CIAO DATE: 04/03

No First Use and India's Nuclear Transition

C. Raja Mohan

Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

November 15-17, 2002

I. Introduction

India has been one of the consistent champions of the abolition of nuclear weapons since the 1950s. For India, nuclear disarmament was almost a matter of national faith. As part of that campaign India has been strongly supportive of the idea of no-first-use and non-use of nuclear weapons as valuable milestones on the way towards the longer term goal of total nuclear disarmament. India is the only one among the states in possession of nuclear weapons to adopt a nuclear strategy is based on no-first-use of nuclear weapons. Unlike some of the five NPT nuclear weapon powers that have declared supported to the concept of no-first-use, for India it is an integral part of its doctrine. This is rooted in a variety of considerations, including survivability, safety and the costs of managing its nuclear arsenal. India has also strongly supported international efforts to reduced reliance on nuclear weapons as well as the institution of a norm among the nuclear weapon powers in favour of a collective understanding on no-first-use, which in effect would also become a non-use pledge against non-nuclear weapon states. Yet, paradoxically, despite this record in favour of nuclear abolition and no-first- use, there are strong indications that India's political enthusiasm for these ideas is beginning to wane.

This paper is an attempt to explain that paradox, that is linked to India's decision to test nuclear weapons, the new challenges in its regional security environment as well as the rapidly changing global nuclear order. The paradox can only be understood in the context of a fundamental change in India's world view that is reflected in an intense nuclear debate in the 1990s. This paper argues that since its nuclear tests in May 1998, India has begun to move away from its traditional approach in favour of global disarmament to one that has begun to support arms control objectives at three different levels---global, regional and bilateral. The paper also suggests that while India's own strategy remains formally committed to the notion of disarmament and strongly supportive of no-first-use, the logic of its nuclear circumstance might be driving India to de-emphasize the traditional abolition agenda and align itself with the new ideas such as missile defences and counter proliferation that have been highlighted by the radicals in the Bush Administration. The paper attempts to capture a flavour of that complex, but very relevant, debate within India. There is a rising view within New Delhi that it is in India's interest to adapt quickly to the changing international rules of the nuclear game, and within that framework the past stress on disarmament and no-first-use might no longer be the top priorities of Indian foreign policy. The extended treatment that the paper offers on the evolution of India's policy underscores the reality of perceptions worldwide about the utility of traditional arguments of the nuclear debate. It is not just the Bush Administration that is breaking away from the traditional Euro-Atlantic discourse on nuclear weapons. India's nuclear policy in the last decade is about a serious effort to come to terms with the traditional arms control and then moving away from it to cope with the new ideas taking root in Washington.

The transition in Indian thinking about nuclear weapons has not been articulated in any explicit manner by the Indian Government. Nevertheless, the series of Indian responses to the international nuclear developments over the last decade strongly point to a reorientation of India's premises on nuclear weapons and national security strategy. The transition was captured in India's dramatic flip-flop on joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, its readiness to join Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty negotiations, endorsement of the objectives of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, willingness to strengthen export control regimes, support to nuclear free zones elsewhere in the world, and its readiness to move towards substantive confidence-building measures with Pakistan. The on-going change in India was dramatized by the unexpected Indian support to the missile defence initiative of the United States in May 2001. India has also been the least critical of the controversial overhaul of nuclear strategy outlined by the Bush Administration this year.

While the transition is real, it certainly is not complete. New and emerging premises on arms control remain to be fully endorsed by the Indian political class. Suggestions from the Government that India's diplomacy might be de-emphasising the traditional emphasis on total elimination of nuclear weapons evokes a passionate opposition from across the national political spectrum. For many within the Indian establishment, is a surrender of core principles that have guided Indian foreign policy over the last five decades. They argue that India's support to missile defence and other ideas from Washington are the triumph of a new Indian opportunism over the past commitment to a set of principles. There is no need here to go into the details of the argument, except to note that the domestic debate on arms control is indeed part of a larger foreign policy transition that is taking place in India, which has involved a redefinition of India's relations with the major powers and an intensified engagement with the United States and the West. It is also about finding ways to cope with the existential threats to Indian security, particularly from terrorism being sponsored by Pakistan and the extraordinary difficulties India has had in restraining Pakistan within the new nuclear balance in the Subcontinent. The foreign policy transition is an on-going one and is riddled with many contradictions. Even as new ideas are being pushed into the debate, the old notions continue to hold sway. But change is clearly under way. The following sections map that change and draw some implications for the current debate on nuclear weapons and no-first-use.

