7 July 2014
Lieutenant-General BS Nagal was an important man in India's nuclear weapons program. From 2008 to 2010 he served as India's Strategic Forces Commander, an office established just over a decade ago to lead the process of managing and using nuclear weapons. After his retirement from the military, Nagal was appointed head of a little-discussed nuclear cell within the Indian Prime Minister's Office. This cell reportedly sought to mimic Pakistan's own powerful nuclear secretariat, the Strategic Plans Division, a body I wrote about for the Interpreter last year (SeePakistan Gets a New Nuclear Weapons Chief). Nagal’s responsibilities included the development of 'a perspective plan for India’s nuclear deterrent in accordance with a 10-year cycle'.
In the June edition of India's defence and security themed Force magazine, Nagal has written a fascinating and somewhat critical essay on India's nuclear weapons titled Checks and Balances. His comments are noteworthy not just because of the positions he held and the general secrecy around India's nuclear weapons, but also because they come at a time when a public debate over India's nuclear weapons is, gradually, intensifying.
This debate has been catalysed by a variety of factors. These include Indian disquiet at Pakistan's development oftactical nuclear weapons, a widespread sense that India's nuclear deterrence has failed in the face of state-sponsored terrorism, concern that India's ability to project deterrence against China remains inadequate, and a general sense that India has been slow to translate its national power into usable capabilities.
Typically, only those at the fringe of this debate – the ultra-hawks – have proposed radical changes in India's nuclear policies, such as the resumption of testing or a shift to nuclear war-fighting doctrines. But a growing number of mainstream Indian voices – including former officials and military officers – are expressing dissatisfaction with India's nuclear doctrine, the first and only public version of which is now over a decade old. See, for example, the former civil servant PR Chari writing for the Carnegie Endowment in June, the April manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before it came to power this year, and articles such as those in The Hindu last week.
But it is fascinating to see an official who until recently was at the heart of Indian nuclear policies, in both military and civilian institutions, make such explicit criticisms of a doctrine with whose classified details he would be intimately familiar.
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