China–India Nuclear Rivalry in the 'Second Nuclear Age'

In the last quarter century, Asia has become home to four modernizing nuclear weapon powers (China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) and is now the epicenter of the “second nuclear age.” There is a growing belief that China and India’s growing geopolitical rivalry in the Indo-Pacific region alongside their efforts to build diverse and sophisticated deterrent forces could potentially produce security dilemmas and arms race spirals similar to the one that enveloped the superpower rivalry during the Cold War. Although the China–India rivalry has received serious attention from scholars, the nuclear competition in their relationship has not. As a result, large gaps exist in our understanding of the China–India nuclear equation. This Insight expands our understanding of the China–India nuclear relationship by incorporating standard bean counting practices with Chinese and Indian thinking on nuclear weapons. It reviews the open source literature on the evolving view of national security managers in both countries on operational planning concerning the deployment and use of nuclear weapons. More specifically, this Insight examines the convergences and divergences between civilian and military policy planners, the contending logics behind their approaches, the contradictions that remain unresolved, and the areas of ambiguity that spell uncertainty in operational policy. It concludes on the basis of the available data that although there is reason for concern, the case for nuclear pessimism in the China–India nuclear dyad is overstated

Teaching The Leviathan Secrecy Ignorance & Nuclear Proliferation

When compared to other nuclear weapon powers why has India historically lagged in the development, deployment, and operational planning of its nuclear force despite unambiguous national security threats? My dissertation answers this question through a cross-sectional study of three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making from 1980 until 2010. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, which combines insights from New Institutionalism, organization theory and Cognitive Psychology with historical process tracing and elite interviewing methods, I argue that there are two interrelated causes for the Indian state’s historic underperformance: (a) the absence of a strongly institutionalized “epistemic community” within the state; and (b) the absence of shared policy-planning and decision-making processes. The first cause is institutional while the second is organizational. I show that epistemic communities as knowledge brokers are necessary for socializing a state’s decision-makers into new learning practices. For learning to occur, epistemic communities must also operate in relatively open and non-monopolistic policy planning and decision-making environments. The latter reduce the scope for heuristics and cognitive biases and are conducive for relatively rational and optimal policy outcomes. I present evidence to show that Indian decision-makers partially mobilized a national security-centric “epistemic community” in the pre-1998 era; and only slowly institutionalized it within the state in the post-1998 decade. These base conditions when grafted on to highly centralized, compartmentalized and monopolistic policy planning and decision-making processes, attenuated the Indian state’s policy capacity. The net result has been policy outcomes riddled with heuristic and cognitive biases alongside the weak actualization of instituted policies

Why India’s Post-1998 Evolution as a Conventional Nuclear Weapons Power Evokes Surprise

Twenty years after India formally staked claims to nuclear weapons power status its nuclear trajectory evokes surprise. The first element of surprise concerns the nature of India’s arsenal, which is operational in the field and not recessed or hidden in the basement. The surprise’s second element concerns the arsenal’s ambitious scope, which is shaping into a triad with an extraregional strike capability. This article tackles the underlying assumptions that are baked into the dominant scholarly discourses on India’s nuclear history, particularly discourses on nuclear symbolism, norms, strategic culture, and institutions. It critically analyzes these discourses to show that the prestige and symbolism discourse infers motives from evidence that is ambiguous. The claim that Indian leaders in the two decades prior to 1998 were normatively disinclined to favor nuclear weaponization is empirically incorrect. Likewise, the thesis that India’s strategic culture disfavors operational nuclear forces is based on a selective and biased reading of the available evidence. Finally, scholars have overstated India’s historic civil-military institutional dysfunction. Because the above discourses have dominated our understanding of India’s nuclear politics, the subsequent developments appear unexpected and surprising