Introduction

In May 1973, a year before India conducted a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE), the Apex Group, a high-level defence committee, submitted a report to the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA), the Government of India's highest decision-making body. Deliberating on India's military needs for the next five-year plan starting in 1974, it made a thorough threat assessment of India's strategic environment. While the report considered a Pakistani surprise attack as an imminent possibility, it did not apprehend any full-scale Chinese invasion. The threat from China was limited to providing material and political support to insurgencies in India's northeast, military aid to Pakistan, and the creation of a military diversion in case of hostilities with Islamabad. Conventional threats notwithstanding, the Apex Group considered the use of atomic weapons by China as highly unlikely. In its submission to the CCPA, the report argued that the ‘use of atomic weapons by China can be ruled out’.Footnote ¹

This top-secret threat assessment stands in contrast to the available literature on Indian nuclear history which often concludes that the Chinese nuclear threat was primarily responsible for India's push towards a nuclear weapons option in the 1960s and early 1970s, finally resulting in the PNE of May 1974.Footnote ² More so because the 1973 threat assessment was consistent with threat assessments made earlier,Footnote ³ India's threat perceptions and its national security interests in the wake of Chinese nuclear tests, as the literature suggests, forced India to contemplate a nuclear weapons future for itself.Footnote ⁴ Beyond insecurity, the Chinese test also engendered two other logics for India's nuclear weapons acquisition.Footnote ⁵ First, it strengthened the pro-bomb lobby not only among India's weak but noisy political opposition, it also stimulated the organizational and bureaucratic interests of India's nuclear scientific enclave.Footnote ⁶ Henceforth, nuclear weapons gained salience in India's domestic politics and its scientific bureaucracy.Footnote ⁷ Second, the Chinese bomb also challenged India's leadership position in the Third World. Technological progress, especially in the nuclear domain, was one of the Nehruvian benchmarks for India's aspirations for great power.Footnote ⁸ China's ‘great leap forward’ in developing the technology of nuclear explosions rendered India's development model rather vacuous. Security, domestic politics, and concerns over status—the three primordial causes of nuclear proliferation—either dominated decision-making or acted in concert to drive India's nuclear behaviour.Footnote ⁹ Foreign intelligence estimates of India's nuclear intentions in the 1960s followed these models closely, as is evident in numerous American and British assessments.Footnote ¹⁰ The Indian Government and public intellectuals also reinforced such perceptions, often for diplomatic and domestic political reasons.Footnote ¹¹ In hindsight, India's PNE does provide credibility to such assertions. Yet, the 1974 PNE was not India's nuclear break-out moment. For one, India did not declare itself a nuclear weapons state. More importantly, the 1974 PNE was devoid of any weapons capability: it remained non-weaponized. The event that took place in May 1974 had no short- to mid-term military significance.Footnote ¹² For another decade-and-a-half, successive Indian leaders decided against building a nuclear arsenal. Only in 1989 did India start weaponizing its nuclear capability.Footnote ¹³ If going nuclear requires a political decision—‘an authoritative order to proceed with deliberate speed to the creation of a nuclear weapon arsenal’—then India's nuclear decision-making in the decade following the Chinese atomic test shows no such response.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore, the real question in India's nuclear history in the post-1964 period is not why it conducted a nuclear explosion after all, but why did it do so little in terms of obtaining a viable nuclear deterrent, especially when there was so much motivation to do so? Both before and after the 1974 PNE, India's ‘nuclear restraint’ rather than its ‘proliferation drift’ is the more exciting puzzle in its nuclear history.

The reasons for attributing nuclear intentions to India are partly theoretical and partly methodological. First, the assumption that the threat of Chinese nuclear weapons drove India's quest for a nuclear weapons programme in the 1960s and 1970s neatly fits the dominant model of understanding nuclear proliferation—the domino theory. For the domino theory to work, an adversary's acquisition of nuclear weapons results in an inevitable nuclear response by the vulnerable state for reasons ranging from national security, domestic politics, to status concerns.Footnote ¹⁵ Nuclear proliferation is viewed as a chain reaction ‘where one state's nuclear weapons development can serve as the impetus for the pursuit of nuclear weapons in another state’.Footnote ¹⁶ The model predicts automaticity of response from states facing nuclear adversaries, and in this scheme of things, India was just another fallen domino.Footnote ¹⁷ As Nicholas Miller argues in his study on nuclear dominoes, ‘the Chinese nuclear capabilities played a key role in motivating the Indian nuclear efforts’, confirming the expectations of nuclear domino theory.Footnote ¹⁸ Since the dominant models of nuclear proliferation only allow for a certain kind of behaviour, India's atomic history until 1974, as Srinath Raghavan cautions, often appears to be a ‘teleological narrative of a quest for a nuclear weapons capability’.Footnote ¹⁹

The proliferation bias, in Western (and particularly American) scholarship on non-proliferation, is not only due to such restrictive theories but also the result of selective sampling and interpretation of data.Footnote ²⁰ For example, the validity of the theory hinges upon the evidence of India's perception of the Chinese nuclear threat. However, in ascertaining India's threat perceptions, the available literature depends heavily on foreign archival sources, primarily American and British documents.Footnote ²¹ The threat perceptions that Indian decision-makers were communicating to external actors may have been different from how they judged the Chinese threat in their internal deliberations. As the archival record presented in this article shows, India exaggerated the Chinese nuclear threat to the outside world for both military and diplomatic reasons. Indian sources referred to in the available literature are restricted to the cacophony of the Indian parliament. Parliamentary debates are a good indicator of the public mood but are seldom an accurate reflection of a government's thinking. The compulsions of such restrictive theory and selective evidence, as G. G. Mirachandani cautions in her book India's Nuclear Dilemma, have ‘painted a somewhat exaggerated picture of a hostile nuclear power (China) across India's northern borders whose principal aim is to neutralise this country (India)’.Footnote ²²

I argue that such teleological narratives do not capture the complexity of India's nuclear decision-making. By focusing on threat assessments made at the highest levels and the internal deliberations of the Indian Government, I show how, contrary to the claims made in the literature, Indian decision-makers did not make much of the Chinese nuclear threat. This conviction emanated out of their distinct reading of the purpose of nuclear weapons in China's foreign and military policy; their perceptions of how India could obtain nuclear deterrence against China using the bipolar international politics of the Cold War; and, finally, their understanding of the political costs of developing an indigenous nuclear response to China's nuclear threat. India's ‘nuclear restraint’ was engendered out of its perceptions and purpose of the bomb in Sino-Indian relations.

First, Indian decision-makers believed that Chinese nuclear weapons were directed at the Great Powers rather than India. In terms of Sino-Indian rivalry, given that the conventional military balance favoured the former, nuclear weapons played a negligible role in China's military strategy vis-à-vis India.Footnote ²³ India's principal concerns remained focused on conventional deterrence on the Himalayan border.Footnote ²⁴ Irrespective of how Indian decision-makers perceived the purpose of Chinese nuclear weapons, their mere presence was a putative threat. However, New Delhi believed that even in the absence of an explicit nuclear guarantee from the Great Powers, China would not resort to nuclear weapons because of the residual risk of nuclear retaliation from the Great Powers. And rather than the credibility of an indigenous deterrent, the minimal risk of Great Power retaliation was sufficient to warn off China. If India could not be certain of Chinese intentions, nor could Beijing have been sure of how the Great Powers would respond to its nuclear threats or use vis-à-vis other vulnerable states in the region. The inherent uncertainty of Cold War international politics compensated for the residual uncertainty regarding Chinese intentions.Footnote ²⁵ For New Delhi, therefore, Great Power détente and the continuing isolation of China was a major goal.Footnote ²⁶ Lastly, though India faced both technological and financial hurdles, the political costs of an indigenous bomb were far more debilitating. An Indian dash to build the bomb, without the necessary capability to obtain strategic deterrence, would have focused Chinese nuclear resources on New Delhi rather than on the Great Powers. A few Indian bombs would have fallen short in projecting credible nuclear deterrence.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, it would have invited the risk of a preventive nuclear strike from China. Moreover, given how adamantly both the United States and the Soviet Union were sticking to their non-proliferation agenda, an indigenous pursuit of the bomb would only have created friction with the Great Powers, leaving India vulnerable to Chinese coercion. In sum, India's perceptions of China as a nuclear adversary, its decision-makers’ views on the purpose of nuclear weapons in this rivalry, and the political costs attached to indigenous pursuit were fundamentally different from the expectations laid down by the domino theory of nuclear proliferation.

Beyond contesting the theoretical straitjacket of the domino theory and empirical assertions of China threat theory, exploring the dynamics of India's nuclear behaviour between 1964 and 1974 has several other implications. First, it underlines the importance of perceptions in understanding a state's nuclear behaviour.Footnote ²⁸ As Robert Jervis argues, ‘In determining how he will behave, an actor must try to predict how others will act and how their actions will affect his values.’Footnote ²⁹ How states perceive their adversary's intentions, the purpose of the bomb in its foreign policy and military strategy, and the overall balance of power in international politics inform their decision-making calculus.Footnote ³⁰ If misperceiving a hostile nuclear adversary as benign may have huge consequences for a state's security, misperception of an adversary as particularly hostile may also prove to be self-defeating.Footnote ³¹ Automatic attribution of worst-case motives to nuclear adversaries limits our understanding of both nuclear proliferation but also of ‘proliferation restraint’.Footnote ³² ‘Unless scholars understand the patterns of perceptions involved’, to paraphrase Jervis, ‘they will misinterpret’ the state's nuclear behaviour.Footnote ³³ For example, realists may find New Delhi's tepid nuclear response between 1964 and 1974 puzzling, but their expectations and prescriptions neither capture how Indian decision-makers perceived and responded to the Chinese nuclear threat nor can they decide the success and failure of India's policy. So far as India successfully resisted the Chinese pressure on the border, avoided a major conventional war, and did not allow China to employ nuclear coercion to settle the border dispute, Indian strategy was successful. The success and failure of decisions based upon a state's perception of the adversary is an empirical question, which cannot be decided a priori.

