Several weeks ago, I penned an article for The National Interest arguing that, in hindsight, India’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons has proven to be a strategic blunder. I based this argument on the grounds that, while domestic and ideational factors are needed to explain the precise trajectory of India’s nuclear program, the original impetus for pursuing them was to address the threat that China posed to Delhi in the aftermath of the 1962 border war and Beijing’s nuclear test two years later.

I argued that this was a strategic miscalculation. While nuclear weapons are the strongest deterrent ever invented for strategic and existential threats, China only posed a limited threat to India, primarily along their shared border. Nuclear weapons are ill-suited to deterring low-level threats, and they have unsurprisingly not stopped China from continuing to challenge India in the border region.

On the other hand, India’s nuclear acquisition prompted Pakistan to pursue its own arsenal, negating Delhi’s massive conventional superiority over Islamabad. Consequently, India has found it difficult to respond to Pakistan’s support of proxy terrorist attacks against Delhi. In the final estimation then, India’s nuclear arsenal has done little to address the China threat, while it has weakened its position vis-à-vis Pakistan.

Earlier this month, Dhruva Jaishankar, an India and South Asia expert at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC, responded with his own piece for The National Interest ostensibly refuting my thesis. Jaishankar is a top-notch analyst (see his work in The Indian Express, India Ink, and The Diplomat). Surprisingly, Jaishankar’s piece mostly provided additional examples that reinforced my argument. To be sure, that wasn’t his intention. After summarizing my thesis, Jaishankar argues that “this assessment stems from a fundamental misreading of India’s threat environment and strategic intent, the absence of certain key facts, and the obscuring of context.”

However, to demonstrate this he begins by conceding my point that India’s nuclear weapons have failed to address Chinese threats along the border. Indeed, as he points out, China’s claims to the border region have if anything expanded at various times since India demonstrated a nascent nuclear capability in 1974. For instance, China became more forceful in asserting its interests in 1985 as its conflict with the Soviet Union began to thaw and, subsequently, Chinese border excursions have become both more frequent and more brazen, in the context of Beijing’s growing conventional superiority. In fact, Delhi’s arsenal has apparently failed to prevent China from seizing 640 kilometers of the border region from India.

Jaishankar next criticizes my failure to discuss China’s nuclear assistance to Pakistan in my piece, which he characterizes as a “glaring” omission. While this grossly overstates the magnitude of this error, there is no denying that including a discussion of China’s assistance to Pakistan would have enhanced the piece, given how well it illustrates India’s strategic blunder.

As
declassified U.S. government documents show, Washington became concerned with Pakistan and China’s growing security ties in the mid-to-late 1960s, during the Johnson administration. Notably, during this period the U.S. government was only concerned about conventional military weaponry cooperation such as China selling Type 59 medium tanks and MIG-19 jets to Pakistan. It wasn’t until the middle to late 1970s, under the Carter administration, that U.S. officials first began expressing concern that the Chinese were assisting Pakistan’s nuclear program, which was confirmed in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. This timeline is consistent with independent analyses.="#9">="#9">

Whereas China and Pakistan’s substantial cooperation didn’t extend to the nuclear realm in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it did begin in this area during the late 1970s and expanded in the 1980s and early 1990s. One reason for this was that Pakistan’s interest and pursuit of nuclear weapons had begun in the first half of the 1970s, and Western nations began instituting stricter export controls over nuclear technology in the late 1970s. Still, the crucial event that gave rise to Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation was India’s own “peaceful nuclear test” in 1974.

This peaceful nuclear test was particularly crucial in shaping Chinese attitudes towards assisting Pakistan in the nuclear realm. As the U.S. embassy in Beijing would reflect in a cable, “The Chinese do not want to see the Pakistani program provoke a full-scale nuclear arms race with New Delhi. That being said, Beijing views the Pakistani program as primarily defensive in nature, a logical response to India's 1974 explosion of a ‘peaceful nuclear device’ and perhaps a check to what the Chinese perceive to be Indian ‘hegemonism’ in South Asia.”

