if he agreed with Bhabha. An astonished Nichols replied in the affirmative. Whereupon Nehru turned to Bhabha and said: "Well, don't do it till I tell you to". With the benefit of hindsight, and perhaps the scepticism that comes easily to anyone who examines the Department of Atomic Energy's record, Perkovich also notes that Bhabha's claim had "no basis in fact". Though impressive in its detail and evidence that it has marshalled, Perkovich's book, probably for reasons of size, does not touch upon a few aspects of India's nuclear history. One of the more glaring omissions has been that of the peace and anti-nuclear movement, perhaps small and weak, but nevertheless real and persistent. If it were simply a case of not recording one aspect of history, the loss would not be great. After all, the anti-nuclear movement operates completely in the open (unlike the pro-nuclear operators who often resort to behind-the-scenes activity to achieve their ends) and it would be easy to trace their history. But by not including this factor, Perkovich does miss out on an important explanatory variable, whose effect in a contested area of policy-making like nuclear policy may have been of greater significance than apparent at first sight. If Perkovich has considered the movement and found it ineffective, he doesn' t tell us about it. This brings me to a somewhat problematic idea in the book. Perkovich ascribes decisions at various junctures to restraint on the part of Indian policy-makers. One is led to ask the question of how one measures restraint. Is there a standard pattern of behaviour that leaders are compared with to see if they are more or less aggressive in their pursuit of nuclear weapons? The implicit base pattern used seems to be that of leaders in the five nuclear weapon states, especially the US, rather than the vast majority of non-nuclear states. Ironically, the base pattern is the one that would have been predicted by most Realist theories of International Relations - the ones that Perkovich's study quite convincingly demolishes. The related question that comes up is whose behaviour is counted in this saga of restraint. Is it just the prime minister's? What about leaders of opposition parties? Does this include the heads of the 'strategic enclave' comprising the nuclear and missile programmes? These are important questions because domestic politics (what realists like Kenneth Waltz term 'second image' effects) is the key explanatory variable for Perkovich. In the absence of consensus within the domestic political spectrum, distribution of power between the different factions and the salience of the nuclear issue would seem more likely explanations for events (or non-events) than restraint. It is in this context that some attention to the grass roots peace and anti-nuclear movements would have been useful - both to understand the power they may or may not have exercised in the past and to find ways of getting out of the nuclear abyss that we seem to be heading towards. Though popular with many supporters of state policy in India, the notion of restraint can be faulted on many grounds. Early on in his account (p 34), Perkovich indulges in an interesting exercise of analysing several of Nehru' s pronouncements on nuclear abstinence. Practising what British historian E P Thompson once described as "the close interrogation of texts and contexts" , Perkovich reveals that Nehru had almost always been careful enough never to foreclose the possibility that India would develop nuclear weapons. Had Perkovich been as discerning with regard to later policy statements and, especially, some of the claims made by the people he interviews, his comments about restraint may have indeed been more tempered. There are several instances even after the Nehruvian era when material activities suggest a completely different narrative from the statements of political leaders, domestically and, especially, internationally. One does not have to be a cynic to note that Rajiv Gandhi's presentation of his action plan followed on the footsteps of the maiden flight test of Prithvi, India's first nuclear capable missile, plans for the Agni were also firmly in place. Likewise, in 1995, while on the one hand the submission to the International Court of Justice arguing against the legality of nuclear weapons was being prepared, plans were afoot for a nuclear test. As Perkovich points out when discussing the aborted 1995 nuclear test, "the strategic enclave did not need explicit political authorisation to maintain the [Pokhran test] site or make other test preparations". It appears to be a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing. Restraint, then, seems hardly the right concept to talk about. Incoherence, ad hocism and lack of coordination seem more applicable. It may be worth digressing for a moment to point out that the autonomy afforded to the strategic enclave will be a serious impediment to any efforts at preventing weaponisation in India. Some proposals aimed at curtailing further development of nuclear weapons while not signing international treaties like the CTBT have suggested passing an act of parliament that bans weapons development. But they then have to address the question of who will effectively oversee the nuclear and missile laboratories. Certainly, as Perkovich observes (p 459), "independent institutions of scientific and technical expertise that could check and balance the work of the strategic enclave" are sadly absent. The pattern of weapons development in India and Pakistan that Perkovich has (and other authors have in the past) traced, could, borrowing and mangling a term from Marx, be described as the South Asian Mode of Weaponisation. Unlike the US, which followed its atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with ramping up production capacity of nuclear bombs and bomber aircrafts, the first Indian test in 1974 was quickly pronounced a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion. As senior scientists have revealed since then, there were significant questions about the success of that test. Despite these questions, there were no actual attempts (with two exceptions) to conduct full-scale nuclear tests in the 24 years between 1974 and 1998. It was clearly not what any quality management professional would have recommended. What was displayed in 1974, then, was the politics of the symbolic. The same style of functioning is also apparent in the way Agni-I was dubbed a "technology demonstrator". Where else would you have the head of the missile programme talk about using a missile to deliver flowers? Pakistan's record is remarkably similar, though more exaggerated. The efficacy or otherwise of grass roots groups is also of much relevance to one of the "exploded illusions" that Perkovich brings up towards the end of the book - the "illusion" that democracy facilitates non-proliferation. Just to be clear, Perkovich is not suggesting that the two are necessarily opposed. Only that the relationship between the two may be more complex than usually assumed and requires more research. In laying out the different possible relationships, Perkovich does admit that "perhaps, nuclear policy has been so shrouded in secrecy and left so dependent on the judgments of a few insulated military and scientific establishments that the virtues of democracy have not been adequately applied to nuclear policy-making" (p 463). The irony lies in the fact that this possibility is resoundingly confirmed by his account of Indian nuclear policy-making, which, in his own words, "is the state that has most democratically debated whether to pursue unproliferation" (p 460). If this is the case with the country that has most democratically debated, there should be little doubt that this explanation would apply to all the other states as well, leaving the democracy vs non-proliferation debate with no empirical case studies to grapple with. Notwithstanding this, Perkovich does make two very pertinent observations in the course of his discussion about democracy and its effects on non-proliferation. First, "the 'strategic enclaves' within these states will defend their budgets, jobs, and status, and their political representatives will fight to retain the economic benefits of investments in nuclear forces" (p 463). And, because democracy "gives voice and power to groups that will press their material, political, and psychological attachments to nuclear weapons regardless of changes in the international security environment" the task of non-proliferation (or, more desirably unproliferation, i e, reversing the decision to acquire or enlarge one's nuclear arsenal) is more a domestic one than one of changing the international security environment. The second important observation is that the process of acquiring nuclear weapons "changes the state that undertakes it. The building of nuclear weapons and related capabilities creates new interests, bureaucratic actors, beliefs, perspectives, and expectations. The exact nature of the changes depends on the form, history, culture, and milieu of the state" (p 456). As Perkovich's book narrates, these changes have had a long history but they have been accelerating in recent years. The challenge that is upon us is to prevent the institutionalisation of these changes. With actual deployment of nuclear weapons, for example, sections of the military would have investments in the perpetuation of nuclear weapons. This has to be resisted. But the task, though largely domestic, is also international. Hence, we have to build bridges to people and movements across the world, especially in all the nuclear weapon states, that strive to regain control over their governments and deliver the world from nuclear danger.
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