Second, if perceptions of adversaries are central to nuclear decision-making, the arrival of a nuclear adversary does not automatically translate into the decision to proliferate; it rather depends upon how decision-makers filter such information, which may often depend upon their ‘existing theories and images’ or beliefs.Footnote ³⁴ Such pre-existing information filters are critical not only to understand how key individuals process the decision to build the bomb for national security, prestige, or domestic reasons but for whether they deem the bomb necessary in the first place. Building the bomb is only one among many responses that can address the demands of security, domestic politics, or national prestige accruing out of a rival's nuclear programme. In other words, what creates security, prestige, or domestic political efficiency is often an empirical question that can only be ascertained by granular historical detail. As this article shows, the Indian case not only captures the importance of perceptions in our understanding of nuclear proliferation but also validates the role of pre-existing beliefs and frames how decision-makers respond to nuclear challenges.

Third, non-proliferation scholars argue that security guarantees are instrumental in stopping proliferation.Footnote ³⁵ However, the effectiveness of security guarantees hinges upon their credibility: they should be both explicit and well-defined.Footnote ³⁶ Implicit or vague security guarantees cannot address the commitment dilemma faced by a non-nuclear state vis-à-vis its nuclear guarantor.Footnote ³⁷ The credibility argument is itself predicated on our reading of how deterrence works: does it obtain from the surety of a nuclear response by the nuclear guarantor or the uncertainty of how a nuclear guarantor will eventually respond to nuclear threats against a non-nuclear state?Footnote ³⁸ This has been a source of a major debate in nuclear deterrence literature where scholars are divided over the sources of deterrence: risk accruing out of the credibility of the response or its uncertainty?Footnote ³⁹ India's response demonstrates that how states think about the sources of deterrence may even have implications for their decision to build nuclear weapons in the first place.Footnote ⁴⁰ As I argue, Indian decision-makers relied on implicit security guarantees from the two Great Powers to avoid the decision to build nuclear weapons. Their strategy was partly influenced by a belief that India was too important an actor in global politics for the Great Powers to leave it to China's mercy. But more importantly, they also believed that rather than the credibility of Great Power security guarantees, China would be deterred by the risk inherent in the uncertainty of the Great Powers’ response to its nuclear coercion against India. The uncertainty of its response rather than its credibility provided New Delhi with deterrent effects vis-à-vis China. These beliefs were, of course, influenced by India's prior perceptions of the limited nature of Chinese nuclear intentions.Footnote ⁴¹

Lastly, exploring the history of the Sino-Indian nuclear equation has some bearing on the current and future trajectory of Sino-Indian relations. In international politics, only three nuclear dyads involved territorial disputes: the Sino-Soviet, the Sino-Indian, and the India-Pakistan.Footnote ⁴² Of these three, only the Sino-Indian nuclear dyad has no record of a nuclear crisis: neither India nor China has ever issued a veiled or an overt nuclear threat to one another—even when the two countries have faced several conventional military crises along the Himalayan border.Footnote ⁴³ Their nuclear histories, as this article demonstrates, explain why their conventional crisis behaviour has so far remained non-nuclear. As John Garver suggests, ‘the nuclear threat from China’ did not ‘come primarily from a fear of direct Chinese nuclear attack on India’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The rest of this article consists of four major sections. The first section briefly discusses the existing explanations of India's nuclear trajectory. The second part discusses Indian reactions to the Chinese nuclear programme in the period immediately after the Lop Nur test. India confined its campaign against the Chinese nuclear programme to diplomacy: seeking nuclear security guarantees from the established nuclear powers and hoping that the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) would eventually arrest the Chinese nuclear cascade. However, the foundations of such a diplomatic crusade were India's political and military beliefs: first, that Chinese nuclear weapons were not explicitly targeted against India but were a product of the Cold War, and second, given the alignment of international politics wherein the Great Powers posed a nuclear risk to China, it would refrain from the threat or use of atomic weapons against India. The third section focuses on the period between 1967 and 1970. Even when the NPT failed to meet India's expectations, New Delhi remained convinced that nuclear weapons would not play a role in Sino-Indian relations. The Ussuri River clashes between China and the Soviet Union made India feel more comfortable as the bulk of Chinese conventional forces were pinned down on the Soviet frontier. The last section discusses the period between India's decisive victory over Pakistan during the Bangladesh War in December 1971 and the conduct of the PNE in May 1974. The sense of euphoria which the 1971 war bestowed upon India was reflected in its threat assessments of China in the post-1971 period. Indian decision-makers not only believed that China would not use nuclear weapons against India but also assumed that even a conventional war was a remote possibility.

Existing explanations of India's nuclear weapons turn

As argued earlier, security, domestic politics, and prestige provide the template for most of the explanations of India's nuclear trajectory between 1964 and 1974. The domino theory—captured in Scott Sagan's perceptive rendition of the above three motivations behind the state's decision to proliferate—works because the emergence of a nuclear adversary not only creates insecurity for the targeted state, it also strengthens the hands of nuclear hawks and opportunists within domestic politics and creates status concerns for national elites.Footnote ⁴⁵ Though individual explanations of India's nuclear trajectory may differ in their emphasis on the relative importance of these variables, it is safe to claim that China's nuclear test in October 1964 was primarily responsible for activating all three of these mechanisms. Notwithstanding the border dispute, it is hard to imagine how India's insecurity vis-à-vis China would have involved a nuclear weapons dimension without the Chinese nuclear test: ‘Until China exploded her first atomic bomb, any danger of a nuclear attack on India was too remote to merit serious consideration.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Even when the scientific enclave led by Homi Bhabha was interested in exploring the explosive side of the atom, without the trigger provided by the Chinese nuclear test, India's scientific bureaucracy could not have lobbied successfully for an indigenous nuclear weapons programme.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, the domestic political opposition's clamour for the bomb was also largely inspired by the events in Lop Nur rather than in New Delhi. Lastly, insofar as prestige and status are relative concepts, they do need a reference point for comparison. The Chinese nuclear test rendered nuclear weapons as an important source driving India's concerns over great power status or its position in Afro-Asia.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Chinese nuclear test had engendered a crisis in ‘India's national destiny’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The China threat theory, in other words, incorporates all the three mechanisms driving India's interest in the bomb. However, all these arguments fall short in capturing India's nuclear trajectory between 1964 and 1974. Chinese nuclear weapons triggered a nuclear debate in India; they did not, as this article argues, produce the decision to build a nuclear arsenal.

Bhumitra Chakma's assertion that the ‘1974 explosion was a culmination of India's search for a nuclear strategy against a growing nuclear security dilemma precipitated by the Chinese nuclear weapons program’ is symptomatic of the literature which identifies security concerns as driving India's nuclear intentions post-1964.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a similar vein, Jayita Sarkar argues that ‘security considerations were the most important drivers for India's nuclear weapons development during this period’.Footnote ⁵¹ However, arguments prioritizing national security assume rather than demonstrate that the Chinese nuclear threat and absence of firm external security assurances forced Indian decision-makers to build the bomb. What precisely were India's threat perceptions vis-à-vis a nuclear China? What specific security interests were the Indian decision-makers trying to defend? Did the lack of external security assurances force Indian decision-makers to contemplate a nuclear future? And, finally, what evidence do we have to conclude that, given these specific threat perceptions and security interests, Indian decision-makers believed that initiating a nuclear weapons programme was the only recourse available? Logically, the extent of nuclear preparation—both in terms of an indigenous nuclear programme and efforts to secure nuclear guarantees—should be proportional to the magnitude of the threat perceived. However, the current state of the literature on India's ‘proliferation drift’ after China's nuclear test falls short in completing this logical loop.Footnote ⁵² It is indeed puzzling why New Delhi took close to a decade to test if national security interests in the wake of the Chinese threat were so grave and when external assessments of India's nuclear capability and intentions often concluded that an immediate atomic response was necessary. Moreover, India's fitful quest for security guarantees betrays hints of desperation in the face of an acute nuclear threat. The literature circumvents the problem of threat-response proportionality by focusing on factors that delayed India's nuclear programme. The tentative nature of India's nuclear weapons programme between 1964 and 1974 is explained through several intermediate variables: the economic costs associated with the programme, lack of firm leadership which could exhibit ‘oppositional nationalism’, and, finally, India's reliance on diplomacy and implicit security guarantees to deter the Chinese.Footnote ⁵³

Domestic dividends and prestige, as Bradley Thayer argues, are only ‘additional benefits’ of pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.Footnote ⁵⁴ In India's case, most scholars, as evidenced above, have indeed focused on insecurity as the driving force behind its weapons programme. The emergence of a nuclear China did activate otherwise-dormant domestic politics over the bomb and drove India's status concerns. However, the arguments and evidence on domestic politics and the quest for status as drivers of India's nuclear programme are equally fuzzy. The domestic politics argument assumes that the increasing salience of an issue-area within the polity automatically translates into policy decisions. However, even when the dominant political force—the Indian National Congress—faced both internal organizational fracture and external challenge from the political opposition during this period, nuclear weapons did not become electorally salient in domestic politics.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both as an organization and a bureaucracy, the Indian scientific enclave had an interest in demonstrating, if not fully developing, a nuclear weapons capability.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, at no point in India's nuclear history has the nuclear bureaucracy been able to bully civilian decision-makers into submission. The interests of the nuclear scientific enclave have been a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for explaining India's nuclear trajectory. Politics, not technology, has been the final arbitrator in India's civilian nuclear decision-making.Footnote ⁵⁷ ‘In Indian nuclear policy’, to use Perkovich's words, ‘before or after 1974, the prime minister has been sovereign’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Finally, the status argument assumes that New Delhi had no other recourse than to develop a nuclear weapons programme to re-establish its technological leadership in the Third World. However, the development of robust nuclear scientific capability, while keeping alive its belief in global disarmament, separated India's great power identity from an internationally destabilizing and revolutionary atomic power like China.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Shyam Bhatia argues, a year before India's nuclear tests of 1974, ‘the self-denial of a nuclear weapons capability in spite of India's nuclear know-how is useful in confirming that morality still exercises a major influence on Indian decision-making’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The morality argument was driven not only by a logic of consequence but also the sense of appropriateness. Indira Gandhi had categorically rejected the development of nuclear weapons and associated delivery platforms after the 1974 tests in the belief that it was not in keeping with Nehru's vision of India.Footnote ⁶¹

