Critical Mass

Title: Critical Mass – Decoding India’s Nuclear Policy
Author: Rajaraman R
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789354359934
Pages: 450

When we were in college in the early 1990s, the suspense regarding India’s possession of nuclear weapons was an intriguing topic of debate. We were all unabashedly pro-nuclear: we wanted India to definitely possess nuclear weapons but not to use it till the last resort is exhausted. A nuclear test was conducted in 1974, but its euphoria had long died down. It was known that thanks to A Q Khan’s smuggling of nuclear material, Pakistan also possessed nuclear arms but they had not tested it. It was a nuclear ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ situation in the subcontinent. The uncertainty was dispelled on 11 May 1998 by the Shakti nuclear tests conducted by India at Pokhran and tests two weeks later by Pakistan. Both nations then officially declared to have possession of nuclear weapons. The US was totally taken off-guard by India’s testing and frankly, that was the icing on the cake. We were so overjoyed that for many years hence, ‘shakti’ used to be our computer password with some combination of letters or numerals. It was reported that the US President Bill Clinton came to know about it from TV news. Crippling sanctions on transfer of technology and supply of uranium for reactors were imposed on both nations soon thereafter. Anyway, the 1998 nuclear tests was a game changer. With it, India elbowed its way to the international high table. India’s rapid economic growth in the ensuing years finally convinced the US to allow it a one-time exemption from nuclear sanctions if India separated its civilian and military programs and subjected the civilian program to international surveillance and safeguards. A nuclear treaty was put in place in 2008 after more than three years of hard negotiations amid opposition from even the ruling party in both the countries. India also formulated a nuclear policy at this time which clearly defined its objectives in having nuclear weapons. R. Rajaraman was a renowned theoretical physicist of JNU who changed his theatre of work to nuclear policy issues and arms control after retirement. He has worked in international NGOs like International Panel of Fissile Materials (IPFM) and has attended numerous programs on nuclear issues and disarmament. Even though the author is ideologically positioned against nuclear weapons, he understood the futility of opposing it after 1998 and changed track to analyse the scenario objectively.

Being a physicist himself, Rajaraman clearly lists out the reasons for why India desperately wanted the post-1998 sanctions to end and reach a deal with the US which would automatically prompt other nations to follow suit. By 2020, it was estimated that the burgeoning energy demand of the nation would reach 300,000 MW of electricity. Out of this, 30,000 MW was to come from nuclear energy. However, uranium sources were very poor in India which could not meet the demand. Sanctions had caused the uranium supply to dry up. Another option was to ‘create’ uranium by transmuting thorium metal in a breeder nuclear reactor. But this technology was only in the design stages and tough technical challenges prevented its early maturing. Under the proposed deal, the civil and military programs were to be separated. India wanted to keep its fast breeder system in the military group but the US initially objected to it. Many, including the author, criticized India’s stand as it would torpedo the deal. India remained steadfast and negotiations remained in limbo for some time. Finally, the US blinked and the deal was signed. The author graciously acknowledges that ‘those observers, including myself, who felt that the Indian demand on the breeder was a deal breaker and should be softened in the higher interests of our nuclear energy needs turned out to be wrong’. This was made possible with a great deal of support extended by the then US President George W Bush in yielding to India’s demands. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged him for this, Singh was ridiculed by the Left intelligentsia. Rajaraman then quips that ‘it would only be poetic justice to rename the street in front of the what had been the world’s last leftist bastion – Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi – George W Bush Marg or Avenue’ (p.80). It should be remembered that the author was a teaching faculty at that institution for many decades.

Even though the nuclear deal was made functional at great risk of being aborted anytime in the middle, the author finds that India shot itself in the leg with a strange legislation whose only purpose was to scare away potential reactor suppliers. India passed a Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010 with stringent rules of compensation by the supplier in case of an accident attributable to negligence on their part. Even before reactors could be purchased and built, an extensive redressal system was put in place. In case of an incident, the reactor operator could sue the supplier if the incident was as a consequence of an act of the supplier which includes supply of equipment or service with patent or latent defects. No other country had stipulated such conditions for reactor purchases. When no supplier from the US, France or Russia was willing to enter into a contract on these terms, the government diluted the provisions. Supplier liability was then limited to the warranty period and capped at a fixed sum of Rs. 1500 crores. The book includes details of reactor negotiations with GE, Westinghouse and Areva. GE backed out due to the liability act while the others were mired in financial difficulties and bankruptcy. With the Fukushima reactor accident in 2011, many countries in the world chose to turn away from nuclear energy.