II. From Disarmament to Arms Control

The Indian Government has not in any way over the last three years suggested the discarding of its historical emphasis on global disarmament, in particular the total elimination of nuclear weapons within a reasonable time frame. On the contrary, after Pokharan II, India has repeated its commitment to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons. Having engineered a rupture in India's long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity, the Government was reassuring key domestic players of the continuity in India's foreign policy. But there is no question that the emphasis in policy has shifted from the goal of time-bound elimination of nuclear weapons to the pursuit of a less ambitious and limited agenda of agenda of global nuclear restraint.

India's traditional campaign for global abolition had to come to terms with the global nuclear discourse in the 1990s. Despite the phenomenal change at the end of 1980s in the world correlation of forces in its favour, the United States insists that nuclear deterrence remains the cornerstone of its national security strategy. The U.S. has also come around to the view that it needs nuclear weapons to deter the use of other weapons of mass destruction (chemical and biological) by the so-called "rogue states", a concern that has been dramatically magnified after September 11. Russia which supported nuclear abolition from the mid 1980s to early 1990s has now cooled its ardour. It has abandoned the doctrine of nuclear "no-first-use'' it had propounded in the early 1980s. Given the steady erosion of its conventional military capability in the 1990s, Moscow's reliance on nuclear weapons has steadily increased. In China, the dominant view on nuclear weapons is based on realpolitik. The collapse of the mighty Soviet Union to its north, the end of the Cold War, and the consequent reduction of American and Russian nuclear arsenals, Beijing believes, have not reduced the importance of nuclear weapons in international politics. The U.S. decision to tear up the ABM Treaty and accelerate the efforts to build a missile shield has added to fears in China that its nuclear deterrent might be less credible in future. From its own past commitments to nuclear disarmament and no first use, China might be debating a shift towards an expansion of its own nuclear arsenal as well as towards ideas of a limited nuclear war and flexible response. Britain and France, despite the absence of any threats to their security have been reluctant to support nuclear abolition.

While pursuing disarmament as a diplomatic objective, India has begun to recognize that nuclear abolition cannot be built apart from the existing structure of power politics in the world. Disarmament treaties, even those structured consciously to be non- discriminatory and fair, have a differential impact on the key powers of the world and have the potential to disturb the existing balance of power. India, like the other second tier powers in the international system is looking at the real prospect that in a world without nuclear weapons America's conventional military superiority over its possible rivals might become even more pronounced. The second-tier powers in the international system, then, might never want to shed their nuclear weapons, even if the U.S. did. For Russia and China, nuclear weapons would remain important instruments for maintaining their position vis-à-vis the sole super power in the global order. The overarching dominance of the U.S. in the present world, and the growing military gap -- driven by the on-going revolution in military affairs - between the U.S. and other powers, may have increased the utility of nuclear weapons - as an equalizer - for the middle powers.

India's policy planners are asking themselves, if atomic weapons are here to stay for a long time to come and they cannot be separated from the international power politics, what should be the priorities for Indian nuclear diplomacy in the coming years? Traditionalists in India would like to stay with the idea of global disarmament. But there are others suggesting that at a time when the rules of the nuclear game are being recast by the Bush Administration, India needs an innovative policy that is focused on new threats to international security, and attempts to deal with India's security challenges and takes advantage of the new dynamism in the global nuclear debate.

Meanwhile since the nuclear tests India has moved decisively towards supporting treaties and arrangements less than total abolition of nuclear weapons. The strategic objectives of India's nuclear diplomacy were radically transformed in the summer of 1998. Until May 11, the Indian diplomatic objective was to create and sustain the option to make nuclear weapons when needed. Since Pokharan II, the task has been to defend India's nuclear deterrent, reduce the political and economic costs of exercising India's nuclear option, and learn to live in nuclear peace with Pakistan and China.