Beyond these concerns, one implicit assumption the literature makes is that between 1964 and 1974, there was no variation in the intensity of these three variables, as if they were completely immune to both internal and external changes. However, as this article demonstrates, India's position vis-à-vis China also improved gradually between 1964 and 1974. In other words, the initial choice of ‘nuclear restraint’ made by Indian decision-makers received constant positive feedback from the internal and external political environment.Footnote ⁶² Events, both domestically and in international politics, were perceived to support rather than challenge their beliefs.Footnote ⁶³ First, in the latter half of the 1960s, decision-makers felt confident of India's ability to conventionally defend its territorial integrity vis-à-vis China, mainly on account of defence build-up after the 1962 war. The economic and political situation also stabilized: the food crisis was over and the communist revolutionary movements had failed to create any political instability. Second, the Sino-Soviet rift in the late 1960s helped India's military and diplomatic equation vis-à-vis Beijing. Therefore, even when India failed to acquire nuclear security guarantees from the superpowers by 1967 and its diplomatic initiative to halt the Chinese nuclear programme came to naught with the conclusion of the NPT in 1968, its atomic weapons programme did not witness dramatic acceleration. Lastly, after 1971, India established its military primacy in South Asia and developed a strategic relationship with the Soviet Union with the 1971 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. The credibility of the Chinese military threat was also severely dented by Beijing's empty promises to Pakistan during the 1971 war. Therefore, the argument that the Chinese nuclear threat was the primary driver behind India's PNE in May 1974 and its push to acquire nuclear weapons remains an exaggerated claim. Nuclear China would go on to become a security threat when in the late 1970s and early 1980s it colluded to provide Pakistan with a nuclear weapons capability.

Understanding India's nuclear history during this period warrants an ‘empathetic reconstruction’, to use Barton Bernstein's terminology, of its nuclear decision-making.Footnote ⁶⁴ It also requires an empiric firmly situated in the ‘local’ rather than external assessments of its decision-making process.Footnote ⁶⁵ This research, therefore, involves a historical process tracing India's reactions to Chinese nuclear weapons capability between 1964 and 1974, based primarily on the recently declassified archival sources at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and the National Archives of India (NAI), both in New Delhi, India. For triangulation of evidence, it also uses archival sources available in the United States and the United Kingdom. Government reports issued by India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Ministry of Defence (MoD), and Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) complement the available documentary evidence. Biographies of scientists, diplomats, and political leaders provide additional data points. A series of structured interviews with various individuals—diplomats and scientists—involved in India's nuclear programme supplement this comprehensive array of primary sources. The rest of the article explains the trajectory of India's nuclear decision-making in the pivotal period between 1964 and 1974.

The tale of two assessments, 1964–1965

J. S. Mehta, who was India's charge d’ affairs at its embassy in Beijing in 1964 and later became India's foreign secretary, made the very first assessment of the Chinese nuclear threat. Three days after the Lop Nur test, Mehta sent the Foreign Office a memo titled ‘China's bomb and its implications on her nuclear and political strategy’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Mehta, the timing of the Chinese nuclear test was inspired by the completion of the non-aligned summit in Cairo and the fall of Nikita Khrushchev at the Kremlin. China's pursuance of the bomb was primarily ‘political and symbolic’ rather than ‘military’ in nature. Therefore, the real challenge for India as well as the United States and the Soviet Union was to ‘minimise the political effect’ of the Chinese bomb, especially among Afro-Asian countries.Footnote ⁶⁷ Mehta downplayed its military consequences since, in his view, China's strategic thinking was highly risk-averse: ‘consistent with her record, her actual military strategy would remain prudent and cautious’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Mehta also argued against an indigenous nuclear weapons programme: ‘it would suit China if the awe created by their achievement would generate a demand for more resources to be diverted towards non-productive defence purposes in India’. Since Mehta viewed the Chinese bomb as a diplomatic rather than a military challenge, he advocated a diplomatic response: India should continue with her ‘programme of disarmament, vindicating our moral leadership, maintaining our faith in collective security and the pledges of our powerful friends, keeping a confident but modest military posture in conventional weapons but sparing every iota of resources for economic development’. Three factors stand out from this initial assessment of the Chinese nuclear programme. First, the Chinese bomb was a political rather than a military challenge. Second, the threat of nuclear retaliation by other Great Powers would constrain China's nuclear blackmail. Third, rather than investing in a nuclear weapons programme, India should focus on conventional deterrence. The Indian military supported these views. In an assessment made in December 1964, India's Chief of Staff's Committee (CoSC) accepted that the Chinese nuclear threat was a problem ‘only in the long term’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The immediate need was to strengthen India's conventional deterrent strategy along the Himalayas.

Mehta represented the old guard within the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), those who steadfastly adhered to Nehru's worldview and considered nuclear disarmament a fundamental pillar of Indian foreign policy.Footnote ⁷⁰ Retired diplomats who were Mehta's contemporaries attest to the weight of such views in the MEA as well as within the then-political dispensation.Footnote ⁷¹ However, such ideas did not go uncontested. Within a month of Mehta's note, K. R. Narayanan, director of the China Division in the MEA, submitted a memorandum to the Indian foreign secretary titled ‘India and the Chinese Bomb’, making a case for India to go nuclear.Footnote ⁷² The impact of the Chinese bomb on India's domestic politics dominated Narayanan's thought process: ‘In the hands of militant communist power like China, the atom bomb has a special revolutionary significance.’ It could demonstrate the ‘efficacy and superiority of the Chinese social system’ and the ‘revolutionary philosophy and methods preached by the Chinese leaders’ creating a ‘demoralising influence on the mass mind of India’. It was a shot in the arm of the ‘left-wing of the CPI (Communist Party of India)’ but was perhaps equally motivating for fissiparous and centrifugal forces like the Nagas and the Mizos, who were then fighting insurgent wars in India's northeast.Footnote ⁷³ Second, China's bomb could also have a ripple effect on Asia and Africa. Narayanan argued that Afro-Asian countries’ muted response to the Chinese nuclear test was a celebration of China's technological achievement: ‘from a strictly moral point of view these countries do not consider China as an international leper because it has exploded a bomb’. In the shadow of this scientific achievement, Asian countries would start bandwagoning with the Chinese rather than balancing it: the Afro-Asian community ‘would reckon with and reconcile to the colossus (China) at their doorsteps than oppose it’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Finally, China could claim the status of a great power. Henceforth, the United States would take ‘China seriously’; Western Europe would ‘move closer to China’; and the Soviet Union and other communist countries would not ‘condemn a major scientific achievement which emphasises the efficacy of the socialist system’. The impending accommodation of China by the international community was most problematic: ‘the majority of nations now feel that if it was illogical and unfair in the past to have kept China out of the international community, it would be positively dangerous to keep her out any longer now that she has a nuclear bomb’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Narayanan's analysis, the Chinese nuclear weapon was a ‘crisis in India's national destiny’. The only real alternative for India in the face of Chinese nuclear capability was to make its ‘own nuclear weapons’.

As India arrived at a nuclear crossroads, Mehta and Narayanan proposed two different pathways. The fate of these two assessments was, however, markedly different. A senior diplomat, who worked with Narayanan during this period, explained in an interview that ‘where Mehta's views found traction with the political leadership, Narayanan's note found a quiet burial’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Narayanan's memo was also deliberately leaked to the American embassy in New Delhi with an explanation that it has been ‘rejected at the top’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The objective of the leak was to ‘create an impression in the mind of the Americans that within the MEA there was a strong opinion which favoured building of the bomb’.Footnote ⁷⁸

What explains this different treatment given to Mehta and Narayanan's memos? For one, Prime Minister Shastri remained sceptical. Nuclear weapons betrayed his Gandhian ethos. They also constituted a significant departure from Nehru's publicly articulated policy on nuclear disarmament.Footnote ⁷⁹ Shastri's inexperience in foreign affairs and India's nuclear policy was a significant factor.Footnote ⁸⁰ During the first two decades of India's independence, Nehru and Bhabha concentrated all nuclear decision-making within the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).Footnote ⁸¹ Therefore, when Homi Bhabha vociferously lobbied for a bomb programme, Shastri saw it as a trap and a rallying point for right-wing domestic opposition.Footnote ⁸² In public, however, Shastri could not downplay the Chinese threat because of the polarized domestic debate and the pressure from the scientific lobby. Shastri even acquiesced to exploring theoretical studies into a peaceful nuclear device by the atomic scientists in November 1964.Footnote ⁸³ The Chinese nuclear test had created an opportunity for the scientific enclave to push for nuclear weapons; for the political leadership, however, it created a risk of a significant deviation in Indian politics and foreign policy. Their contradictory impulses over an appropriate Indian response made them explore two very different options. Whereas Shastri requested nuclear security guarantees from the Great Powers, Bhabha sought a nuclear device. Both these strategies were inspired by American nuclear policy in the immediate aftermath of Lop Nur.

