Nuclear weapons make sense only in the strategic context. Understand the trends in India's geopolitics, discern the thinking behind it, weigh India's moves in the realm of grand-strategy, and the underlying logic and importance of a large and robust deterrent become clear. Hence, in the first part of this article, India's geo-strategics will be deconstructed. And in the concluding section, the disconnect between ends and means will be analysed and a case made to prove that a truncated nuclear deterrent India currently fields is manifestly incapable of realising the broad strategic aims it has set for itself.

Strategic Trends
A long overdue but, nevertheless, significant strategic development has all but escaped notice: A sea-change in India's threat perception and foreign policy outlook. Recently, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee surprised many by talking about 'New unexpected threats…constantly emerging in the neighbourhood' to an audience of the heads of police, para-military and Intelligence agencies without once attributing terrorism in Kashmir to Pakistan. A day later in his inaugural speech to the Annual Combined Armed Forces' Senior Commanders' Conference in New Delhi, the PM shook up many more by choosing to not delve at all on Pakistan as any kind of threat -- strategic, theatre-level or even tactical.

A sensible case has been made for many years now that for India to pack credibility as a would-be great power it needs to act its weight and size and see Pakistan for what it is, not a threat but a strategic nuisance. And that, to continue to fixate on Pakistan is for India to acquiesce in Islamabad's paring India down to its size and for New Delhi to wilfully engage in India's 'strategic reduction'. The Indian government apparently has got round to accepting this rational assessment of what India's policy should be, as the PM's recent statements indicate, a trend buttressed by Defence Minister George Fernandes' quite categorical view, expressed for the first time in these terms, that Pakistan 'is too small a country for us to be afraid of'. Indeed, and this may be the most far-reaching measure of all in terms seeding a more rational policy mindset, foreign service officers are being penalised (in terms of extension in service and promotion) for excessive anti-Pakistan-ism!

The change in New Delhi's attitude and threat perception may hurt Pakistani amour propre', but it is a realistic, albeit expansive, world-view that may help reach a satisfactory modus vivendi with Pakistan. It reflects India's growing self-confidence based on two trends: the quiet satisfaction, on the one hand, with the underway programme of thermonuclear and nuclear weaponisation and long range missile development coupled to the encomiums India has gathered from its growing reputation for 'responsible' nuclear state behaviour; and the equally heartening developments, on the other hand, in the high-technology, industrial and economic spheres, which have fleshed out what would otherwise have been merely strategic pretension. The outcome of these trends is a considerable enlargement of India's political space for manoeuvre.

The attitude that India can take on the toughest rivals is reinforced by reports of competence in cutting edge technology, with Andrew S. Grove, Chairman of Intel Corporation, for example, warning that India could surpass the United States in software and technology services sectors by as early as 2010; by evidence that China can be bested at its own export game as shown by India's running up of a trade surplus of some US$ 500 million with that country; and, by startling projections, such as those by the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs that suggest India will be a 27.8 trillion dollar economy, the third largest in the world (after China, at US$ 44.5 trillion, and the U.S. at US$ 35.2 trillion) by 2050.

With the country finally acquiring the wherewithal and showing the willingness to box in its correct weight-class, the strategic order New Delhi long ago traced out but, lacking the necessary muscle, kept in abeyance, is being dusted off. As, perhaps, the last Nehruvian to rule in Delhi, Vajpayee is not just recharging Jawaharlal's vision of India as the dominant player in the Indian Ocean region and, along with Russia and China, in Asia, but enhancing it.

What was an abstraction in Nehru's mind 50 years ago may be within the country's grasp to realise now and in the future: India as the crucial balancer forming along with the other principal actors - the United States, China, Russia, Japan, the European Union or (should occasion demand or opportunity afford itself) separately with its main constituents (France, U.K. and Germany), and rising regional states, like South Africa and Brazil (India's IBSA - India, Brazil, South Africa - economic initiative), and influential blocs, like ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), appropriate short-term strategic but situation-based coalitions to contain and defeat instances of economic sphere, the rogue big power of the moment, an inflammable regional conflict scenario, or a seemingly uncontrollable threat (like that posed by, say, radiation weapons in the hands of terrorists).

