No ‘Bermuda Triangle’ off Chenai, but a Cyber attack on radar? (Amended)

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Certain circles in the military and elsewhere in the Indian government dealing with extremely sensitive matters are abuzz with how the forward air defence radar in Avantipur was knocked out Wednesday, November 23 evening and how it stayed down until the next day, Thursday, November 24, when a slapdash air surveillance system was patched together. This was only the latest in a series of incidents that have left a lot of people really worried about the air defence.

The crashing in March 2015 of a Coast Guard Dornier off Chenai, and a few months later a night-flying Navy Dornier likewise diving into the sea may be attributed respectively to pilot error/technical malfunction and the pilot shutting off an engine mid-flight to practice recovery drill. In the former event, Reliance lent its deep sea recovery vessel to locate and recover the debris from a depth of 980 metres. On July 22 this year an IAF An-32 transport aircraft carrying 29 military and civilian Naval Armament Depot personnel, went down. It was on the Chennai-Andaman run, and as it was, according to defmin Manohar Parrikar, one of the Ukraine upgraded lot of An-32s, it may be safely assumed that technological decrepitude was not the reason. Now why were the debris from the Dornier sea crashes located and recovered, but not that of the Antonov plane?

Simply because while the CG and Navy aircraft all have pingers on-board, IAF has not thought it fit to equip its planes with pingers, equipment that has enough stored power to keep pinging even from deep sea the easier to home on to. It is only after this Antonov accident that IAF brass are talking of outfitting and then only the aircraft designated for the Andaman run with these locaters. Better late than never, I suppose.

But what about the Avantipur radar that left the entire approaches to Jammu & Kashmir, exposed without any air surveillance capability for some 12-15 hours mid-week? There may be nasty business afoot.

Many in the know are beginning to believe that rather than some freak occurrence of Nature, that the downing of the Avantipur radar may be the result of concerted cyber attacks.

These same experts point out that the Indian radar system can be switched off by remote means, such as through penetration via the Net and can even be made to turn on and target national assets by, for instance, mis-identifying IAF aircraft as adversary planes to possibly occasion fratricidal kills. And because the country relies wholly on imported hardware there is every the likelihood, as the former science adviser to the Defence minister and DRDO head Dr. Avinash Chander had publicly warned, of embedded bugs in foreign-sourced and upgraded aircraft being distantly activated, or the system penetration being such as to even spoof information on guidance equipment onboard to misdirect planes.

That the Indian government and military communications systems are entirely penetrated is easy enough to presume. Despite official warnings to everyone in the government, the armed services, the police orgs, and paramils, to not use gmail or yahoo, and to not hold long and sustained conversations on unsecured mobile phones, officers/officials any and everywhere and especially at the highest levels of government and in the PMO are seen routinely do be doing just this. With indiscipline and carelessness as the normal, India’s adversaries — even a lowly Pakistan with minimal cyber warfare/cyber terrorism capabilities, will always have it easy, what to speak of our more capable friends China and the United States. And given the fact that there is no expertise in government or in the Indian military or in the intelligence agencies for “penetration analysis”, and that the capacity of the National Intelligence Agency in all respects is pretty basic at best the country is, to use an American idiom, “up s..t creek”.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Culture, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Russia, russian assistance, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons, Western militaries | 7 Comments

‘Heart of Asia’, India’s role in configuring CG-6, & Aziz

Posted on November 25, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

India has been frozen out of all the regional and international Meets held to-date on Afghanistan all over the globe and hosted by adversary states (China), countries that are ostensibly friends but act friendly only when it suits their purpose and interests (United Stateds), and states that have been steady in their friendship even if the old bonds have withered of late due to neglect or out of deliberate choice (Russia). Considering how centrally India and Afghanistan are linked by history, this freezing out of India is intolerable. But no regime has protested or, better still, shown the wit, will, and strategic imagination to be disruptive as a means of highlighting India’s interests in that country by initiating its own peace process involving not only the Kabul regime, the various factions of the Taliban, Iran, and the Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan to its north — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. This would have been a unique constellation of countries to put together and the most immediately concerned that the religious fight between moderates and Islamic hardliners in Afghanistan not spill over into their territories. Such a grouping would have put India front and centre. But when was New Delhi last really innovative in its foreign policy? When the Indian government itself considers India a secondary player in Afghanistan, it is hardly to be wondered that other countries don’t think of involving India at all. So the “Heart of Asia” Conference scheduled for Dec 2-3 in Amritsar is something of a surprise, surprise that it has happened at all and, even more, that New Delhi has allotted itself the prime role in it.