A couple of days after the Chinese test, President Lyndon Johnson offered ‘to respond to requests from the Asian nations to help in dealing with communist China's aggression’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Shastri saw in this promise an avenue to deflect the domestic demand for a nuclear arsenal. In December 1964, while on a trip to the United Kingdom, Shastri asked British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to formalize Johnson's promise by making concrete nuclear security guarantees.Footnote ⁸⁵ For the Soviets, however, India's pleas were an excuse for Western nuclear powers, especially the United States, to entrench their atomic forces in the Indian Ocean. Moscow warned that any ‘subscription to this idea (of nuclear guarantees)’ would strengthen ‘the case for the US to consolidate its nuclear presence in the Indian ocean area on the pretext of offering nuclear protection to India (and other countries)’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indian decision-makers were also fearful of the fact that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would only bring China and the Soviet Union closer together ‘as a matter of necessity though not of choice’.Footnote ⁸⁷ As these contradictions became apparent, the PMO realized the difficulty of obtaining joint nuclear guarantees. India's insistence would have only accentuated the differences between the Great Powers. By March 1965, the PMO decided that India should not invest further diplomatic effort in extracting guarantees from the Great Powers. The secretary to the prime minister, L. K. Jha, instructed the Foreign Office that ‘our Ambassadors in Washington and Moscow should be told not to have any further discussions on this subject’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The ease with which the PMO relinquished the search for a diplomatic deterrent appears somewhat surprising since the extant literature argues that the threat from China was the primary motivation behind it.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, it was the internal domestic pressure from the bomb lobby which had inspired Shastri's original gambit. As a top-secret assessment made in the PMO noted, ‘the proposal for nuclear protection was originally made to neutralise the pressure on the government to go in for the manufacture of nuclear weapons’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Johnson's vague promise of assistance inspired Shastri's interest in nuclear guarantees as a way of avoiding the decision to go nuclear. Bhabha's strategy, on the other hand, was motivated by the discussions within the Gilpatrick Committee on Nonproliferation appointed by President Johnson in November 1964. In one of the recommendations, the Committee suggested that the United States should find avenues ‘to cooperate with India in one or more new projects regarding the peaceful uses of atomic energy’ which included the Plowshares programme on peaceful nuclear explosions.Footnote ⁹¹ These were discussed in detail by Jerome Wiesner, chairman of the US Presidents Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), with Homi Bhabha during the former's visit to India in January 1965. For Bhabha, this opportunity was a godsend. As Bhabha explained to Under Secretary Ball during his visit to Washington DC in February 1965, India had to ‘counteract the “noise” of Communist China's nuclear explosion’ to ‘offset the prestige gained by Communist China among Africans and the Asians’.Footnote ⁹² Bhabha claimed that India could explode a device in 18 months on its own, but with the ‘US blueprint it could finish the job in six months’.Footnote ⁹³ However, by March 1965, American policy was set in favour of non-proliferation. Soon after, US Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg told Bhabha that the ‘US could make no commitment to proceed further on the matter’ and that any ‘plowshares project overseas would depend on the further development of the technology and other relevant political considerations’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Both anxiety and exaggeration drove Bhabha's scientific diplomacy. First, even when he claimed that India could build a nuclear device within two years and was able to extract Shastri's grudging acquiescence to initiating theoretical studies on PNEs, India's technological capability was highly limited. The problem for Indian scientists was twofold. First was the lack of fissile material. India's first plutonium reprocessing plant started operating in May 1964 but suffered from major structural problems leading to ‘significant difficulties’ for the first few years of its operation.Footnote ⁹⁵ As Ashok Parthasarathi suggests in his autobiography, ‘although the plutonium plant was inaugurated with much fanfare, it failed to work properly for almost seven years after formal commissioning’.Footnote ⁹⁶ It was only in 1968, after a significant refurbishment, that the plant started producing small amounts of weapons-grade plutonium.

Notwithstanding the lack of fissile material, engineering an implosion-type nuclear weapon was equally problematic because the scientists had no facility to understand plutonium's fissile behaviour. India's first fast reactor Purnima (Plutonium Reactor for Neutron Investigations), vital for understanding plutonium's neutron economy and fissile behaviour, was only commissioned in 1972.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even though Western appreciation of India's nuclear capability was extraordinarily generous (partly because of India's extensive nuclear profile, including a capacity to reprocess plutonium, and partly because of Bhabha's exaggerated claims), India's actual ability to build the bomb was highly suspect. American assistance, especially the blueprints, could have resolved these problems. It was why Bhabha had first asked the Americans for technical support before eventually retracting his extraordinary claims. In June 1965, Bhabha acknowledged to the PMO that it would take at least ‘five years’ for India to build the bomb.Footnote ⁹⁸

However, external perceptions that India could build a nuclear bomb reasonably quickly were a useful instrument for Indian diplomacy. Exaggerating India's nuclear capabilities could help extract better bargains from the Great Powers and created an image of India as a technologically advanced state but one that had a responsible attitude towards nuclear weapons. This strategy was evident in a secret correspondence between the Indian foreign secretary C. S. Jha and India's ambassador to the United States, B. K. Nehru. As Jha told Nehru, the perception that India had accumulated weapons-grade plutonium for building a nuclear device was just a ‘false impression’.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, it was essential to avoid any serious inquiry into India's nuclear programme, which could lead to an objective assessment of its nuclear capability:

An exaggerated version of India's threat perceptions and its capabilities would have helped its cause in soliciting Great Power support vis-a-vis China. It would have also provided India with more bargaining power in the nuclear negotiations taking place at the Eighteen Nations Disarmament Committee.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Rather than being motivated by an objective assessment of the Chinese nuclear threat, political and personal preferences drove Shastri's diplomatic strategy and Bhabha's scientific diplomacy. As both Mehta and Narayanan's memo indicated, there was no explicit agreement on whether Chinese nuclear weapons posed a significant military threat to India. New Delhi was, however, most concerned with the political effects of Chinese nuclear weapons. Would China leverage atomic weapons during a conventional face-off with the Indian military? Could Chinese nuclear weapons provide a rallying point for India's communist and insurgent movements? Should India invest in nuclear weapons, strengthen its conventional defences, or focus on its terrible economy? Since the 1962 war, the traditional balance of military power on the Himalayan frontier was a significant element in New Delhi's threat calculus.Footnote ¹⁰² For the Indian armed forces, however, the debate over nuclear weapons was a distraction insofar as conventional defence modernization under the first defence plan after the 1962 war had just begun.Footnote ¹⁰³ Even after the Chinese nuclear tests, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) saw ‘no material change in the threat to (India's) security’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When in December 1964, the Chief of Staff's Committee (COSC) conducted a new threat assessment, it argued that China's nuclear weapons were a problem ‘in the long term’—the ‘immediate and real threat’ was conventional.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Given India's ‘limited indigenous capability’ to provide for its conventional defence, it was ‘necessary to seek assistance from friendly countries both in respect of the technical know-how and material and financial resources’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The MoD also opined that an indigenous nuclear programme would not only exacerbate the existing tensions between the two countries but, as it would take considerable time and effort to build a viable deterrent, India would be ‘completely vulnerable’ to a Chinese first strike in the interim.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The question was also not merely one of Western military aid: extremely vital for New Delhi was civilian aid, particularly the assistance it received during the ongoing food crisis.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The issue of food was one that impacted on India's ‘survival’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It was also a highly politically sensitive issue as the food crisis created domestic unrest and provided a conducive environment for the nascent communist movements to prosper. The nuclear threat from China was, therefore, one among multiple risks the Indian state faced in the mid-1960s and, as the discussion above indicates, was not necessarily the first on its threat hierarchy.

If Indian decision-makers did not see Chinese nuclear capability as a credible military threat, there also existed a conviction that even an implicit security guarantee from the Great Powers could serve as a sufficient deterrent.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The unsuccessful quest for formal guarantees notwithstanding, New Delhi remained convinced of assistance from the Great Powers if China were to resort to nuclear blackmail. The presence of the Great Powers in the region, insofar as this posed a nuclear risk to China, was therefore welcomed. This approach was evident in India's attitude to the establishment of an American naval base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.Footnote ¹¹¹ The significant factor in deciding India's attitude towards Diego Garcia, as the head of the MEA's disarmament division argued, was the ‘strategic and political implications’ of this military base for India's security.Footnote ¹¹² New Delhi could not ignore the ‘Chinese nuclear menace’ as a factor in any ‘strategic appreciation of the region’.Footnote ¹¹³ A consensus was therefore reached not to make ‘undue noise’ about the proposed communications facility in Diego Garcia.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It was also precisely for this reason that New Delhi did not oppose the movement of American nuclear forces, especially its Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBNs) into the Indian Ocean, even when most other Afro-Asian countries rallied against it. As Principal Secretary Jha told Prime Minister Shastri in March 1965,

India's reliance on Chinese vulnerability to the two Great Powers was also reflective of its approach to any talks of reconciliation with Beijing. During the initial stages of the Indo-Pakistan war in August 1965 discussions were rife within the MEA on whether India should offer some reconciliatory gestures to avoid a two-front war situation. However, the Consultative Committee of the MEA argued against the opening of direct negotiations. As the Committee explained,

The events of the Indo-Pakistani war of August–September 1965 further reinforced such perceptions. The Chinese ultimatum of 16 September 1965 to the Indian Government to withdraw from what Beijing claimed were Indian transgressions into its territory or otherwise ‘bear full responsibility of the grave consequences’ triggered a response both from the United States and the Soviet Union. The American assessment was that China was not ‘preparing for a large-scale conflict against India’ and the Chinese ultimatum was merely a ‘bluff’. However, it also expressed its ‘willingness to intervene in the event of an appreciable attack by China against India’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The US State Department conveyed to the Indian ambassador ‘that if Peking choose to force the pace, the US government would be prepared to meet the challenge’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A post-mortem report prepared by the Indian embassy in Washington DC even suggested that ‘certain units of the strategic air command had been placed on an alert and other measures for military preparedness were taken’ by the United States to meet the Chinese threat.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The response from the Soviets was far more emphatic. China's ultimatum elicited a public retort from the Soviets who not only expressed ‘serious alarm’ but also warned ‘outside forces’ against ‘adding fuel to the fire for which they alone would be held responsible’.Footnote ¹²⁰ It was for the ‘first time’, as an intelligence report prepared for the Army headquarters in New Delhi explained, that the Soviets ‘seriously warned Peking to keep out of (Indo-Pak) conflict’.Footnote ¹²¹ The conclusion reached in the aftermath of this incident was that the Sino-Soviet rift was so ‘deep-rooted and wide’ that a possible ‘rapprochement’ was nearly impossible.Footnote ¹²² The conduct of the 1965 conflict only reinforced India's assumptions of assistance from the Great Powers in the case of Chinese intervention.