India's Geopolitical Design
In a world hurtling towards more, not less, violence, turmoil and uncertainty, an enduring security architecture necessitates a series of bilateral cooperative military relationships with countries in the near abroad as also with the more distant states, like China and the U.S., which could threaten India in the future. Over the last five years of the BJP government, what been observed is a revved up military diplomacy, with the Indian Navy at the cutting edge. Joint annual naval and joint arms exercises with proximal states on India's flanks -- Oman and several East African countries to the west, and Myanmar, Bangladesh, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines in the east and the south-east, and South Korea and Japan in the far-east, have firmed up, in a manner of speaking, an Indian commitment as a reliable counterpoise to China in South East Asia.

China's suspicions are sought to be doused by also exercising with its navy, an effective means of keeping Washington guessing about New Delhi's intentions. That this is a double-edged activity meant to gauge China's seaward capability and impress a potential adversary with India's naval reach and seagoing skills is a goal appreciated by the naval brass and the policymakers alike. For some of the same reasons, the need to impress Washington as a potential partner in peace-keeping in the extended region vide joint exercises with the U.S. involving air, land, sea and special forces, has wide currency.

The military component of foreign policy is more prominent now in New Delhi's approach to Central Asia as well. The bulging hard currency reserves amounting to some US$ 91 billion permit India the latitude of cultivating a region with historical ties with India and hence amenable to Indian ministrations. The opening so provided is being availed of to build up substantial military and economic assets. Indian presence has been successfully re-established in Afghanistan by collaborating with the U.S. and other Western powers in maintaining the Hamid Karzai regime in Kabul and, for the first time, a military 'foothold' too has been facilitated in the Central Asian expanse vacated by the former Soviet Union with the setting up of an Indian Air Force base in Ayni, 10 kms from the Tajikistan capital of Dushanbe. Such military out-reach is being underwritten by Indian investments particularly in the oil and gas sectors and direct grant-in aid and other forms of financial assistance to the local regimes. India's Oil and Natural Gas Commission Videsh Limited, for instance, already has a 15 percent and 10 percent stake respectively in the exploration of oil in the Alibekmola and Kurmangazi fields of Kazakhstan.

The idea is to get the Central Asian states in the coils of extensive and mutually beneficial economic and military cooperation so as to be able to influence the political and strategic thinking in those parts and, only, tertiarily to hedge in Pakistan -- an aim furthered by consolidating good relations with Iran and the Gulf states and pursuing a policy generally of projecting India as a benign military power. This last objective was conspicuously boosted when the government of Mozambique, whose navy regularly benefits from interactions with its Indian counterpart, specifically asked for Indian warships to patrol the seas off its coast by way of providing perimeter security for the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) Summit in mid-2003.

India may, in a sense, be 'returning to the future' by subscribing to the 'distant defence' concept for India, circa the 1810s. Lord Minto, the then British Governor-General, had premised the defence of India on the securing of friendly states in the large quadrant formed by the line going northwards up from the littoral of East Africa, the Gulf States, Iran (Persia) to the Caspian before turning east across the khanates of central Asia before dropping down east of the Malacca Straits and the Indonesian archipelago and then moving west into the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. A more recent articulation of such a security concept is the 'Indian Monroe Doctrine', which is a more India-centric view than the Asian 'Monroe Doctrine' proposed by Nehru in the 1950s to enable Asia to be secured by Asians.

And in the immediate neighbourhood, the obverse side of not seeing Pakistan as a substantive threat is Prime Minister Vajpayee's resolve to disallow regional ventures, mainly SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and SAFTA (South Asian Free Trade Association), from remaining hostage to Pakistan's obstructionism. India means to push for economic integration to the extent possible within these fora, but to achieve it through bilateral channels which have been very productive, if that is easier. New Delhi believes that it can win over individual subcontinental states traditionally fearful of India by offering irresistible economic attractions and incentives.

The prototype deal is the kind India signed with Bhutan, which allowed hydro-electric power stations to be set up in Bhutan with Indian money with the guaranteed off-take of all the power produced at attractive prices. Owing to this source of large and regular revenues at virtually no cost to itself, Bhutan's per capita income has jumped within a few years from almost negligible to the US$ 2000 plus level - among the highest in Asia! Eyeing this economic miracle, Nepal's long held reservations about tapping its hydro-electric resources to benefit itself and India seem to be diminishing and a comprehensive agreement is likely in a year or two.