In the past, India rejected most of the global nuclear arms control arrangements, including the NPT, fullscope safeguards, regional nuclear weapon-free zones, the bilateral denuclearization of India and Pakistan, and more recently the CTBT. India's nuclear rejectionism was built around the principles of global disarmament, equity and non-discrimination. But underlying these normative arguments was a powerful security consideration- that India cannot allow the global arms control and non- proliferation regimes to chip away or completely rob it of the option to build nuclear weapons when it wanted. Having finally exercised its option, it was inevitable that India would review its traditional opposition to arms control. Until now, the principal question that India asked itself was whether an arms control treaty was global and non-discriminatory. Since its decision to go nuclear, India had to look at two different posers. First, how does a treaty affect India's national security? Second, what are the political gains and losses of joining a particular arms control arrangement?

India is not the first country to make such a transition. China, for example, has moved from its past intense ideological opposition to all arms control, which it had branded as reflecting super power hegemony, to pragmatic participation in the global nuclear regimes. China took nearly two decades to make this transition; but India did not have that luxury. Facing a hostile international environment after its nuclear tests, India needed to make a rapid transition in its arms control positions in order to dent the international opposition to its nuclear weapons. Immediately after announcing its nuclear tests on May 11, the Indian Government did try to soften the impact of the political shock waves it had created by announcing a package of arms control proposals. That included an immediate moratorium on new nuclear tests, flexibility on joining the CTBT, readiness to negotiate the FMCT and a nuclear no-first use agreement. Some of these came up later as key benchmarks in the extended nuclear dialogue between the Indian foreign minister Mr. Jaswant Singh and the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Mr. Strobe Talbott.

The transition in India's nuclear policy has also been captured by the draft nuclear doctrine that India issued in August 1999. In the controversy that followed the release of the document, Western observers paid scant attention to certain formulations that were entirely new for India. In its final section, the draft for the first time endorsed the notion of arms control and its relevance for India's security. The last two sentences of the draft state:

"Nuclear arms control measures shall be sought as part of national security policy to reduce potential threats and to protect our own capability and its effectiveness. In view of the very high destructive potential of nuclear weapons, appropriate nuclear risk reduction and confidence building measures shall be sought, negotiated and instituted.

For a Western audience reared on deterrence and arms control, the above statements might sound self-evident. But in the context of the Indian debate that was centred around normative considerations, acknowledging that arms control is part of security policy and recognizing the need to institute nuclear CBMs is a substantial movement forward.

The new support to arms control and nuclear confidence building was built on the incremental evolution of attitudes during the 1990s and the intense exposure of the Indian strategic community to the unending track two initiatives from the United States aimed at promoting nuclear dialogue and CBMs in the Subcontinent. By June 1997 when India and Pakistan had agreed on a structured dialogue, they had put "peace and security, including CBMs" at the top of their bilateral agenda. When the two governments agreed, in September 1998, to initiate talks after a period of tension following the nuclear tests, there was the first formal discussion of nuclear and conventional CBMs at the end of 1998. And this was further consolidated in the MoU on CBMs that the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries signed during Prime Minister Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore in February 1999. At the inconclusive conversation at Agra in July 2001, it is believed that resumption of the negotiations on nuclear and other CBMs.

III. Supporting Non-Proliferation

Nothing illustrates the significant changes in India's nuclear mindset than its one hundred eighty degree turn on the NPT. After years of lambasting the treaty, which had become the veritable symbol of a discriminatory order, India has over the three years has come to endorse, if only critically, the basic objectives of the treaty. For nearly three decades, India, ambiguous about its own nuclear posture, whined and complained about the inequities and unfairness of the NPT. Despite the fact that much of the world came to accept the NPT, India kept up its demonization of the treaty. But having acquired nuclear weapons itself, and recognizing the importance of preventing the further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, India now takes a realistic view of the treaty system. Even as it recognized that the NPT system will not be able to confer the status of a nuclear weapon state on India, New Delhi is confident enough to extend political support to the NPT and its objectives.

In a formal statement before the Indian parliament on May 9, 2000 the foreign minister Mr. Jaswant Singh expounded on the new Indian approach to the NPT. The occasion was the review conference of the treaty under way in New York. Declaring that India is a "nuclear weapon state", Mr. Singh told the Indian parliament: "Though not a party to the NPT, India's policies have been consistent with the key provisions of NPT that apply to nuclear weapon states. These provisions are contained in Articles I, III and VI." Mr. Singh went on explain India's "compliance" with the NPT. After painting the NPT as an instrument of dominance and hegemony, and as a symbol of "nuclear apartheid", India was declaring itself to be part of the system.