The above discussion makes two crucial points. First, there was no consensus among Indian decision-makers that Chinese nuclear capability posed a significant military threat to India. New Delhi was much more concerned about the political fallout of China's atomic demonstration in October 1964. Second, Indian decision-makers felt convinced that China would not use nuclear weapons against India as it would invite some retaliation from the Great Powers. For nuclear deterrence to hold, even implicit nuclear guarantees were sufficient. These beliefs continued to inform Indian policy in the latter half of the 1960s.

The non-proliferation debate, the Sino-Soviet rift, and the Chinese nuclear threat, 1966–1970

India's strategy to seek nuclear guarantees failed on its first contact with the Great Power politics of the Cold War. As was discussed in the previous section, Shastri sought nuclear assurances to offset the demand for an indigenous nuclear weapons programme. Therefore, by the middle of 1965, India's focus had shifted to the United Nations Disarmament Commission (UNDC).Footnote ¹²³ The Chinese nuclear test put the issue of the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the forefront of international security.Footnote ¹²⁴ In May 1965, the 114-member UNDC debated the issue of a non-proliferation treaty (NPT).Footnote ¹²⁵ For New Delhi, a NPT could restrict further advancement of Chinese nuclear capability.Footnote ¹²⁶ It could also provide a way to secure nuclear guarantees from the nuclear-weapon states, now within the multilateral institution of the UN.Footnote ¹²⁷ The NPT, as envisaged by New Delhi, could have eased India's concerns for two reasons. First, it would have stopped the development of the Chinese nuclear programme in its tracks. Under the treaty, further refinement of the Chinese nuclear arsenal would have been very difficult. Second, security guarantees under the treaty would have created a deterrent against any Chinese aggression or nuclear blackmail. However, when the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) began negotiating the NPT in August 1965, both the Great Powers and the non-aligned states ‘did not react favorably’ to the idea of security guarantees.Footnote ¹²⁸ Since ‘the non-aligned powers…have not been enthusiastic about this idea (of security guarantees)’, in early 1966, New Delhi ‘clarified its position on (guarantees)’ in the ENDC, claiming that ‘arrangements to assure the security of non-nuclear powers are relatively unimportant in any comprehensive scheme to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons’.Footnote ¹²⁹

The year 1966 was a tumultuous one in Indian politics. With the death of Shastri in January, followed by the sudden demise of Bhabha in February, India lost both its political and scientific leadership in quick succession. Part of the explanation after 1964 for India's reticence on the nuclear question were the differences between the two men. Shastri's demise led to an intense power struggle within the Indian National Congress. As a compromise between various warring factions of the party, Indira Gandhi became prime minister.Footnote ¹³⁰ Gandhi's first year in power was mostly about fighting a battle of consolidation within the party, however.Footnote ¹³¹ It was a similar case within the nuclear bureaucracy. While alive, Bhabha enjoyed absolute command over India's atomic establishment. His death created an acute struggle within the scientific enclave over its future leadership. If Gandhi was a compromise solution, Vikram Sarabhai, who eventually became the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was an outsider to the core nuclear group.Footnote ¹³² The distraction caused by such internal power struggles notwithstanding, the change in India's political and scientific leadership also influenced the agenda of the government and the nuclear establishment. Indira Gandhi's immediate concern was India's food security and its economic health. With the expectation of Western assistance, she initiated some significant economic reforms.Footnote ¹³³ When Gandhi devalued the Indian currency in June 1966, major protests followed. The Congress Party passed a resolution against its prime minister, and the leftist opposition was up in arms. As Kathrine Frank notes in her biography of Gandhi, ‘within months of becoming the Prime Minister, Indira had managed to make herself far more unpopular than Shastri had ever been’.Footnote ¹³⁴ If the prime minister was distracted by domestic politics, Sarabhai's views on nuclear weapons were drastically different from those of Bhabha.Footnote ¹³⁵ Sarabhai argued that a nuclear weapons programme would seriously jeopardize India's economic development as it would adversely impact on the ‘utilisation of national resources for productive and social welfare against the burden of defense expenditure’.Footnote ¹³⁶ However, the problem of India's security would remain unresolved as nuclear deterrence was not obtained by merely ‘exploding a bomb’. It required a ‘total defence system, a means of delivery…long range missile…radars…high state of electronic and a high state of metallurgical and industrial base’. It entailed a ‘total commitment of national resources of a most stupendous magnitude’ which India could not spare, given its social and developmental needs. Sarabhai, therefore, put an end to the academic enterprise of developing PNE technology within the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), at least formally.Footnote ¹³⁷ The MoD supported Sarabhai's assertions. In early 1966, the Indian military revisited its threat assessment of late 1964. It concluded that even if India could produce a bomb, ‘it had almost no possibility of procuring or purchasing a modern delivery system in the near future’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Moreover, the military was equally sceptical over the efficacy of nuclear weapons in the Sino-Indian military theatre along the Himalayas.Footnote ¹³⁹

It was only towards the end of 1966 that the PMO once again seriously involved itself in India's nuclear options and strategy. For one, in the ENDC negotiations and the drafts of the NPT proposed by the nuclear powers, China was accorded a nuclear-weapon state status. On the other hand, there was no positive movement on the issue of security guarantees. The nuclear weapons states were only offering negative security guarantees, as per the Kosygin proposal. However, Vikram Sarabhai still insisted on pushing for nuclear guarantees one last time. As L. K. Jha suggests, Sarabhai opined that India should propose a different route to non-proliferation: ‘a different kind of treaty which would make non-nuclear powers feel secure from nuclear threats’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It was under these circumstances that Gandhi sent L. K. Jha, her principal secretary, as a special emissary to the four nuclear-weapon states in early 1967. Upon his return, Jha summarized the conclusions of his diplomatic travels in two secret memos to the prime minister.

On security guarantees, Jha was categorical: even when nuclear powers were sympathetic and would intervene in the event of hostilities with China, no formal nuclear guarantee would be available: ‘a political guarantee is possible, but a legal guarantee is impossible’ because the Great Powers would not agree to a formal treaty with ‘commitments to help any country at any time irrespective of the circumstances’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Against the backdrop of such resistance, the leadership had to confront the question of whether India ‘should make nuclear weapons’. As Jha put it, ‘the time has come when at least at the top level in the government, this question should be faced squarely, and some kind of view taken’.Footnote ¹⁴² If the ‘main argument’ for India to go nuclear was the ‘Chinese threat’, Jha dismissed it categorically: there was no ‘evidence to support the view’ of ‘the Chinese embarking upon a full-scale war with India’.Footnote ¹⁴³ The Chinese military threat was, at most, ‘of subversive activities and guerilla warfare’. Even in the event of ‘a full-scale war’, it was highly doubtful that China would ‘use nuclear weapons’. Jha based his arguments on three primary assumptions. First was the tradition of the non-use of nuclear weapons in international conflicts in the post-Second World War period. Second, even in the absence of a legal guarantee from the superpowers, their ‘political compulsions’ offered a political guarantee against any Chinese nuclear threat or blackmail. Lastly, India was too important to be allowed to fall victim to Chinese nuclear aggression. As Jha explained to the prime minister,

Jha, therefore, argued against India going nuclear. For one, the financial burden of pursuing a nuclear weapons programme was simply untenable: ‘the cost of India going nuclear is so high in material terms that we shall lose the ideological battle against China in the process’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As Sarabhai had also argued earlier, a credible nuclear deterrent required a panoply of strategic capabilities. Second, India's relative lack of scientific and technical progress on nuclear weapons and delivery systems provided Beijing with a window of absolute nuclear superiority over New Delhi. As Jha clarified, ‘since China is at least five years ahead of us in developing both nuclear weapons and delivery systems, if we had to meet China militarily on the nuclear plane, the chances of us getting the worst of it would be very high (emphasis added)’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ While New Delhi's nuclear vulnerability in interregnum was a fact of life, the development of nuclear weapons would ‘not only reduce the restraint on China using nuclear weapons’ but, more importantly, ‘weaken the political compulsions on the USA and the USSR to come to (India's) help in such a case’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Ironically, if nuclear weapons were to provide India with much-needed security against Beijing, for the time being, a nuclear India would be both militarily defenceless and diplomatically isolated. Jha, therefore, recommended ‘not to abandon (India's) policy of not developing nuclear weapons for the present’, while maintaining a posture of nuclear ambiguity. This nuclear ambiguity was to be obtained by non-signature of the NPT: India was reluctant ‘to tie its hands in perpetuity against making nuclear weapons—guarantees or no guarantees’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

However, no decision was yet taken within the PMO to accelerate India's nuclear weapons programme. Under the Bhabha-Shastri compromise, the nuclear scientific enclave had been allowed to undertake some research and development work on PNEs. Vikram Sarabhai put a stop to all such activities, at least formally. Bhabha's protégé and Sarabhai's immediate deputy, Homi Sethna, complained directly to the PMO about the lack of progress on PNEs. As Sethna told Gandhi's principal secretary P. N. Haksar in August 1967, ‘at one stage decisions were taken with the approval of the Late Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri and also P.M. to go ahead with the development of atomic energy up to a point short of actual detonation’. Indeed, the scientists wanted to know ‘whether the Government wish to go back on this decision’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The nuclear scientists, as Sethna told Haksar, were suffering from ‘extreme uncertainty’ on this question.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It was at this stage that the scientists in BARC began a highly secretive in-house programme for developing a nuclear device. According to R. Chidambaram, the whole enterprise ‘began de novo on the design’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Scientific efforts at this stage were both informal and ad hoc: without any written requests; closely guarded within BARC's High-Pressure Physics Group; only part-time involvement of the scientists within the group; and mostly theoretical calculations concentrating on the equation of state of plutonium and shock compression. There was no official sanction either from Gandhi or Sarabhai.Footnote ¹⁵² The scientists were also confronted with the problem of the plutonium shortage. For a long time, the High-Pressure Group used ‘empirical equations of state derived from properties (of Plutonium) that were either available or one could estimate from data on neighbouring elements of the periodic table’. As Chidambaram reminisces, during these secretive preparations, the scientists never ‘tested with Plutonium’; they instead used ‘Uranium or surrogate materials’.Footnote ¹⁵³ It was only in 1972 that they could finally master the critical aspect of the equation of state of plutonium with the commissioning of India's first fast reactor, Purnima. As Chidambaram explains, ‘With Purnima, we got familiar with Plutonium…the reactor properties of Plutonium…it gave us confidence in our calculations.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ It was only then that the programme peaked.