Sri Lanka is the other success story from the Indian perspective. The Free Trade accord Colombo has with India is proving to be an economic bonanza for Sri Lanka and is the main reason why Bangladesh too has agreed to a similar agreement. Once 'free trade' benefits percolate down into Bangladeshi society, the psychological barriers against cooperating with India in other fields will come down. Transit rights for Indian goods to be carried on Indian rolling stock but on Bangladesh's permanent way, from West Bengal to the Indian North-East enabling Bangladesh to earn a hefty annual royalty, will be eased. And, the U.S. oil major Unocol's plan to develop gas fields in Bangladesh primarily for the Indian market, will take wings simply because gas in the ground will be of diminishing value, considering that Indian companies have struck huge oil and gas reserves offshore in the Bay of Bengal and will soon come on stream.

Pakistan may, in the event, find itself twiddling its thumbs on the fringes as other South Asian nations mesh their economies with India's and reap a windfall. Defiance of good economics, symbolised by Pakistan's purchase of coal from Australia for dollars when the same can be delivered literally at Pakistani factory doors by freight trains running from the Jharia coal fields in Jarkhand through Wagah into the heartland of Pakistani Punjab and the Rajasthan border into Sindh, has taken Pakistan as far politically as it can. More of the same will only encourage those forces within Pakistan propelling it towards the status of a 'failed' state.

While there is the occasional relapse by New Delhi into atavism, as in its continuing disapproval of the overland gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan just because it will fetch Pakistan a billion dollar fee annually at a time when it is seen to be supporting terrorists in Kashmir, the over-riding conviction is that neighbouring states will ultimately act in their own self-interest and plug into India's 'Big Emerging Market' even as New Delhi will do what it can to smooth out this transition. This has led, for example, to New Delhi's green-lighting the gauge conversion on the Indian side of the Munabao-Khokrapar rail link. New Delhi expects economic logic to push Pakistan's rulers into giving up their, by and large, synthetic hostility (which is what Indian politicians too have been stoking) and to make peace with minimum political discomfort to both sides and little redrawing of maps.

Given the politico-military and economic buoyancy, New Delhi has so far been fairly adept in siding with this or that side mostly to benefit itself, while hewing to its ideological slant on a concert of democracies. This last has covered, in the main, the warming of relations with the United States and with Israel. It has given enough indication that it wouldn't mind being part of a collective effort to ring China (like its support for U.S. national missile defence), but now and again hints at joining France, China and Germany to thwart American hegemony, unilateralism and over-reaching ambition to order the world in its own image and run it largely to advance American interests. Elsewhere, it took the lead, along with Brazil and China, to frustrate the U.S. and the Western Combine in the global trade talks at Cancun.

But the U.S. ire is being blunted by indirect means, like relying on Israel as a premier supplier of military goods which, in turn, ensures that the legion of Israel-friendly U.S. Congressmen and Senators will not pass laws hurtful to Indian interests. This is achieved also by more direct instrumentalities to proactively negate restrictions on trade by diverting a goodly part of it into regional Free Trade Areas installed as alternative. Other than SAFTA, India, emulating China, is forging free trade agreements with 'the little dragons' of South East Asia and the Far East - Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and even Taiwan (which last is also the 'Taipei card' New Delhi has up its sleeve to play against China should the situation so warrant).

Imperatives in a Harsh World
But there's a point beyond which India's economic prowess, technological capability and agile foreign policy will be of no avail in the harsh dog-eat-dog world of sovereign states where survival is as much a function of size, resilience and one's realpolitik orientation as the Big Bomb in its armoury. With the five Non-proliferation Treaty-recognised nuclear weapons states - the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France - pledged to rely on their nuclear arsenals in perpetuity and to constantly upgrade them, and with Washington going further and unveiling its doctrine of strategic pre-emption and preventive war and its policy of 'regime change' that Russia and France have indicated they will emulate, the danger most countries face to their sovereignty in the post-cold war era, is less from their relatively weak neighbours than from the militarily powerful states.

The twin requirements, policy-wise, for any major international player, which India aspires to become, are therefore a realpolitik approach and a policy based on raison d'etat principles first enunciated by the Cardinal Richelieu in the early 17th Century whereby national interest justified all, any and every twist and turn in national policy however radical these may seem. In the U.S. the second idiom is referred to as 'playing hard ball'. Curiously, in this respect the Vajpayee led coalition government is merely returning to the realist path trod by the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted India to acquire nuclear weapons for the same reasons other 'second tier' countries - the United Kingdom, France and China, did - great power standing, status and prestige, political leverage, military heft, and 'strategic independence'.

