The Indian nuclear program was started in the mid-forties, around the time it gained independence from over two centuries of British rule, and soon after the United States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Both these factors had a powerful impact on Indian leaders, who saw India's technological backwardness and military inferiority as the main causes of colonization over two centuries ago. It was therefore natural that India would also follow the dominant power at the end of the Second World War, the United States, which relied on nuclear technology for energy as well as defense.
From the very beginning, the Indian nuclear program was ambitious and envisaged having indigenous capability for covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Over the years, apart from nuclear reactors, India also developed facilities for mining Uranium, fabricating fuel, manufacturing heavy water, reprocessing spent fuel to extract Plutonium and, more recently, enriching Uranium.
During the early years, though only a part of the infrastructure needed to manufacture nuclear weapons was in place, the program never lost sight of the possibility that the facilities constructed and expertise gained could be used for military purposes.
The strategy used, perhaps not intentionally, were remarkably close to something that Robert Oppenheimer said in 1946 while responding to a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons. "We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: We would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the production of atomic weapons saying, this is just in case somebody two-times us; we would stockpile uranium; we would keep as many of our developments secret as possible; we would locate our plants, not where they would do the most good for the production of power, but where they would do the most good for protection against enemy attack."
Several countries, like the U.K., Canada and the U.S., offered technical help to India's fledgling nuclear program. The framework for U.S. aid was the Atoms for Peace program, initiated by Eisenhower to forestall criticism of the use of atomic energy for military purposes and to wean away third world countries from the Soviet Union.
As part of this initiative, the U.S. offered $80 million as a low interest loan towards the cost of the first Indian nuclear reactor at Tarapur, constructed by General Electric.
As it became clear that China was developing a nuclear bomb, there was even a proposal that the U.S. help India conduct a nuclear test.
In a 1961 memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, George McGhee, Director of the Policy Planning Council, suggested that assisting India to test a nuclear device first was one way to reduce the political impact of a Chinese bomb. Rusk did not approve this idea, in part, because India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was likely to reject it.
At the same time as the development of its nuclear infrastructure was going on, India under Nehru also tried to change the world so that it was not necessary to develop nuclear weapons.
As a champion of the non-aligned movement, Nehru had made several disarmament proposals. Prominent among them was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In a proposal dated April 8, 1954, he requested the nuclear weapon states to negotiate: "Some sort of what may be called `Standstill Agreement’, in respect at least, of these explosions, even if arrangements about the discontinuance of production and stockpiling must await more substantial agreements among those principally concerned."
The reactions to this proposal from the two superpowers of the day are worth recalling. The Soviet Union said that the proposal made sense only in the context of general and complete disarmament, a linkage that is even more ambitious than the one that India gave when it rejected the treaty in 1996.
The United States first said that the proposal was worth of "respectful attention." But Eisenhower, the president at that time, was soon persuaded by Lewis Strauss that a ban on nuclear explosions was not in the US interest.
Nevertheless, the proposal, coupled with worldwide concern about the dangers of radioactive fallout, galvanized opposition to testing. It resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
India was one of the first countries to sign it.
Despite the buildup of nuclear infrastructure, Nehru’s avowed opposition to nuclear weapons as well as India’s recent history of non-violent struggle for independence under Mahatma Gandhi, ensured that there was never any support for developing nuclear weapons.
Three events mark the shift in India’s nuclear program during the early sixties. The first was the completion of a reprocessing plant at Trombay and the CIRUS research reactor, which gave India the ability to extract plutonium and thus to make nuclear weapons. The second was the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. While encouraging the development of a militarily capable nuclear infrastructure, Nehru had always opposed explicit weaponization. The third event was the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964, barely two years after India lost the border war with China.
In hindsight, the Chinese nuclear test was the most significant since the Chinese nuclear program allowed and has continued to allow the construction of a security rationale for the Indian nuclear program. With Nehru's death the most significant political opposition to an explicit nuclear weapons program had been removed.