Just so we all know — “Heart of Asia” was the phrase the Pak PM Liaqat Ali Khan originally coined in 1949 as an attempt to endow Pakistan with geostrategic centrality he hoped his government could leverage in the future. This title has now been expropriated by New Delhi to fit Afghanistan — a deft little move that must have left at least some history-literate denizens in the Pakistan Foreign Office to grit their teeth and not just bear it but decide that PM Nawaz Sharif’s Foreign Affairs Adviser, Sartaj Aziz, should be the Pak rep at the Amritsar do!

The calculation appears to be that it is a way to have the so-called “composite dialogue” that functions in fits and starts, to start once more amidst the usual Indo-Pak farce — the ongoing two month old “war of befitting replies” and cross=border reciprocal threats of “surgical strikes” and worse! General Raheel Sharif, in his last week as COAS Pakistan Army, wanted to wax tough one last time, and did promising that if his forces were unleashed on a surgical strike we Indians would remember it “for generations”. This will no more make us quake in our chappals than Indian threats to do this, that or the other frightens Pakistanis.

In the event, whatever is talked about at the Amritsar Meet, the more important development would be the breaking of the ice for the umpteenth time should Aziz have some time on the sidelines with Narendra Modi, who is expected along with the Afghan President Abdul Ghani to open the conference. Official India will talk with Aziz — of that there’s little doubt. What’s up in the air is if not Modi than who? The indisposition of MEA Minister Sushma Swaraj means it will be MJ Akbar, MoS, MEA. So all the synthetic suspense in the media about whether Aziz would be issued a visa is so much diplomatic hoo-ha to create the impression that it is Islamabad that is seeking some guftgu, with Amritsar affording it cover. The fact is the Modi government too has been realizing the demerits of letting incidents on the border dictate policy (even something as heinous as the beheading of a patrolling Indian jawan in a sneak operation) rather than national interest. And Aziz’s presence offers an opportunity to gingerly open talks w/o losing face.

If the “Heart of Asia” talkathon does nothing else except mark India’s singular interest in being a party to the shaping of Afghanistan’s future, it will have done its job. With Ghani and Modi in tandem, Aziz will be remiss in his duty if he failed to communicate to his principals — Nawaz and GHQ-Rawalpindi, the depth of India’s intent to stay the course north of the Khyber Pass and be engaged with the numerous Afghan factions — both Taliban and tribal in the years to come. And its determination to supply Ghanis’s army, police, and intel the wherewithal, including heavy armaments — attack helicopters, tanks, APCs, etc. by financing the purchase of such milhardware from Russia, Ukraine, etc and transporting them via the Russian rail/road Northern Distribution Network for delivery directly to Kabul forces, as India has been doing for over a decade now. The point Aziz will hopefully take back home is that Islamabad’s efforts to take India out of the Afghan picture will simply not work, and may in fact redound to its disbenefit.

There will be some 40+ countries in Amritsar. New Delhi’s main thrust should be to weave the six countries mentioned in the lead para (above) — India, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, formally into a core group, making it pivotal to the issue of war and peace in Afghanistan and the extended region. Call this collection Core Group-6 (CG-6). Pakistan, after due consideration, should at best be accorded “observer” status. China, US, and Russia should likewise be kept as outside players looking in, not permitted entry. If India holds strong and true, this core group will too. If New Delhi vacillates in the face of US eagerness to influence the proceedings, then the whole thing will be another hopeless diplomatic boondoggle, prospectively achieving nothing.

With President Donald Trump running the show in a retrenching America post-January 20, 2017, and keen to get the 10,000-strong US Special Forces out of Afghanistan soonest, the CG-6 will naturally acquire salience. Assuming the Indian government has the vision and the stamina to see this thing through, it will have to guard against Washington pressuring New Delhi to exclude Iran from the CG-6 or curtail its role in it. The US has no real stake in Afghanistan and cannot, and should not, be allowed to screw things up by imposing its distant agenda on the countries in the region. Tehran is important to India and Afghanistan, even if it rubs the US the wrong way — but that is America’s lookout, not our concern.