Curiously, Jaishankar argues, “In fact, Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons with Chinese assistance proved an impetus for India’s nuclear-weapon pursuit, not the other way around.” This seems odd, to the say the least, given that Indian officials were openly debating nuclear weapons in the aftermath of China’s nuclear test in 1964, and at that time authorized what would be a decade long project that culminated in a “peaceful nuclear test” in 1974, years before China’s nuclear assistance to Pakistan had even been discussed.

Next, Jaishankar takes offense to my “gross oversimplication” that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has frustrated India’s attempts to retaliate or respond to the numerous large-scale terrorist attacks conducted against India by Pakistani proxies. As he notes, “Pakistani adventurism directed at India was not enabled by a nuclear deterrent, but in fact predated it.” As proof, he cites Pakistan’s use of irregular forces in Kashmir immediately after independence, in 1965 and in 1989.

Admittedly, in my piece I did not spell out that Pakistan had used proxy attacks before India’s nuclear acquisition, and instead assumed that the reader would have a basic understanding of recent South Asian history. At the same time, I most certainly did not say that Pakistan hadn’t used proxy forces against India before a situation of Mutual Assured Destruction developed between Delhi and Islamabad.

My argument in the piece was that before MAD gripped the subcontinent, Delhi had a viable means of retaliating against such incidents, and it indeed often utilized it. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has, thus far at least, largely eliminated India’s ability to retaliate to these attacks.

Consider that, in response to Pakistan’s Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir in 1965, India not only repelled the infiltrators but also invaded Pakistan. Although India’s military was in a sorry state at that time, its inherent numerical superiority allowed it to seize more than three times the amount of territory in Pakistan that Islamabad seized in India. While taking notable losses of its own, it inflicted heavy losses against a much smaller Pakistani force that could ill afford it. In any case, by the time a UN ceasefire was agreed to—Pakistan had jumped at the opportunity to get out of the war but India wasn’t quite so keen at first— the Indian military had Lahore completely encircled.

In contrast to its past record of invading Pakistan when Islamabad stirred up trouble in Kashmir, India has not mounted a military response to much more brazen attacks against it in recent years, such as the 2001 bombing of the Indian parliamentary building in Delhi, and Pakistan proxies holding the entire city of Mumbai hostage for days in 2008. It’s difficult to explain this discrepancy in India’s responses by anything other than Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Furthermore, even though India bested Pakistan in their previous engagements during the Cold War, India’s conventional superiority over Pakistan is many times greater than it was during the second half the 20^th century. Consider that in 1965, Pakistan’s economy (including Bangladesh) was about one-fifth the size of India’s; by 2011 it was about 9 percent. Furthermore, as late as 1988, Pakistan was spending $4.21 billion (in constant 2011 USD) on defense each year, while India was spending $18.2 billion. By 2012, Pakistan was spending$6.9 billion a year on defense while India was spending nearly $50 billion. Moreover, in the 1965 war, Islamabad’s alliance with the U.S. meant its military forces were qualitatively superior to their Indian counterparts. Given the technology gap today, the idea of Pakistan maintaining a qualitative edge over India is laughable.

Jaishankar next tries to demonstrate that I ignored the context in which India’s nuclear decisions were made. As a corrective, Jaishankar argues that “Given its adverse security environment in the early 1990s, India’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as a deterrent against Chinese and Pakistani adventurism would have appeared not only wise but necessary” given the “relatively low costs of a nuclear program, a multilateral order that threatened to recognize China’s nuclear status in perpetuity while denying India entry, and an enabling domestic political environment.”

Most of these specific claims are either logically unsound—how did “an enabling domestic political environment” make it strategically wise to test nuclear weapons?—or just highly questionable on their merits. The bigger issue here is that, paradoxically, Jaishankar ignores the context in which India’s nuclear decisions were made.

Like many academics who seek to undermine realism’s explanatory value for nuclear proliferation, Jaishankar is essentially asking us to evaluate India’s nuclear calculus solely on basis of its decision to test the nuclear weapons it already built in 1998. But this would require ignoring the thirty-five years prior to 1998, when Indian policymakers made the hundreds if not thousands of consequential decisions that are required to build nuclear weapons. In other words, it would be trying to explain the strategic rationale behind the program through a single tactical decision.