June 1, 1998

Given India's minimum deterrent posture, estimates show that inducting nuclear warheads will have a negligible impact on defence spending.

By Manoj Joshi

Listen to the prophets of doom and it seems that nuclear weapons will soon destroy India, not by their use but by their cost. In addition to warheads, India must now establish a missile force to deliver such weapons, a secure place to locate them as well as a system for their command and control.

According to G. Balachandran, a defence analyst, this process could raise the country's existing estimated annual Rs 40,000 crore defence-related spending, among the lowest in the region (see chart) by 3 per cent at most. He says that even a fast-track approach of constructing a force of 20 Agnis, 20 Prithvis their mobile basing, and a command and control system within five years would not exceed Rs 5,000 crore. Even this figure could be reduced if the Ministry of Defence restructures the way the armed forces are organised and equipped in the light of India's induction of the "doomsday" weapons into its armoury.

According to P.K. Iyengar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and the man behind Pokhran I, the cost of each warhead is "less than Rs 1 crore", as against the estimate of Rs 4 crore made by former army chief General K. Sundarji in 1996. Vice-admiral K.K. Nayyar, who participated in a secret mid-'80s study on the impact of nuclear weaponisation, estimates costs to be of the order of Rs 4,000 crore per year because he adds the cost of five nuclear-propelled submarines to be produced over the next 10 years.

In the public mind the massive costs of nuclear weapons programmes are associated with the arsenals of the United States and Russia which had tens of thousands of warheads deployed globally. In the '50s and '60s, China paid an estimated $4.1 billion for its somewhat smaller force estimated today to number around 300 warheads, minus, of course, the missile programme which came later. Information now public indicates that South Africa spent $200 million (Rs 800 crore) for making seven warheads virtually from scratch -- from ore to milling, enrichment, maching and fabrication. According to Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) Director Jasjit Singh, similar costs have been given for Pakistan's bomb programme by former Pakistan Army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg.

The reason for the low cost of the Indian programme is that many of the facilities and institutions for a credible deterrent force have been set up over the past decades. In some cases the costs have already been "sunk," as in the case of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). In other cases, they are embedded in programmes that have no direct military relevance. Separating such "embedded" costs is not easy. Plutonium for bombs is a by-product of the metal processed for making electric power from one of India's nuclear reactors. The Agni's first stage comes from the civilian space programme as it is the same as the first stage of the SLV-3 rocket. Iyengar says only some 2 per cent of the manpower from BARC has been used in the bomb programme.

When India began to think of nuclear weapons after China's 1964 test, economics rather than politics shaped its decisions. The then IDSA director, K. Subrahmanyam, estimated in 1968 that the smallest weapons deterrence program would cost up to $15 billion over 10 years. Those were sums simply not available, so he suggested a staggered scheme to give India a balanced weapon production capability at a later stage. Though slowed down by US sanctions after its first nuclear test in May 1974, India continued to add to its capabilities. A key development was the construction of the Dhruva research reactor at BARC, which is the source of India's weapons' grade plutonium.

Conditioned by economic realities and the experience of the nuclear "haves", Indian thinking has been to advocate a "minimum deterrent" posture. In 1994, Subrahmanyam argued for a force of 60 warheads carried on 20 Agnis, 20 Prithvis and the rest on aircraft and put the additional cost of this force at Rs 1,000 crore over the next 10 years. Two years later, Sundarji arrived at a figure of Rs 2,760 crore -- Rs 600 crore for 150 warheads, Rs 360 crore for 45 Prithvis and Rs 1,800 crore for 90 Agni missiles. Looking at the three estimates, and with no current official figures available, Nayyar's figure of Rs 4,000 crore per annum does not seem too unreasonable. Costs in 1998, as Balachandran points out, are likely to be lower, as indeed the warhead count which may not exceed 60.

But is a small force adequate to meet the needs of India's security against countries like China which possess over 300 nuclear warheads? As Sundarji puts it, "More is not better if less is enough for nuclear deterrent." There is need therefore for a force that will be "survivable", meaning it has to be based on railways tracks or deep in mountain silos or on board nuclear-propelled submarines. India would also have to bolster its air defence with a good airborne early warning system consisting of satellites and aircraft. The view today is that no country would risk attacking another country with nuclear arms unless it is sure it can destroy 100 per cent of its forces. Since no general can give such a guarantee, no one would be willing to pay the price of suffering the nuclear devastation of even one city.

As the government begins its budget exercise (see related story), it realises that inserting the cost, no matter how small, into the defence budget is not simple. The armed forces have been forced to go slow in their modernisation for 10 years -- the air force has hundreds of obsolete fighters, most of the army's tanks would not survive in the battlefield, and the forces do not have enough anti-aircraft guns and missiles, while counter-insurgency operations make their own demands on the defence budget. The armed forces will naturally not oppose the induction of nuclear weapons, yet they will certainly be affected if they are made to share their existing budget with the additional costs required for inducting the weapons into the arsenal.

Part of the problem can be overcome if the government moves fast to order the armed forces to reformulate their defence strategy and their structure in the light of India's overt nuclear weapons capacity. Adding the costs of nuclear weapons to that of a sprawling and inefficient military-industrial complex would be the poorest option. The government today has the opportunity to reform this colossus and rid it of excess manpower, inefficient ordnance factories and establishments. Imaginatively done, the process could ensure that the country gets the biggest bang for its limited bucks.

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