Posted in Afghanistan, arms exports, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, Culture, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Iran and West Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian military, SAARC, society, South Asia, Special Forces, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia | 4 Comments

More, Mr. Parrikar

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

He is duty-bound to confound assessments of India’s nuclear deterrent.
————
Deterrence is a mind game. Nuclear deterrence is even more psychologically weighted because at stake, quite literally, is a nation’s survival as a “social organism”, to use the words of the geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder.

What makes nuclear deterrence work is the ambiguity and opacity shrouding its every aspect. These range from weapons/warheads, delivery systems, their deployment pattern, command and control system to details about storage, reaction time, and physical, electronic and cyber security schemes, the weapons production processes, the personnel involved and policies relating to all these elements. The more anything remotely connected with nuclear hardware and software, strategy, policies, plans and posture is a black hole, the greater is the uncertainty in the adversary’s mind and the unpredictability attending on the deterrent. Moreover, pronouncements emanating from official quarters that obfuscate matters and generate unease, especially about India’s nuclear weapons-use initiation and nuclear response calculi, enhance the sense of dread in the minds of adversary governments. Dread is at the heart of successful nuclear deterrence.

It is the responsibility of the Indian government to make the ambiguity-opacity-uncertainty-unpredictability matrix denser, not make it easier for adversaries to plumb its political will and to read its strategic intentions by clarifying nuclear issues. The adversaries one needs to keep in mind are as much the obvious ones — China and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan — as the “friendly” countries, such as the US. The US, in particular, was at the forefront of preventing India from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, failing in which enterprise, it has done everything to ensure India stays stuck at the low-end of the nuclear weapons technology development curve. It insisted that India does not resume underground nuclear testing, or depart from the US understanding of limited nuclear deterrence. It may also be recalled that, for geopolitical reasons of containing India to the subcontinent during the Cold War, Washington disregarded its own proliferation concerns and watched China nuclear missile-arm Pakistan even as it preached responsible behaviour to New Delhi.

In this context, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar’s wondering why no-first-use (NFU) is assumed to be a restraint on the Indian nuclear forces is just the monkey wrench that needed to be thrown into the Western considerations of this country’s nuclear security. American think-tanks help the US government to achieve its nuclear non-proliferation objectives, propagating, for instance, the hollow India-Pakistan “nuclear flashpoint” thesis that Washington has often used to pressure a usually diffident and malleable New Delhi. Pakistan naturally supports this thesis as a means of legitimating its fast-growing nuclear arsenal, as do many Indian analysts for their own reasons.

No surprise, then, that Parrikar’s stray thoughts on NFU have shocked the large community of flashpoint believers and acted as bait for George Perkovich, one of the stalwart proponents of this idea, to rise to it. He uses the morality card — the loss of India’s supposed “high ground” which has been sufficient by itself in the past to subdue the Indian government — and labels Parrikar’s statements as “superficial, perhaps, dangerously so” (see his “Impolitic musings”, The Indian Express, November 15, at http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/manohar-parrikar-india-nuclear-policy-4375606/). The truth, however, is that Perkovich — and by extension, Washington — is worried that Parrikar has upended the US-qua-Western nuclear construct for South Asia.

But NFU is less of an issue for Perkovich than his desire to get Parrikar to explain “whether and how” India means to enlarge its nuclear forces and infrastructure and “revise its operational plans” contingent on New Delhi’s apparent jettisoning of NFU. In this respect, it is pertinent to note that besides its intelligence agencies, Washington has always relied on American think-tankers and gullible Indians to help winkle out details of the Indian nuclear deterrent — Perkovich’s primary intent. I recall that at a 1.5 track meet held under the US government’s aegis in San Diego in December 1998 the hosts called in a surviving Manhattan Project biggie, Herbert York, to impress on the Indians there the dangers of the nuclear course India was embarked upon. They banked on an Indian patsy — the joint secretary (Americas), MEA — to repeatedly ask K. Subrahmanyam and me to speculate about what weapons strength constituted a “minimum” deterrent.