From the beginning, the standard politico-military objectives of nuclear weapons - deterrence, dissuasion, and as means of countering intimidation and coercion/compellance - were presumed to be served and, in any case, were not specifically voiced. But after the humiliating military defeat in the short war in the Himalayas in 1962, these became the guiding principles and China centrally the threat to try and neutralise. China has retained its primacy in the Indian threat calculus to this day, as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's letter leaked to The New York Times by the Clinton White House in the wake of the 1998 tests, attested.

A Flawed Deterrence
But unlike Nehru, Vajpayee and his close advisers, are yet to appreciate the political utility of a fully developed thermonuclear arsenal as leverage and instrument to shape the strategic objectives of small and big powers alike, and thereby to change the 'correlation of forces' arrayed against India to its advantage. Thus, the Indian government has chosen so far to retread the policy post-1974 test after the 'Shakti' series of tests in May 1998, and voluntarily forsake further testing, in effect once again freezing Indian weaponisation on the low end of the learning curve.

This is notwithstanding the fact that grave doubts have been evinced by the scientific and strategic communities in India and abroad after the tests about whether in fact the Indian hydrogen bomb and the tritium-boosted weapon design worked as they were supposed to. The reasons for this predictable lapse into inaction have been plumbed elsewhere by this writer along with a deconstruction of the cultural, bureaucratic and military milieu in which Indian nuclear policy and thinking have evolved over the last five decades and will not be gone into here at any length.

Suffice to say, however, that the reasons are a mix, among other things, of traditional complacence and an incorrect reading of Nehru's 'Janus faced' nuclear policy which set the weapons programme on its course, leading to confusion about its end-state. This has eventuated in a system of 'deterrence by half-measures' emphasising a de-alerted posture and de-mated weapons systems that are trifurcated into the nuclear core or the 'pit', the weapon assembly and the delivery system, each being kept separate from the others.

The Indian nuclear policy disregards the main lesson from the first fifty years of the nuclear age: that international and regional peace and stability is best maintained when an upcoming power, like India, does not allow severe asymmetry to grow between its nuclear arsenal and that of the inventories of the big powers, especially China. In practical terms this means India's urgently acquiring a force with maximum yield and reach featuring advanced tritium-boosted fission weapons of 100 kiloton (KT) yield for theatre use, megaton thermonuclear warheads/bombs to equip land and sea-based intercontinental range ballistic missiles, ICBM-firing submarines and long-range strategic bombers, and neutron weapons and sub-kiloton tactical weapons for battlefield and specialised use. It also requires India to follow up this force build-up by doing as the Americans, Chinese and every other 'recognised' nuclear weapon state have done (as different from what they prescribe for others) - keep a goodly portion of its nuclear force in a launch-ready state.

Such an accelerated nuclear force build-up is an imperative for the obvious reason that India is not North Korea. It is both extremely risk-averse and concerned about safeguarding its reputation as a 'responsible' nuclear weapon. This rules out the possibility of its resiling from commitment to No-First-Use principle or indulging, a 'la North Korea, Pakistan and China, in the covert and overt selling of sensitive nuclear and missile technologies to any country that wants them in return for cash and/or influence. A megaton thermonuclear-ICBM based force in situ as the acme of defensive posturing, in a sense, will act as prophylactic against both the habitual indecisiveness of the Indian government in a crisis and spare the political leadership the hard decisions that would otherwise have to be made about if, when and how to retaliate after absorbing an enemy first strike, etc. because the sheer size of the deliverable megatonnage of destruction would prevent even the most powerful states from contemplating an attack or from doing anything to force India into a crisis mode when the use of such megapolis-busting weapons becomes probable.

Nuclear deterrence is, after all, a mind game that relies primarily on the psychological impact of prospective destruction. The more the wherewithal is seen as capable of delivering mega-destruction, the greater the degree of caution that will be induced in the minds of any would-be aggressor. A small and un-deployed deterrent, on the other hand, can be more easily challenged because the impression this nuclear order-of-battle makes is not as daunting, and countries with superior conventional and nuclear forces might fancy their chances of pre-emptively destroying a puny Indian nuclear arsenal.