Following the Chinese test, several influential individuals among the bureaucracy, political parties and intellectuals started arguing for India developing nuclear bombs. The chief arguments for developing nuclear weapons were largely based on the rationales used by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The "bomb lobby" argued that nuclear weapons are required to counter nuclear weapons, they guarantee security, and that they are relatively cheaper than conventional weapons and provide more destructive power.
The elite in India also identified having a nuclear bomb as a source of international prestige.
The first official policy decision shaped by this constellation of factors was at the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1967. After initial attempts to seek security assurances from the nuclear weapon states, India decided to vote against the treaty and argued against the its discriminatory aspects and pushed ahead with its nuclear program.
A little over a year after the NPT went into force, India and Pakistan fought their third war. During this war the US Seventh Fleet, led by the USS Enterprise, was sent into the Bay of Bengal. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State at the time, claimed the move was designed not only to 'assist' Pakistan, but also to 'back up the Chinese'.
For some Indian policy makers, however, the 1971 intrusion was a form of "gunboat diplomacy" – one that was possibly nuclear. This is regarded by some as a factor in the decision to conduct India’s first nuclear test.
The first Indian test was conducted on May 24, 1974. At that time, in order to try and limit negative international reaction, the Indian Prime Minister termed it a "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion." At that time, of course, this term was very much in vogue.
The U.S. was still pursuing its own series of PNEs under Project Ploughshares. The Soviet Union also had a similar program. The IAEA conducted several meetings on PNEs. Indian officials and policy makers now admit that the 1974 test was, in part, a bomb and that since then it has always been part of India's security calculus. For a variety of reasons, primarily domestic, India did not proceed with further nuclear tests after this.
We now know that there were a couple of attempts to carry out a test in the early eighties but they were called off. However, the eighties saw the establishment of a missile program that started delivering its first products around the end of the decade. The decision to induct these missiles into the Indian armed forces was made only in the early nineties.
Throughout this period, i.e. ever since the 1974 test, India maintained that it had demonstrated its capacity to build nuclear weapons should the need arise, but had chosen not to manufacture or deploy them. There were calls within the domestic debate, by what can be called the "bomb lobby" to proceed with these activities but they were not particularly popular.
It is only in the mid-nineties that we see the first shifts within the debate. This happened on the occasion of the question of what to do with the NPT when it came to the end of its 25 year life in 1995. Due to the complete failure of the Nuclear Weapon States to comply with their Article VI commitments under the NPT, the Non Nuclear Weapon-States seemed to be more inclined towards a rolling or definite-period extension.
The Nuclear Weapon-States, led by the US, forced through an indefinite extension of the NPT.
This provided grounds for a renewed campaign for nuclear weapons by the Indian bomb lobby who argued that the indefinite extension signaled that nuclear weapons were going to be around forever; therefore, India should either develop nuclear weapons or settle for permanent second-class status. To develop militarily use-able nuclear weapons India had to test.
Therefore it had to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
In international forums, as well as official circles, two main arguments were used against the CTBT. First, the CTBT was no longer a step towards disarmament as had always been envisioned. Indeed, the Nuclear Weapon-States viewed it as merely a measure that would, in the words of the head of the erstwhile Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the USA, "freeze countries on the nuclear learning curve."
Second, the CTBT did not really constrain the weapons development programs of the Nuclear Weapon-States, especially the U.S. The U. S. had started a multi-billion dollar Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program involving the construction of several facilities that could develop new weapons designs.
Further, the rationale for the Stockpile Stewardship Program was to ensure the US nuclear arsenal would remain functional for the foreseeable future, thus making it clear that the U.S. was not interested in nuclear disarmament.
India demanded that the CTBT be coupled to a time-bound program for nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Weapon-States were completely opposed to this. Quoting these reasons, India voted against the CTBT.
Despite refusing to sign the CTBT, the last two Indian Prime Ministers belonging to the center-left United Front party did not authorize nuclear tests.
This was left to the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The large number of tests with differing designs – a thermo-nuclear fusion weapon, a light weight fission weapon and three sub-kiloton tactical nuclear weapons – suggest that, unlike the 1974 explosion, these tests are intended to develop weapons for military purposes.
The Indian Prime Minister also stated that a Command and Control system was in place, thus making it clear that it is possible to deploy these weapons.
