| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
That the chairman of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), Shyam Saran, has seen fit to provide reassurance about India's nuclear deterrent through the media (Indian Express 3 October 2013) is a long-overdue but very comforting gesture. While he rightly assails the sceptics who label India's nuclear deterrent as a measure of prestige rather than a security imperative, he spares the national-security establishment whose egregious silence over the past 15 years has allowed such doubts to take root and prosper.
It is true that a reduction of conventional forces, as many seem to expect, may not be an automatic consequence of the induction of nuclear weapons. However, it is also a fact that a nation's political and military postures as well as manner of conducting international relations must undergo substantive change on acquiring the status of a nuclear-weapon state (NWS). Not only has this not happened in India's case, but the structure of its conventional forces as well as their command & control systems and the pattern of its huge defence spending remain ad-hoc and haphazard; as if we are trapped in a debilitating time-warp.
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