The dawn of the new millennium was not, realistically-speaking, expected to change the basic international reality in which consequential nuclear arsenals define the limits of national power, elevate a country's status and increase its political clout and leverage. This being the case, it is only pragmatic for New Delhi to proceed, with a certain urgency to acquire the full panoply of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons by way of extensive, iterative, nuclear testing of proven as well as new nuclear and thermonuclear weapons designs, of whole and its critical parts, along with those of the proposed delivery systems, specifically intercontinental range ballistic missiles.

But New Delhi seems prey to many tangible and intangible fears among them, in recent years, that of upsetting the U.S. This is a disabling factor and has kept the country from pursuing even legitimate defensive nuclear goals and cobbling together an appropriate deterrent. The alleged benefits from Western technology transfers and capital and credit flows and the negative consequences of being denied the same have shaped the Indian government's thinking. This flies in the face of New Delhi's own claims that the economic sanctions imposed by the West after the 1998 tests had virtually no effect on the Indian economy and, indeed, that unintended good was done by the technology denial regime in that certain critical technologies were developed indigenously during this period. It is also to be entirely unmindful of the dangers inherent in the U.S. policy articulated by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage of using 'defence trade controls' described by him 'as an important element of (American) foreign policy' to enhance U.S's, 'overall security goals'.

While cutting edge technologies will not be permitted to be exported to India, lesser technologies and systems that can be readily purchased elsewhere - could, in fact, be transferred in drips and drabs to keep India hooked on the promises of better stuff to come just so long as the Indian government does not breach the understanding, for instance, to remain below the large-yield thermonuclear-ICBM capability threshold. This is imprudent policy. The awareness among senior Cabinet Ministers of the signal- lack of strategic focus, weak-heartedness and mental lassitude of the government - the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, for example, declared at a prestigious public forum that 'To act may be risky, but inaction is disastrous' - has not, however, translated into reforms in the official nuclear outlook.

Precarious Security
Unless there is an overhaul of the current thinking, the security of the country will depend on a precariously configured deterrent in the new century. The Indian N-force comprises, other than several untested weapons designs and not fully field-tested intermediate-range missiles, mainly small numbers of small yield warheads atop short-range missiles and gravity bombs deliverable by equally short-legged fighter-bombers deployed in a disaggregated form. This may serve the purposes of the P-5 - the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom - because it simplifies their respective strategic threat calculus and affords each of them the edge in any potential politico-military confrontation with India. But it is not in India's interest to have its security hang by the slenderest of threads - a tiny, half-cocked, deterrent.

Instead of the country's nuclear posture being a response to large looming perils, a relatively minor strategic threat, Pakistan, is made to fit the rationale for an under-sized Indian deterrent. Manifestly strategic--use armaments are thus reduced to a tactical/theatre role. While a large and meaningful nuclear/thermonuclear inventory can indeed be brought to bear upon a pesky neighbour, the reverse is not true. A yield and reach-wise curtailed arsenal cannot perform extended theatre-level, leave alone truly strategic, missions. In the event India is rendered incapable of deterring the two countries most likely to militarily threaten or politically intimidate and pressure it on a host of issues in the future, namely, China and the United States of America. After all, as a leading American political scientist, John J. Mearshimer, has concluded in his recent study, great powers are naturally revisionist and 'primed for offence'. Indeed, sinologists even compare the China of today to the resurgent and dangerous Germany of past eras.

In any conflict with China, therefore, India can expect to face a 400 plus nuclear warheads/weapons-strong force with one megaton hydrogen bomb as standard-issue warhead for its IRBMs (DF-21s) targeted at this country. The spectre of megaton consequences of a nuclear exchange will be sufficient to self-deter New Delhi and push it towards capitulation. This will be truer still if the U.S. were involved considering it has at hand a far more advanced and lethal nuclear destructive power yoked to quite extraordinary conventional military capability for pre-emption.

The most substantive raison d'etre for India going nuclear - the immanent threats posed by these two states - has been fatally undermined by India's restricting itself to so minimum a deterrent as to be virtually defenceless against any nuclear weapon state other than Pakistan. This deterrent posture, reflecting the Indian government's traditionally wary and self-abnegatory attitude in the nuclear realm, has prevented the accrual to the country of genuine 'strategic autonomy' (which is officially touted, with a fair bit of exaggeration, as one of the positive outcomes of India acquiring a nuclear deterrent), of increased political manoeuvring space and of enhanced political leverage that a consequential large yield thermonuclear force with intercontinental reach at its command would have naturally fetched it.