This highly siloed nature of India's nuclear enterprise suggests the absence of a concerted nuclear strategy or any firm decision to pursue the bomb. Most importantly, as is evident from the discussion so far, it points to the lack of a concrete security imperative for India to take the nuclear route. When towards the end of 1967, the United States and the Soviet Union submitted their joint draft of the NPT to the ENDC, it did not ‘contain any provisions relating to security assurances for non-nuclear countries’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Instead, the draft proposed a separate UN Security Council resolution outside the treaty. The resolution also applied only to those non-nuclear weapons states that were signatories to the treaty. As a top-secret note prepared by the MEA for the prime minister explained, ‘assurances of assistance in the form of Security Council would not be the sort of credible and effective guarantees that (India) had in mind’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The confidence in implicit guarantees which had hitherto shaped India's understanding of nuclear deterrence vis-à-vis China remained intact. As a top-secret memo written for the PMO by the head of MEA's disarmament division argued,

As far as the question of signing the NPT was concerned, the domestic politics of the bomb and India's portrayal of the NPT as an unequal treaty had put the ‘government into a position from which it seemed impossible to retreat’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ However, internally, the Indian bureaucracy was a divided house. Whereas the Ministries of Defence and Finance were in favour of signing the NPT, the Atomic Energy Commission remained firmly opposed.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In March 1968, as the draft treaty was debated and discussed in the ENDC, the PMO took final cognisance of the matter and decided that India would not be a party to the treaty.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Gandhi's principal secretary P. N. Haksar argued in a top-secret note of April 1968, ‘We cannot fail to notice that out of the five nuclear weapons powers, two will not be signatories to it. This might not have mattered but for the fact that one of the non-signatories is our neighbour, namely, China, who is full of hostile intentions towards our country.’Footnote ¹⁶¹ India's opposition to the NPT could have angered both the United States and the Soviet Union. India required both these powers to come to her aid in the case of a Chinese nuclear threat. Evidently, in India's security policy, even when the superpowers refused to provide explicit security guarantees, the unspoken assumption was that India was too important to be ignored and left at China's mercy.Footnote ¹⁶² The NPT was also a manifestation of détente: stability in American-Soviet relations was important for India. Tensions between the two could have been exploited by China to further its revisionist agenda in Asia, as was the case after the Cuban Missile Crisis.Footnote ¹⁶³ Instructions to India's representative to the ENDC from the PMO were reflective of this balanced approach: ‘avoid polemical tone against the nuclear powers’; mention the Chinese threat but ‘we should neither overplay that threat nor underplay it’; ‘should not mention Pakistan’; ‘mention that our policy as hitherto continues to be to refrain from doing anything which would escalate the nuclear arms race’; and ‘on the question of the time table for the conclusion of the Non-proliferation treaty, we should not spearhead any move for delay and postponement’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The desire to maintain an international political environment where China could be isolated guided India's final act on the NPT.

Refusing to sign the NPT, as Vikram Sarabhai privately accepted, had a severe disadvantage: it would be construed by the ‘pro-bomb school in India’ as ‘keeping open…the option’ of going nuclear at a later date.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Sarabhai had personally rejected such an interpretation of India's refusal to sign the NPT: he reportedly told the prime minister that ‘the correct course for India was not to sign the treaty’ but ‘also not to build the bomb’. The pace and nature of India's nuclear programme also discredit the ‘nuclear option’ theory. New Delhi did not accelerate its nuclear weapons programme. Several top-secret reports prepared by the PMO and the DAE explain the status of the nuclear programme and India's intentions at this stage. The context was the launch of China's first satellite in April 1970. This scientific accomplishment confirmed China's mastery of sophisticated delivery systems. It also raised many questions from the parliamentary opposition on the nuclear threat from China as well as India's indigenous capability to conduct PNEs.

As far as the question of the PNE was concerned, even when a small coterie of scientists at BARC had started working on a nuclear device in 1967–1968, PNE was yet to receive an official sanction. As a background report submitted by the DAE to the PMO in April 1970 argued, ‘there are great many unknown factors and a great deal of information on the properties of nuclear explosives and, in fact, of their effects relative to conventional explosives (which) must still be developed’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Even when the ‘potential use of nuclear explosives’ for peaceful purposes was of ‘great interest’ to the scientific community, the DAE did not ‘consider that there is justification at the present time for undertaking these experiments’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ More interesting, however, were the threat assessments and policy recommendations prepared by the DAE in consultation with the PMO following the Chinese achievement in outer space and the debate it had sparked in parliament. This review of Indian nuclear policy—overseen by both P. N. Haksar and Vikram Sarabhai—came in response to the claims made by some members of the political opposition that India should develop tactical nuclear weapons to deter Chinese conventional forces along the Himalayan border.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

First, the threat assessment argued that it was ‘difficult to identify’ a ‘good military reason’ for China to ‘use its nuclear weapons against India’. Second, given that China was ‘developing a strategic nuclear weapons system’, India's response could not be tactical. Deterrence against China could be obtained only under two conditions: either through an indigenous strategic nuclear capability or through the threat of nuclear retaliation from the United States and the Soviet Union. As far as an indigenous capability was concerned, ‘manufacturing a few nuclear bombs’ was not only insufficient but could also ‘create an escalation of arms race with China particularly in targeting her weapons more specifically on (Indian) cities’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The argument that ‘possession of a few tactical weapons’ could thwart Chinese aggression on the Himalayan frontier was equally fallacious because of problems inherent in fighting a limited nuclear war. As the memo argued, ‘every time a tactical exchange takes place, it invariably escalates to a strategic exchange as soon as one of the parties starts having the worst of tactical exchange’. A purely tactical capability would leave India open to strategic retaliation from the Chinese. Pursuing a strategic capability, on the other hand, required a ‘total commitment of national resources of a most stupendous magnitude’ which India could not possibly afford. Pakistan's reaction to India's nuclear programme complicated matters further. As the assessment argued, ‘acquiring some atom bombs would provide no significant security vis-à-vis China…our actions (on the other hand) can only escalate the arms race with Pakistan and drive the Pakistanis to press ahead with their atomic energy programme from the weapons standpoint’. The memo summed up India's dilemma in these words,

Clearly, at this stage, India was not facing a pressing nuclear threat from China nor was it ready to respond to it in strategic terms. If an indigenous deterrent was out of the question, what of the second condition under which India could obtain a deterrent against Chinese nuclear weapons: the threat of retaliation from Great Powers? Since deterrence is not based on the ‘certainty that a particular party would retaliate against one’ but only on the ‘strong probability’ that such may be the case, China would have to remain conscious of American and Soviet reprisals in case of a nuclear threat against India: ‘just as nobody in India can be certain that the United States would use its weapons against China in the event of a Chinese threat to India, nobody in China can also be certain that the United States, in fact, will not use its nuclear weapons systems against her’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Any use of nuclear weapons could not remain limited to a specific geographical area, given the balance of Cold War international politics, guarantees or no guarantees. As the assessment elaborated,

This omnipresent, though minimal, ‘element of risk’ was an essential aspect of India's nuclear thinking vis-à-vis the Chinese nuclear threat. Nuclear weapons in the hands of the Great Powers may have been a liability in India's public diplomacy, but in private they were indeed an asset. The review prepared by the DAE and the PMO, therefore, recommended against ‘manufacturing of nuclear weapons’.Footnote ¹⁷³

As the discussion so far illustrates, India's strategic belief systems concerning the Chinese threat and implicit deterrence in Cold War nuclear politics continued to inform its nuclear policy well after the successful negotiations of the NPT and the treaty's failure to address India's strategic concerns. What explains this strategic continuity? One crucial factor, which has remained underappreciated in the literature so far, is the effect of the Sino-Soviet rift on India's strategic environment and its threat perceptions. Soviet and Chinese ideological and political competition in Asia was always a factor in India's assessment of its strategic environment. Still, the intensification of the conflict between the two communist states with the Ussuri River clashes of March 1969 was exceptionally fortuitous for New Delhi. The threat of war with the Soviets required China to shift its military focus onto its northern borders and led to a consequent decrease in the Chinese military presence along the Himalayan frontier. The deployment of 35 Soviet divisions, along with tactical nuclear weapons, on the Sino-Soviet border, as the Indian embassy in Moscow informed New Delhi, forced the People's Liberation Army to dedicate more than two million men on its northern frontier.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The open conflict with Moscow, as a top-secret assessment made by the MEA for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Cabinet argued, ensured that ‘China is unlikely to run the risk of military provocation against India’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Second, it increased India's importance in Moscow's Asia strategy. It was only in the wake of the Ussuri River clashes of March 1969 that Indo-Soviet relations started gaining momentum, which eventually led to India's closest strategic partnership of the Cold War. The Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, the edifice of their Cold War security relationship, was first proposed by the Soviets in March 1969, a week after the Ussuri River clashes.