Of particular significance are Articles I and III, both of which refer to the non-proliferation obligations of the nuclear weapon states under the NPT. In the reference to Article I, Mr. Singh said, "India's record on non-proliferation has been impeccable." On Article III, he added that India's nuclear exports have always been under international safeguards. The statement reflected more than mere rhetorical commitment to the objectives of non-proliferation. India's nuclear dialogue with the United States looked at export controls as an important benchmark, and resulted in a significant strengthening of India's procedures in relation to monitoring and preventing the transfers of sensitive items that could be used in programmes for weapons of mass destruction. In the past India had denounced the export control arrangements as part of the discriminatory North-South paradigm; now India was acknowledging the importance of preventing high technologies from falling into the hands of states of concern. In the past, India refused to engage the multilateral export control groupings. As India becomes an exporter of sensitive technologies, it is preparing to consult with these groups and hopes to join them on a reasonable basis in the near future.

While moving towards the great powers in terms of the articulation of its interest in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, India has also sought to present it self as being in tune with the sentiments of the majority of non-nuclear states for "negative security assurances". Referring to India's no-first-use posture and a commitment for non-use against non-nuclear states, Mr. Singh said, "this meets the demand" for "unqualified negative security assurances raised by a large majority of non-nuclear states". In another twist, India which consistently rejected the South Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, first mooted by Pakistan in 1974, now is ready to extend support to such zones elsewhere in the world. Mr. Singh said, "India has indicated readiness to provide requisite assurances to the nuclear weapon free zones in existence or being negotiated". Skeptics would suggest India might be playing politics with the nuclear issues. But clearly India's nuclear diplomacy has begun to evolve.

IV. Underlining No-First-Use

Within days of testing its nuclear weapons in May 1998, India announced that its nuclear doctrine would be guided by the two principles of minimum nuclear deterrence and no-first-use against nuclear weapon states and non-use against non-nuclear nations. A draft nuclear doctrine issued a year later broadly confirmed this position. The quick assertion of no-first-use by India was not a mere stratagem to soften the negative international reaction to its tests. It was a reflection of the already settled debate on a nuclear doctrine that was put in place in the late 1980s. The nuclear tests of 1998 did not signal India becoming a nuclear power. They only signalled that India had finally come out of the nuclear closet. All indications are that India began to assemble air-deliverable nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, when it became clear to India it had a second nuclear neighbour, Pakistan. A small group of officials and advisers in the late 1980s had worked out the broad parameters of the Indian nuclear doctrine that focused on minimum nuclear deterrence and no-first-use. The doctrine was based on a number of assumptions, which remained valid when India declared itself a nuclear weapon power.

The first of these assumptions was that there is no need to match any adversary in the number of weapons, nor yields nor types of weapons; nor of achieving superiority; as long as there is an assured capability of a second strike that can inflict unacceptable damage defined sensibly. More is not better if less is enough. Second, there was a clear rejection of tactical nuclear weapons. The Indian intention is to deter the adversary from making first use of tactical nuclear weapons and thus gaining battlefield advantage. In case this fails, India could use its relatively small sized nuclear weapons, not on tactical point targets but on tactical area targets. Third, the no first use doctrine does not take away the fundamental right of a nation to defend itself by all available means when its very survival is at stake. What no-first-use does do, is to forswear brinkmanship in the very early stages of a conflict and gives up the possibility of using nuclear blackmail. Fourth, no-first-use avoids the requirement of a hair-trigger reaction. India believes its deterrence requirements can be met without time-urgent responses to a nuclear attack. As Gen. K. Sundarji, one of the key figures involved in framing the doctrine in the late 1980s pointed out:

"The response can be a good few hours or even perhaps a day after the receipt of the first strike. A very highly sophisticated, highly responsive command, control and communication system that functions in real time is not necessary….Even a very successful decapitating attack by the adversary cannot give him any assurance of the non-launch of the surviving second strike by the recipient of the first strike. Standing Operating Procedures may well lay down the launch of the second strike against pre-determined targets, say after X hours of the receipt of the first strike, if no orders countermanding it are received by that time".

Fifth, a no-first-use doctrine allows India to keep its nuclear warheads and delivery systems separate and thereby ensure the survival of its arsenal from a pre-emptive strike. Overall, the Indian nuclear doctrine based on minimum deterrence and no-first-use will help keep the costs down of managing its nuclear arsenal. This doctrine has survived considerable domestic criticism as being inadequate and pressures from the right for a larger and more robust nuclear posture.