For instance, it has weakened the nuclear military underpinning for its new 'Look East' policy stiffened in recent years with some adroit naval diplomacy, because the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) members and Vietnam cannot possibly rely on a nuclear-wise marginal India to keep a militarily advanced and aggressive China at bay. Indeed, the latter's accelerated build-up of nuclear ballistic missile firing submarines and intercontinental range ballistic missiles aimed at keeping Washington in check when it comes to any interventionary activity in the region (on the side of Taiwan, etc.).

Having achieved this objective, it stands to reason that China will find little to deter it from playing an even more intrusive role in South East Asia and otherwise, singly or jointly with Pakistan, to hedge India's options in the extended southern Asian region by, for instance, absorbing Bangladesh into its security system. As it is, without a strong Russia to the north and west to worry about, China feels free to focus on India and Japan in Asia and the extra-regional hegemonic power, the United States. India's nuclear reticence combined with China's outward thrusting policy has already gained for the latter tremendous leeway in South East Asia. It has forced the ASEAN members, for example, to make their separate, unequal, peace with Beijing resulting in the firming up of a Chinese sphere of economic and political influence in the region astride the Malacca Straits crucial to vital Indian national security interests.

However, the worst consequence of the large void in Indian strategic nuclear capability generated by a short-sighted policy of deliberately keeping the Indian nuclear arsenal emaciated, is that it permits Pakistan to enjoy by default a modicum of nuclear parity. The Pakistan weapons inventory too, in the manner of its Indian counterpart, is limited, size and quality-wise, besides being handicapped by a similar deployment pattern. New Delhi's incomprehensible reluctance to rapidly advance up the nuclear value chain by going megaton thermonuclear-ICBM and instead stuttering and stopping midway has eventuated, as far as Islamabad is concerned, in the levelling of the playing field. It has realised for Pakistan where nuclear forces are concerned what it enjoys in the conventional military field - an operational balance, which effectively stymies the taking of any Indian nuclear or even conventional military initiative.

This is, perhaps, why in the summer of 2002 Major General Rashid Qureishi, the spokesman for President Pervez Musharraf's government, mocked New Delhi's decision for 'mobilisation' and pooh-poohed the possibility of this leading to 'general war'. And why, high officers of the Pakistan Army perceive the Indian government's backing down and 'redeploying' its forces from the frontline as their 'victory'. In other words, India by its own actions on the nuclear/thermonuclear weaponisation front has managed something quite extraordinary for a potentially major nuclear weapon state, which is to be at once neutralised by its putative great power adversaries as well as by its minor, sub-continental, foe!

Maximising Deterrence
Certain fundamental axioms of maximising deterrence and political value of a nuclear force, I am afraid, have escaped the Indian government altogether. Among these are ;

(1) That nuclear force planning should be geared towards dealing with the inherent uncertainty of the future. The U.S. Under Secretary of State for arms control, John R. Bolton, for example, explained the necessity to prepare militarily for situations created by 'Uncertainty about the world [and] about the geo-strategic circumstances that (the U.S.) might face due to threats that we can't foresee.' This is sound advice and India should act on it, reflecting as it does less paranoia than common sense laced with caution, because as Bolton added, '…there's nothing inevitable in life…and that's what is inherent in the [national security] planning assumption.'

(2) For all practical purposes, however, this injunction translates into achieving the benchmark capability of being able to deter the strongest possible adversary. Such a force, moreover, will automatically take care of the lesser threats.

(3) This deterrent capability ought to be based, not so much on the most powerful adversary's intentions which can change at any time, but his existing and future military strength, which is normal premise for any military planning.

(4) Because a counter-strategic (or a meaningful retaliatory) capability against a hefty opponent with global presence will take relatively long to realise, it is prudent to obtain as highest priority at least a miniscule force of ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads credibly to make even the most powerful state think twice.

This is exactly what China did between 1964, when it conducted its first nuclear test, and 1967, by which time it had operationalised a handful of long range ballistic missiles with hydrogen warheads able to reach the U.S. west coast. This move also simultaneously provided protection against the Soviet Union, giving Beijing the confidence militarily to take on the Russians in the clash on the Ussuri River in 1969. The confidence to pursue national interests is a prime gain. The fact that Beijing had ICBMs to launch at Soviet