Insofar as the Indo-Soviet friendship was of ‘vital importance’ for ‘safeguarding promotion of (India's) economic and political interests and the strengthening of (India's) defense machinery with sophisticated military weapons’, New Delhi was now confident of constant Soviet support.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ As the Indian ambassador to Moscow, D. P. Dhar, informed the Foreign Office in New Delhi, ‘ideological hatred between the two countries is so great and the attitude of both countries to India is so organically related to this hatred, border dispute or no border dispute, the Soviet Union is bound to be more friendly with India than with China for several years to come’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Lastly, the Sino-Soviet split more than compensated for the Sino-American reconciliation under President Nixon. Sino-American rapprochement constituted a fundamental change in India's security environment. By early 1970, the Nixon administration conveyed to New Delhi ‘that if the Chinese were to come to Pakistan's assistance in an attack on India, the US would not find it possible to help’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In the wake of increasing tensions in the Sino-Soviet relationship in the late 1960s, New Delhi felt confident that at least one, if not both, of the superpowers would come to her aid. However, rather than openly siding with Moscow on its ideological and military conflict with China, India's response was a guarded one. The Sino-Soviet rift was an opportunity but also posed significant risks. A secret memo prepared by the MEA for the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on External Affairs in March 1970 summarized New Delhi's strategic dilemma:

Indian strategy had to correspond with the larger geopolitical reality of the Cold War: that in the triangular competition between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, India had to keep its strategic autonomy intact. If the Sino-Soviet rift ameliorated India's strategic conditions by ‘averting a military threat from China while it was preoccupied on the Soviet border’ and ‘by inducing the Soviet Union to pay greater attention to India’, it also engendered a strategic risk in that a full-blown war between the two could drastically reduce India's options.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Therefore, as the abovementioned memo argued, ‘the best for us (India), from a purely Machiavellian point of view, would be for this conflict to remain unresolved but without escalating into a war. Such a situation would be particularly advantageous for India if there could be at least a partial improvement in Sino-Indian relations.’Footnote ¹⁸¹ This strategic context allowed Gandhi to make an effort to normalize Sino-Indian relations: ‘India was ready to talk to China’, the Indian prime minister declared in parliament.Footnote ¹⁸² The ‘deteriorating strategic environment’ in the wake of the Sino-Soviet rift also forced Beijing ‘to respond to New Delhi's overtures for a rapprochement’.Footnote ¹⁸³ By August 1970, the two sides had begun a process of exploratory talks to resolve the boundary dispute.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ As Srinath Raghavan argues, ‘when the East Pakistan crisis erupted, China was still exploring an opening with India’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Towards a peaceful nuclear explosion, 1971–1974

Successive assessments carried out at the highest levels of policymaking in the Indian government conclusively illustrate that at least until the end of the 1960s, New Delhi did not make much of the Chinese nuclear threat. Even the persistence of the territorial conflict, increasing sophistication of Chinese nuclear capability, and the failure of the NPT to address India's security concerns had no impact on India's perceptions of the Chinese nuclear threat and the need to acquire a nuclear deterrent. In fact, with the signing of the Indo-Soviet security treaty in August 1971 and the Bangladeshi liberation war of December 1971, the strategic environment changed dramatically in New Delhi's favour. The fear of a two-front war came to nothing, repeating the performance of ‘verbal support’ Beijing offered to Pakistan in 1965 and again proving the fact that the threat from China, at least since 1962, was more ‘political and subversive rather than military’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Within a year of its most emphatic military victory, New Delhi finally decided to go ahead with a PNE. In September 1972, Prime Minister Gandhi formally ordered the nuclear scientific enclave to demonstrate India's nuclear capability.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ If Vikram Sarabhai's death in December 1971 removed the organizational obstacle restraining the scientists, by early 1972, they were also confident of their ability to carry out a nuclear demonstration successfully. Irrespective of these favourable bureaucratic factors, as the decision was taken at a time when India was the most strategically secure in its history, it is a challenge to understand New Delhi's nuclear motivations if we rely primarily on threat perceptions and nuclear insecurity as a guide to India's actions. If China was not a factor before 1971, it was even less so after the Bangladesh war. Nevertheless, following the 1971 war, even as India emerged as a regional power in South Asia,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ an impression of vulnerability was left on India's strategic mindset. For one, if after 1965, India was relying on the political guarantees from the Great Powers to deter China, it could no longer count on American support. The Sino-American reconciliation left New Delhi deeply sceptical of President Nixon's foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ If the Sino-American collusion signalled a dramatic shift in India's threat environment, Indo-American relations reached their nadir when President Nixon dispatched the Seventh Fleet to the Indian Ocean in support of the Pakistani military.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In the post-war period, therefore, the triumphant assertion of India's regional supremacy sat uncomfortably with a sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis extra-regional interventions. As Prime Minister Gandhi wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs in February 1972: ‘It is necessary to take note of the dispatch of the warship Enterprise to support a ruthless military dictatorship and to intimidate a democracy, and the extraordinary similarity of the attitudes adopted by the United States and China. Imagine our feelings.’Footnote ¹⁹¹ In February 1972, the mention of Kashmir in the joint communique issued after Nixon's historic visit to Beijing was deemed an act of interference in India's internal affairs. It was this feeling of vulnerability at the hands of the United States and the changing strategic scenario regarding Sino-American relations, some argue, that led Indira Gandhi to finally give the go-ahead for India's first nuclear test in May 1972.Footnote ¹⁹²

These arguments, however, do not entirely capture the complexity of decision-making in New Delhi. Instead, as this section illustrates, the need to maintain India's strategic autonomy and the domestic politics of the bomb explains the PNE of May 1974. India's security relationship with the Soviets more than compensated for the threat posed by the burgeoning Sino-American nexus. The Bangladesh war was a testimony to the new balance of power in the sub-continent. With the Indo-Soviet treaty in place, China's direct involvement in South Asia could be ruled out. What concerned officials in India's Ministry of Defence most was a renewed rearmament campaign by Pakistan, with encouragement and material assistance from China and the United States. For the Soviets, however, this narrow focus on ‘Phantoms like Pakistan’ was indeed disappointing.Footnote ¹⁹³ For Moscow, India's obsession with Islamabad blinded her from correctly assessing the real source of its insecurity—China. As Marshall Grechko told the chief of the Indian Army General Sam Manekshaw in February 1972, ‘as in the past, India is still overrating the threat to the security of India from Pakistan…(India) always missed the ominous source from the real threat to India emanates from, namely, China…it was in fact the real danger’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The Soviet and Indian agendas in the subcontinent diverged significantly: whereas New Delhi saw Moscow as a guarantor against any intervention from the Great Powers and as a source of military technology and equipment, the Soviets wanted India to become a pivot of their anti-China campaign in Asia. A formal military alliance with India ‘against the menace of China’ would have helped the Soviet agenda. As Grechko told Manekshaw, ‘it would be wise for both countries to coordinate their strategies and plans and harmonise their defense organisations…(India and Soviet Union) should think in terms of a military alliance’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ If India and the Soviet Union could work out an alliance, the Soviets could even offer India an explicit nuclear guarantee: ‘I shall earmark 50 IBM's (sic) for your defence against China. I shall not locate them on your soil but on my own so that you do not run any risk. What else do you want me to do for your defence?’ Grechko told the visiting Indian chief of Army staff.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Moscow could not appreciate that India's dependence on the Soviet Union was engendered out of a desperate strategic situation; it was never a preferred foreign policy choice. India's threat perceptions of China were markedly different from that propagated by the Soviets.

In May 1973, just a year before the May 1974 nuclear test, a top-secret threat assessment prepared by India's CoSC for the Indian prime minister categorically stated that ‘use of atomic weapons by China can be ruled out’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Even the possibility of ‘land invasion’ by China was deemed ‘unlikely’ by India's Ministry of Defence.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Overdependence on the Soviets constrained the independence of India's foreign policy, especially concerning New Delhi's policy towards China, evident in India's reservations regarding the Soviet proposal for collective security in Asia.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Reinstating India's strategic autonomy was, therefore, an essential objective for Indian foreign policy in the post-1971 period and a nuclear test would have helped the cause. As Balazs Slazontai argues, Prime Minister Gandhi's inclination to increase ‘India's strategic independence from its Soviet superpower ally’ influenced her decision to test. PNE was a ‘powerful manifestation of (India's) independent mindset’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ A nuclear test would have signalled India's determination to be the leading South Asian power, increased its international status, and, most importantly, maintained India's strategic independence in the fluid power dynamics of the Cold War.

It would have also increased Indira's grip on India. The involvement of the United States in India's internal politics was a significant irritant in the relationship between the two countries, fuelled further by the disinformation campaign launched by Soviet intelligence agencies in New Delhi. By 1972, Prime Minister Gandhi publicly accused the CIA of supporting the opposition parties in organizing anti-government protests and destabilizing her government.Footnote ²⁰¹ In September 1973, as the physical preparations at the test site began, including the digging of shafts for placement of the device, the PMO was debating the timing of the tests and their consequences. For one, Indira Gandhi's new principal secretary Prithvi Narain Dhar, an economist by profession, argued against the test as it could negatively affect the Indian economy.Footnote ²⁰² On the other hand, P. N. Haksar, another confidant of the prime minister, argued for a postponement of the nuclear test. As Raja Ramanna suggests, ‘[Haksar] was of the view that we should wait for election time, some six months later, to be able to use it to defeat the opposition parties’.Footnote ²⁰³ However, in 1974, scientists won the debate, and the peaceful nuclear explosion went ahead in May. Nevertheless, the timing of the explosion did provide Gandhi with political mileage. It happened precisely as the government was facing huge labour protests. As Inder Malhotra notes in his biography of Indira Gandhi, ‘On 18 May 1974, the country temporarily forgot the railway strike…to hail a landmark in its history.’Footnote ²⁰⁴