This book handles the issue of ‘credible minimum deterrent’ (CMD) in some detail which is the basis of India’s nuclear policy. This document states that India won’t use nuclear weapons first. But if it was attacked by nuclear weapons at home or wherever its troops are, it would retaliate with nuclear weapons to inflict an unacceptable damage on the enemy. A nuclear deterrent arsenal is required to convince the enemy of the stupidity of launching a first strike. The extent of the unacceptable damage is estimated and redundancy is added to arrive at the required number of warheads. However, the concept of deterrence necessarily assumes that the other side is rational who values human life. No deterrence is feasible against a suicidal jihadi group should one take over Pakistan as no amount of civilian deaths would deter them. Even Mao Zedong of China – may be only as a rhetoric – once declared that he was willing to sacrifice 300 million Chinese in a nuclear showdown with the US. The author then estimates that only two bombs are required as retaliation for a first strike on the major cities of Pakistan or China which would cause at least half a million deaths that is sufficient ‘unacceptable damage’. Hence he audaciously suggests just two bombs as sufficient CMD. This pittance is against thousands of nuclear warheads in China and hundreds in Pakistan. Why are our intellectuals so adamantly anti-national? The cold war arms race had accumulated around 60,000 warheads by both adversaries. The author suggests a ‘more is not better; less is enough’ principle. However, professionals in India’s nuclear technology front have outright rejected Rajaraman’s insinuations as ‘an amateurish oversimplification by a theoretical physicist unschooled in the complexities of nuclear technology’ (p.201). He then considers the delivery systems and concurs with the general view that the triad of delivery platforms such as land-based missiles (the Agni series), sea-based missiles from nuclear submarines and release from fighter jets. Assuming that many of them might be shot down by missile defence systems, conservative analysts feel that even 100-odd warheads will not be sufficient to arm the triad for ensuring minimum deterrence.

However cleverly one may play brinkmanship, the chance of getting struck by a nuclear bomb in a busy city cannot be entirely ruled out. This can also happen by accident or equipment malfunction even if not by intent. Rajaraman raises awareness of the requirement of a civil nuclear defence and complains that India has still not developed a system. The US had implemented several measures in the 1950s but the American civil defence was not revived once they petered out by the 1960s. Nobody finds it attractive enough to spend a lot of money on something that may never be used. The American public and government lost interest in maintaining such a high level of preparedness for an event that didn’t seem to be happening. Besides this may not even be practical in India because of the incredibly short time of response available to a missile launch from Pakistan. A nuclear device shot against India from the Sargodha air force base in Pakistan would reach Delhi in just six minutes! This book also hints that the Indian government should have conducted a referendum before going nuclear in 1998 because it was an existential issue for the public. Here again, he is demanding something from India which no other country had done before. In fact, this is an existential issue more for the author as his research, seat in international consultative bodies and stature are solely linked to his anti-nuclear stance. However, he is not much concerned about countries other than India possessing nuclear weapons.

An original idea which is fully explained in the book is estimating the casualty figures in case of a nuclear attack on an Indian metropolis. Based on international consensus charts, the author makes ballpark estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the event of a nuclear bomb exploding in various neighbourhoods of Delhi. This makes for sickening reading, but we must accept that it is a risk we have to contend with while living next door to our arch enemy who was willing to eat grass to get nuclear weapons. Rajaraman describes about the numerous international conferences on nuclear issues he had attended around the globe. Some photographs are included which do not go above the level of ‘selfies’. Many of these meetings were pointless exercises of academic-turned activists helping each other to make an item of expense acceptable to an auditor of the grants received by them. Many of them are simple gatherings of self-appointed arms control ‘experts’ running on liberal funding by American NGOs. The author’s criteria for evaluating the ‘success’ of such meetings verge on the comical. His estimate of the utility of such conferences is represented in such remarks as ‘they were attended by unprecedented number of heads of states’, ‘the set of invitees was very inclusive’, ‘the proceedings were very cordial’ etc. He has also shared the response of the official Indian delegation upon meeting him on the sidelines of such global meets. The officials considered him only as a rabble-rouser and won’t even talk to him even if he made an initiative to walk over to their seats to make a self-introduction. Reports of two such incidents are recorded in the book. International NGOs usually rank India very low in their much-trumpeted-yet-totally-worthless global indices. One such scheme is the Nuclear Security Index where India’s position is just two slots from the bottom. Rajaraman admits that this is due to the prejudice of the adjudicating members who are resentful of India not joining the NPT and peeved at its getting away from the consequences of the 1998 tests with a nuclear deal from the US.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star