The political confidence in this modest nuclear strategy has let India campaign with some vigour for an international convention on no-first-use. Reinforcing that campaign, India also began to call for measures like de-alerting to reduce the danger of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. At the United Nations in the fall of 1998, India introduced a resolution on "reducing the nuclear danger" that called for a review of nuclear doctrines by the nuclear weapon states and take steps to reduce the accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons. The move was initially seen by the world as an attempt to legitimize India's standing as a declared nuclear weapon state. But support for the move has increased over the years. The Indian focus on nuclear de-alerting signaled a number of changes in Indian thinking on nuclear issues. Unlike in the past, India is now emphasizing practical steps to deal with the danger of nuclear weapons, without giving up its larger quest for their worldwide abolition. Total disarmament, it was being pointed out, must be treated as a long-term normative goal and not as an achievable diplomatic objective in the near-term. Besides reflecting a shift towards pragmatism in India's nuclear diplomacy, New Delhi's initiative on "de-alerting'' reinforces the national commitment to a responsible nuclear strategy. It also meshes in with the Indian determination to pursue a series of confidence- building measures with Pakistan as part of an effort to design a regime for nuclear restraint in the subcontinent. Indian diplomacy on de-alerting hopes to bring the other nuclear weapons towards a doctrinal posture that the others would like to see in India-lengthening the nuclear fuse.

V. Warming up to the Bush Doctrine

The decision in May 1998 to end its nuclear ambiguity has allowed India to move towards a more positive approach towards arms control at all levels. It has helped define a more responsible Indian approach to arms control treaties at the global level, a new readiness to accept internationally mandated restriction of its strategic programmes, recognize proliferation of weapons of mass destruction an important international security problem, raise standards of implementing controls on the spread of sensitive technologies, and accept the need for a credible regime of nuclear and conventional military CBMs in the subcontinent to reduce the danger of a nuclear war. India has overcome the past intellectual resistance to idea of arms control that is limited in scope and aims at a small range of security objectives. New Delhi is no longer the permanent dissident in the global nuclear debate. It is ready to contribute constructively in building global and regional arms control regimes. As it demonstrates a willingness to pursue its national security interests in a responsible manner, India is prepared for substantive negotiations that involve complex bargaining and trade-offs.

Ironically, even as India moved quickly after the nuclear tests to find a lasting accommodation with the international system, it began to discover that the old nuclear order was on its last legs. The American post Cold War debate on nuclear strategy appears to have been finally clinched in favour of a more radical view that questioned the value of the traditional arms control framework, was insistent on tearing up the ABM Treaty, build missile defences and explore non-traditional means to deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the so-called "rogue states" and terrorist organizations. Somewhat counter-intuitively the advent of the Bush Administration offered an entirely unexpected convergence of interests between Washington and New Delhi.

The Bush Administration's attempt to recast the global nuclear strategic framework opened the door for building cooperation between India and the United States in the area of nuclear weapons. India was among the first to back at least parts of the controversial National Missile Defence initiative of the Bush Administration unveiled on May 1, 2001. Stating that the Bush ideas are an attempt "to transform the strategic parameters on which the Cold War security architecture was built", India declared that "there is a strategic and technological inevitability in stepping away from a world that is held hostage by the doctrine of MAD to a cooperative, defensive transition that is underpinned by further [nuclear]cuts and a de-alert of nuclear forces".

India's surprising support to the missile defence project was based on a number of political expectations. The Indian decision involved considerations of its strategic relations with the United States and Russia as well as its security concerns in relation to China and Pakistan. One, a new strategic framework might open the door to addressing India's long-standing problem with the global nuclear order and India's place in it. India's inability to test nuclear weapons before January 1 1968 made it impossible for India to be accepted as a legitimate nuclear weapon power. India's efforts to find a modus vivendi with the NPT system in the late 1990s were indeed real. But that process remained an unfinished business during the Clinton Administration. While the Clinton White House was willing to live with India's nuclear weapons, it was not ready to lift the restrictions on technology transfer that apply to India under the NPT regime. The Bush Administration's attempts to rework the global nuclear order are seen by some in India as providing an opportunity for India to become part of the making of a new system of nuclear rules. Unlike Russia and China, India has had no stakes in the survival of the ABM Treaty. In welcoming the collapse of the ABM Treaty-the cornerstone of post War global arms control-the ABM treaty- India of course had to take into account the sensitivities of its long-standing partner Russia. India, unlike the Europeans and the American Democrats, bet that Moscow will ultimately find an accommodation with Washington rather than confront it on the question of missile defence.