The PNE process was devoid of any thoughts of developing a nuclear weapons capability. As Maharaj K. Chopra explains, ‘A nuclear explosion is far from being a nuclear weapon, very far indeed when it is not linked with a delivery system. The government had no military policy, and there were no nuclear cells in the armed forces.’Footnote ²⁰⁵ The device used in the May 1974 explosion, in the words of R. Chidambaram, was a ‘highly conservative’ one.Footnote ²⁰⁶ It would have required India much effort to weaponize this rudimentary nuclear capability. Gaurav Kampani has elaborated elsewhere that there is a fundamental difference between exploding a nuclear device and the process of weaponization.Footnote ²⁰⁷ India's peaceful nuclear explosion involved an atomic device which, by definition, can only be considered as an ‘apparatus that presents proof of scientific principle that explosion will occur’. By contrast, weaponization entails a ‘rugged and miniaturised version of the device’. It also involves a ‘process of integrating the nuclear weapon with delivery systems’ and its ‘operationalisation’ with the ‘development of soft institutional and organisational routines’ for deployment and use.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Chidambaram's recollection of the process and the nature of the May 1974 test further attests to the rudimentary nature of India's nuclear intentions during this period: ‘If you want to deliver it (nuclear device) as a weapon, the question of the weight and the dimensions of the diameter is important…those issues come in as far as the carrier is concerned…but these restrictions do not apply when you are thinking of a PNE except that you would not want to dig a very large diameter hole (shafts) for that will be very expensive.’Footnote ²⁰⁹ Neither in the process leading up to the PNE nor afterwards was there any intention of developing a nuclear weapons capability. In fact, as a senior diplomat who was close to Indira Gandhi told the author in an interview, ‘Gandhi categorically denied any permission to weaponize India's nuclear capability after the PNE.’Footnote ²¹⁰ Further documentary evidence proves that the PNE was not a weapon and that India's leaders did not follow it up with concerted efforts to weaponize the PNE capability or develop the necessary delivery systems.Footnote ²¹¹ It is most evident in top-secret communications between India's Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Ministry of Finance (MoF) while deliberating on India's third five-year defence plan in December 1974.

If the MoF saw in the 1974 test a rudimentary nuclear capability and argued for a cut in India's conventional defence spending, the MoD found such arguments highly misleading. The MoD complained about the Finance Ministry's misguided views to India's highest decision-making body: the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs, which functioned directly under the prime minister. For India's defence mandarins, it was ‘unfortunate’ for the Finance Ministry to have even made a ‘mention of the nuclear blast’ as it played ‘no part in our defence preparedness which is based entirely on conventional weapons’.Footnote ²¹² For the MoD, associating the 1974 test with a nuclear capability was extremely problematic for three reasons.Footnote ²¹³ First, India's nuclear policy was focused exclusively on energy for peaceful purposes. Second, any use of nuclear weapons would bring India international opprobrium. Last, and most importantly, was the fact that India had no demonstrated capability in nuclear warheads or delivery vehicles. The Ministry of Defence noted: ‘[W]e cannot take into account the impact of our nuclear explosion on the [conventional] threat from Pakistan in the absence of [a] tactical nuclear weapon and a delivery system for it.’Footnote ²¹⁴ One can look at it as a bureaucratic struggle for scarce resources. Still, the weight of the evidence suggests that the Ministry of Defence was far more accurate in its assessments of India's nuclear capability.Footnote ²¹⁵ Archival research indicates that India was neither developing a missile programme explicitly mandated to deliver a nuclear payload nor acquiring an air-delivery capability to drop nuclear weapons using bombers or fighter aircraft. The 1974 test only provided India with an ‘imagined arsenal’.Footnote ²¹⁶ India's nuclear weaponization began in the mid-1980s as a response to the Pakistani nuclear programme.Footnote ²¹⁷

Perceptions and purpose of the bomb in India's nuclear trajectory

In hindsight, India's ‘indifference’ to the Chinese nuclear threat, as Ambassador Shiv Shankar Menon told me in an interview, appears almost ‘surreal’.Footnote ²¹⁸ It defies the domino theory of proliferation whereby an adversary's acquisition of nuclear weapons must result in an inevitable nuclear response by the vulnerable state. Domino theory works because nuclear development by an adversary increases insecurity, creates demand for nuclear prestige, and tilts the domestic nuclear debate in favour of pro-bomb political groups.

India is the only country in the world that shares disputed territorial borders with two nuclear-armed adversaries. India's reaction to the Chinese nuclear threat in the 1960s and 1970s and the Pakistani nuclear threat in the 1980s was, however, markedly different. If the Chinese nuclear test in October 1964 presented India its first nuclear adversary, its response was highly ambivalent.Footnote ²¹⁹ In the mid-1960s, New Delhi was one of the most technologically advanced states in the Third World. India took a decade before exploding its first nuclear device in May 1974. Though the existing literature considers the PNE as primarily motivated by the Chinese nuclear threat, top-secret threat assessments made by Indian decision-makers between 1964 and 1974, as this research has shown, did not make much of the threat posed by China's nuclear capability. After the PNE, Indian decision-makers abstained from weaponizing its nascent nuclear weapons capability nor did they seek a nuclear weapon status. Until the mid-1980s, India practised a policy of ‘nuclear refrain’.Footnote ²²⁰ As the Pakistani nuclear programme matured into an existential threat, India's prepared for a ‘catalytic’ response.Footnote ²²¹ In 1988, India decided to acquire a deliverable nuclear arsenal.Footnote ²²² Within a decade, it had not only operationalized the first leg of its nuclear delivery capability based on fighter aircraft, but had declared itself a nuclear weapons state with a series of nuclear tests in May 1998. Until 1998, India's nuclear deterrent targeted only Pakistan. Two decades into overt nuclearization, India is still in the process of developing a credible nuclear deterrent against China.

India's ‘differential response’ to China and Pakistan's nuclear weapons must take into account not only the variation in India's perceptions and beliefs about the Chinese and the Pakistani nuclear threat respectively, but also the methods which Indian decision-makers employed to counter them. China's acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability did not fundamentally threaten India's national security. Rather than perceiving Chinese nuclear capability as directed against India, New Delhi situated Beijing's quest for nuclear weapons within the nuclear rivalry of the Great Powers in the Cold War. For New Delhi, China's nuclear weapons were more of an extension of its political and ideological battle against American imperialism and Soviet revisionism. Moreover, for Beijing ‘India was a lackey of US imperialism and Soviet reactionism in international affairs’ and therefore extended this battle to India as well.Footnote ²²³ Thus, the primary impact of Chinese nuclear weapons was also political and ideological, as was evident in New Delhi's concerns over Beijing's support for communist movements and fissiparous insurgencies in India's body politic. The threat perception vis-à-vis Pakistan was entirely different: Islamabad's nuclear drive was a direct military threat, given its historical penchant for revisionism in South Asia. Second, in the aftermath of the 1962 War, India learned that a robust conventional defence against China would help preserve the status quo on the border. Nuclear weapons were not essential for maintaining this territorial status quo. Conventional deterrence rather than nuclear deterrence was therefore India's immediate priority. For one, nuclear weapons could not replace the need for conventional military capabilities. For a resource-constrained nation, as India was in the mid-1960s, bearing the burden of both nuclear and conventional military capabilities was an uphill battle.

Moreover, given Beijing's ‘great leap forward’ over India as far its nuclear weapons programme was concerned, Indian decision-makers were too wary of a lag in strategic capabilities vis-à-vis China. A determined push for nuclear weapons would have only angered China and upset the Great Powers, leaving India vulnerable to Chinese nuclear superiority. Pakistan, on the other hand, had consistently challenged the territorial status quo even when it was an inferior military power in the Indo-Pak dyad. In New Delhi's thought process, therefore, nuclear weapons in Pakistan's possession would have only exacerbated the latter's inclination for a military resolution to the territorial conflict. This difference in New Delhi's threat perceptions of China and Pakistan is a product of various military crises on the Sino-Indian and Indo-Pakistani border. Neither China nor India have ever issued a veiled or overt nuclear threat to each other in any of their military crisis along the Himalayan border, even at the height of the Sino-Indian conflict in the 1960s; the threats have remained purely conventional. However, since the Brasstacks crisis of 1986–1987, Pakistan has always leveraged its nuclear arsenal to influence any Indian decision to pursue conventional operations across the border. Pakistani nuclear programme originated under this military strategy.Footnote ²²⁴

India's threat perceptions of Chinese and Pakistani nuclear capability, therefore, differed substantially and so have been the methods which India employed to counter them. Against China, India primarily relied on implicit nuclear security guarantees from the two Great Powers during the Cold War. This assumption was based both upon the fluid dynamics of the Cold War's international politics as well as India's understanding of what nuclear deterrence meant and entailed. New Delhi's calculation was profound but straightforward: any use or threat of use of nuclear weapons by Beijing against India involved at least a minimal risk of nuclear retaliation from the Great Powers primarily because of the necessity of maintaining the Cold War's balance of power. This minimal risk, rather than the absolute credibility of a Great Power response, was sufficient to deter the Chinese decision-makers. This approach assumed both rationality and restraint on Beijing's part. In hindsight, such assumptions have proved valid; China has never threatened nor blackmailed India with the use of nuclear weapons. For this to hold, détente between the two Great Powers was critical as it not only isolated China diplomatically but reinforced the perceptions of implicit deterrence in the Chinese mind. However, Beijing's biggest contribution to India's nuclearization was its support for the Pakistani nuclear programme.Footnote ²²⁵ India's historical experiences vis-à-vis Pakistan, however, betrayed all assumptions made by Indian decision-makers regarding China. Pakistani nuclear capability was directed solely against New Delhi. Given its penchant for risk-taking, it also posed a fundamental threat to the Indian state. As Minister of Defence Arun Singh argued on the eve of India's decision to build nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, ‘India has come to terms with the Chinese nuclear capability in the belief that China will not use nuclear weapons against India. But India has no such confidence about Pakistani restraint and believes that India's superior size and capabilities offer an incentive for Pakistan's nuclear weapons development and use.’Footnote ²²⁶ Therefore, to deter Pakistan, an indigenous nuclear capability was a must.

After all, not all nuclear adversaries are the same. Some bombs are more threatening than others.Footnote ²²⁷