Karthika Sasikumar

Debating India's Pathway to Nuclearization

In his article, Andrew Kennedy attributes India’s nuclear restraint from 1964 to 1989 to (1) implicit nuclear umbrellas extended by the two superpowers and (2) the normative beliefs of Indian leaders.1 Using newly available declassiaed documents, he argues that India’s apparent absence of nuclear balancing against China and Pakistan until the 1980s was a distortion of reality, because the balancing occurred in secret. Its means were implicit nuclear umbrellas, arst extended against China in the mid-1960s by both superpowers and then from 1970 to 1991 by the former Soviet Union. As Soviet power in the mid-1980s waned, India resorted to internal balancing by developing an independent nuclear arsenal (pp. 151–152). Kennedy further claims that Indian leaders arst sought security through international disarmament institutions. Only when that quest failed did they proceed with nuclear acquisition (pp. 144–146). In this letter, I argue that there is no credible evidence to support either of the above two theses. Further, neither provides a consistent explanation for Indian nuclear behavior over the period in question. Hence neither qualiaes as a general cause for Indian nuclear restraint. Kennedy’s arst claim is contradicted by two events: the 1974 Pokhran test and the aborted plan for nuclear tests in 1982–83.2 The 1974 test came in the wake of the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation. The treaty’s key clause was article 9, the security clause, which according to Kennedy formally institutionalized the implicit Soviet nuclear guarantee (pp. 136–140). If the implicit nuclear guarantee was the cause for Indian nuclear dormancy, then the 1974 test is a puzzle that needs explaining all over again. Kennedy further links India’s revived nuclear program around 1985– 86 to the advent of the Gorbachev regime and the sense among Indian ofacials that the adelity of Moscow’s implicit nuclear guarantee was waning (pp. 141–144). This claim ignores historical evidence that places the revived Indian nuclear weapons program Correspondence: India’s Pathway to Nuclearization