ISLAMABAD, April 21: The Indian nuclear programme is targeted at the United States with high-yield thermonuclear weapons, according to Bharat Karnad, a member of the Indian defence establishment. The warning about India's nuclear doctrine targeted against big powers
, especially the US and China, came on the first day of an international seminar- Arms Race and Nuclear Developments in South Asia-organized by a think-tank in collaboration with a German NGO here.
Speaking on the Indian nuclear doctrine, Mr karnad, a former member of the group which drafted the doctrine, the National Security Council of the government of India, said: "The more substantive danger to India is from the US' insistence that the Indian deterrent be kept at a sub-operational level which if resisted or ignored by New Delhi could lead to Washington's contemplating a disarming first strike."
Mr Karnad is a consultant engaged with India's Integrated Defence Staff of the Ministry of Defence, science advisor to the defence minister, perspective planning directorate and financial planning directorate of the Army Headquarters and also to the directorate of concepts and Air War Cell Air Headquarters.
Talking about recent US interventions and possibility of engaging with India some time in future, Mr Karnad said the US could be deterred with a thermonuclear weapon which didn't need not be accurate. An intercontinental ballistic missile with a thermonuclear weapon would be deterrent enough, he said.
He said the scenario was not as far-fetched as it seemed at first glance considering that the Counter-Proliferation Office of the Pentagon had planned for precisely such contingencies.
Dilating on the anxiety in the Indian establishment over diplomatic, political and technological help given to Pakistan by the US and China, Mr Karnad said: "These facts as well as its own great power ambition will compel India to acquire a genuinely potent thermonuclear force with high-yield weapons and inter-continental reach as a deterrent and insurance against any great power machinations."
The former senior member of the Indian nuclear establishment said the nuclear doctrine drafting group (NDDG) of the (First) National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) debated and discussed the ideas in December 1998 and the doctrine was submitted to the government as per deadline the following year.
About future threats and the Indian response, Mr Karnad said that given China's expansive geostrategic policies and the United States' aggressive counter-proliferation agenda, "India will, in all prudence, have to quickly augment its now fairly thin nuclear force into one featuring high yield thermonuclear weapons with great clout and reach offered by intercontinental ballistic missiles, something the doctrine allows."
Talking on the key concepts in the Indian nuclear doctrine and reproducing from the text of the doctrine, Mr Karnad said the deterrent force would feature "high yield weapons which will be too large in number and diverse to be eliminated even by waves of disarming counter-force strikes unleashed by the most powerful country, and which will have sufficiently potent residual retaliatory capability to inhibit any attacker from attempting such pre-emption in the first place."
He said the Indian nuclear doctrine gave an expansive mandate as any government would ever want to exercise and covered all the worst case scenarios. "The greater the destruction quotient of the Indian thermonuclear force and the greater its reach in terms of the delivery capacity, the more it will blunt the propensity of the Great Powers- the United States of America and China in particular - proactively and coercively to use their nuclear and conventional military prowess to intimidate India..."
In January 2003, the Indian Cabinet Committee on Security approved the draft nuclear doctrine as official doctrine and went a step further than the NDDG had done in committing the country to a possible nuclear response to attack from any source by biological and chemical weapons, he said.
Mr Karnad said while Pakistan had tried to get some mileage from touting its 'Islamic Bomb,' it could not realistically extend nuclear protection to other Islamic states without facing the possibility of being forcibly disarmed by some great power or the other acting in concert with India or Israel.
He said the way the Dr AQ Khan affair has panned out in the shadow of such implicit threat from Washington is indicative of Pakistan's extremely limited room to manoeuvre in the nuclear realm.
He said part of Pakistan's nuclear programme was already under US control and its nuclear programme had to be far more expansive to be of credible threat. Rejecting the suggestions of a German scholar about nuclear disarmament, Mr Karnad said Germany is just a protectorate of the US and not a sovereign country in the nuclear realm.
Giving an Indian perspective on politico-strategic dimensions of conventional arms race in South Asia, Dr Raja Mohan, said the ideas of symmetry and parity could no longer be sustained given the significant emerging gaps in the economic capabilities of India and Pakistan. he advanced the argument that the search for a framework of conventional arms control in South Asia could be a 'fool's errand.'