Two, there was a view in India that the American movement towards might open up the exploration of new solutions to one of the problems that had significantly complicated India's security environment over the last two decades-the proliferation of nuclear weapons and missiles in its neighbourhood. India believes it has been the biggest victim of Chinese proliferation of nuclear weapons to Pakistan in the 1980s and missile technology in the 1990s. For years India protested about Chinese nuclear and missile proliferation. But it could make no impression on Beijing which insisted either that it was within the bounds of its treaty commitments or flatly denied such , and is open to any move that has the potential to reduce the dangers from such spread of weapons of mass destruction. U.S. plans for missile defence have created space for India, for the first time to put pressure on China, both on its own nuclear arsenal as well as its perceived policy of balancing India through WMD transfers to Pakistan. It has often been argued that U.S. missile defence programme would lead to an expanded Chinese nuclear arsenal and India would be forced to respond in kind. But New Delhi has no desire to match China weapon to weapon; it is more interested in breaking out of the current political box that it has been trapped into vis a vis China and Pakistan. While India has taken out a modest nuclear insurance, it is missile defence that might offer at least a conceptual way out of its current security dilemmas. Even before the Bush Administration unveiled its plans for missile defence, India has been actively engaged in an effort to obtain theatre missile defence technology from Israel. It is also exploring cooperation with the United States in the field and the Pentagon has offered to make an evaluation of India's missile defence requirements.

Finally, having recognised the proliferation of WMD as a serious threat to its own national security, India is deeply concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of states or groups of terrorists who do not abide by the traditional rules of nuclear deterrence. India's own experience with Pakistan's nuclear blackmail, and Islamabad's strategy of using the nuclear balance to foment terrorism across the border puts it in empathy with the arguments in Washington that there are forces out there who cannot be deterred by traditional means. Added to it is the concern that is the concern that Pakistan might become a failed state or that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of extremist forces in that country. That reinforces India's interest not only in defence but also in counter-proliferation, or the military capability to deal with an environment in which there is proliferation of WMD. At the end of their joint Defence Policy Group meeting in December 3-4 2001 in New Delhi, India and the United States pointed to "the contribution that missile defenses could make to enhance strategic stability and to discourage the proliferation of ballistic missiles with weapons of mass destruction." They noted that, "that both India and the United States have been the targets of terrorism, the two sides agreed to add a new emphasis in their defense cooperation on counter terrorism initiatives, including expanding mutual support in this area. The two sides also recognized the importance of joint counter-proliferation efforts to achieve the goals of their defense cooperation".

VI. Conclusion

In sum, then, India has adopted no-first-use as its national nuclear strategy. This is a unilateral decision and is not contingent on the nuclear approaches of either China, which has lent declaratory support to no-first-use and Pakistan, which opposes the idea. India strongly supports, at the political level, the movement towards a collective agreement among all nuclear powers on no-first-use. India is also in favour of agreed measures on de-alerting which expand the time for nuclear decision-making amidst crises. But in the prevailing international environment the prospects for such agreements do not look too bright. The obstacles to such agreements do not lie in technical fixes but in the political parameters that guide the world today. The absence of a politico-military confrontation among the great powers of the international system has reduced the political pressures for traditional arms control measures within the domestic public opinion in the Euro-Atlantic world. The Bush Administration has gone many steps further in arguing that the old framework of arms control is an obstacle to dealing with the new security challenges to the world in relation to nuclear weapons. While the new security threats that involve the combination of WMD, extremist forces and failing states might look somewhat remote in Europe, they are seen as part of a clear and present danger in India. New Delhi might increasingly distance itself from the view that treaties on further reduction of nuclear weapons or agreements on no-first-use provide answers to the current security challenges. While India will go along with any such agreements, its focus is likely to be riveted on building political and military coalition of democratic and moderate states against the new forces of extremism that are determined to acquire and exploit WMD for their own purposes.