Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was roundly criticised when he ruminated out loud about generating greater uncertainty about India’s nuclear doctrine as a way of bolstering India’s nuclear deterrence. Parrikar was complaining about India’s No First Use (NFU) policy, which in his view and the view of a number of analysts, ties India’s hand by assuring its adversaries that India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons.
There are strong reasons for retaining the NFU, but there are also strong reasons for expanding India’s nuclear options. Doing so could increase uncertainty about India’s nuclear responses and strengthen some elements of India’s nuclear deterrence. And there are ways of expanding India’s nuclear options without giving up NFU. The most pressing challenge that India faces is in finding a nuclear deterrence response to Pakistan’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs). This is one area where India can expand its options, to deter this threat and expand India’s conventional military options.
The NFU policy is definitely one rigid element in India’s nuclear policy. It is rigid because it limits India only to responding to a nuclear attack rather than taking the initiative. Still, there are good reasons for retaining the NFU because there are no plausible contingencies where India might need to initiate a nuclear attack. There might be some deterrence benefit to creating uncertainty by keeping open the option to initiate a nuclear attack rather than just respond to a nuclear attack. But any such benefit is far outweighed by the dangers of maintaining a first-use posture, including in terms of command and control and safety and security.
But NFU is not the only rigid element in India’s nuclear doctrine. Equally rigid is India’s doctrinal promise that “Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” This ties India down to a single response, a massive retaliation, irrespective of the type of the nuclear strike on India. In other words, even an attack by a small nuclear warhead on a forward Indian military column deep inside Pakistani territory would require India to launch a massive nuclear assault on multiple Pakistani cities. There are two problems with this: the first is the limitation imposed by the phrase ‘first strike’ and the second is the constraint imposed by ‘massive retaliation’.
Using the phrase ‘first strike’ is rather odd in the Indian context, and it was probably the consequence of a lack of awareness of what ‘first strike’ means. In nuclear theology, ‘first strike’ means a nuclear attack that is designed to win the war by attacking first to eliminate as much of the enemy’s nuclear arsenal as possible, thus “crippling his means of retaliation” as Lawrence Freedman put it. This would be akin to a nuclear Pearl Harbor, but presumably designed to be more successful than that effort. But carrying out such a nuclear first strike is enormously difficult. First, this requires perfect intelligence about where all of the adversary’s nuclear weapons are so that they can all be destroyed in a single strike because any surviving weapons will be used in retaliation. Second, a first strike also needs a sufficiently large nuclear arsenal that would be able to devote multiple warheads for each target and in addition, sufficient reserves for further attacks if needed. These requirements are not easy to meet for any nuclear force, especially having perfect intelligence. This makes no sense in India’s context because neither Pakistan nor China had or have anywhere near the kind of intelligence capacity or nuclear superiority that would allow them to pursue a ‘first strike’ option against India.
Thus, most likely, the framers of the doctrine simply used it to mean an initial nuclear attack – a ‘first’ attack. But, presumably, they also meant a strategic nuclear attack, since Pakistan’s ideas about tactical nuclear weapons came up much after the Indian doctrine was framed. In other words, it is very likely that Indian planners did not consider the possibility of Pakistan’s TNWs when they framed the original massive retaliation doctrine. What they considered ‘first strike’ was a strategic nuclear attack by either Pakistan or China, not the use of TNWs.
While it was reasonable in 2003 to assume that the most likely scenario for a nuclear attack on India would be a strategic attack, this is no longer the case. Pakistan’s move towards TNWs present the possibility that India might have to deal with a much smaller-scale nuclear attack, carried out on Pakistani soil against Indian forces. Such an attack will require a different response than what the Indian nuclear doctrine proposes: ‘massive retaliation’. Massive retaliation also represents a rigidity in Indian nuclear doctrine, but one which, unlike the NFU, it is possible to alter and for the better.
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