Indeed, far from being under any obligation to throw light on NFU or any other nuclear issue, Parrikar is almost duty-bound to air his “personal views” more frequently on the subject and thus keep confounding assessments regarding India’s deterrent.
——–
Published in the Indian Express on November 21, 2016, at http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/manohar-parrikar-india-nuclear-policy-4386333/

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons | 10 Comments

Solidifying India-Israel relations with miltech quid pro quo; 1982 Indo-Israeli plans for Kahuta strike

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The Israeli President Reuven Rivlin begins his six-day trip to India today — the first by the Israeli head of state. This is a lead-up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long awaited state visit in January 2017 to Israel to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of regular diplomatic relations between the two countries by the Narasimha Rao government. Time to recall just how much progress has been made, and how much more needs to be done, in forging strong Indo-Israeli strategic links. I first wrote a major two-part op-ed article for the Hindustan Times in 1982 exactly a decade before GOI girded up its loins to do just that — the usual lag time for New Delhi to do anything, advocating an upgrade in the bilateral ties from the one-way Consular level — with just an Israeli Consulate in the Peddar Road area of Mumbai but no reciprocal Indian presence anywhere in Israel — to normal ambassadorial representation. For the Israeli diplomats posted in Mumbai it was a high-risk station that also fetched career rewards, so some of the best in its foreign service corps opted for three years of inconvenience and hemmed in life with a lot of security.

These articles — possibly the first in the public realm — were met with shock, a flurry of barely concealed abuse, and the Left-leaning policy Establishment grandees, such as the old Indira Gandhi adviser and Congress government heavyweight from the 1970s, PN Haksar, adopting a high moral tone in their attacks. Other than the obvious strategic benefits, the main line of my argument I had made was that giving away anything free, especially something so precious as diplomatic support for the Arab causes, including Palestine — for which last the Arab states did nothing except show eagerness to fight the Israelis to the last Palestinian — not even maintaining a semblance of neutrality on the Kashmir issue when Pakistan regularly raised it in forums like Organization of Islamic Countries. Such genuflection, far from serving the national interest only generated contempt for India in the Arab world and demands for more give by Delhi!

A year later, I was reporting on the Israeli military advance into Beirut where I met with the Israeli army chief Moshe Dayan’s legendary MilIntel head from the 1956 Sinai Operations, retired Major General Aharon Yaariv then in Reserve and called up for duty, at the Kiryat Shimona kibbutz just this side of the Israeli border. It was Yaariv who told me over breakfast the story of how Indira Gandhi had first approved of an Israeli strike on the Pakistani uranium enrichment centrifuge complex in Kahuta in 1982 with Indian help but called off the raid just before it got underway.

The Israelis who had taken out Saddam Hussein’s Osiraq military reactor in Baghdad in June 1981 had planned the attack, according to Yaariv, thus: A sortie of six IsAF F-16s and like number of F-15s flying combat air patrol (CAP) were to come in from Haifa over the southern Arabian Sea into Jamnagar where the crews would rest up for a couple of days, and tie-up last minute, minor, changes in the flight and mission plans. The IsAF strike and CAP aircraft would then take off from Jamnagar, fly over central India and into Udhampur where previously IsAF C-17s would have landed with a cargo of deep penetration and detonation weapons for use on Kahuta targets. The Israelis had warned GOI that their aircraft would fly with Israeli roundels and entirely unmasked because, as Yaariv put it, they didn’t trust the Indians, who would be the principal beneficiaries, to not claim that it was a solely Israeli initiative in which India had no role whatsoever. “We wanted India to be fully involved and implicated and to share in the responsibility for the mission”, he told me, even though the IsAF could have carried out the entire operation all by itself using aerial refuelers as was done on the strike on the PLO HQ outside Tunis (over 1,500 miles away) in 1985. The plans were thereafter for the Israeli F-16-F-15 complement to top off their tanks, upload the special heavy ordnance on fuselage points and take off, flying in the lee of the mountains to avoid Pakistani radar detection, before coming into the open for the final bomb run over target — two F-16s at a time drooping their loads and egressing as the F-15s circled overhead to take care of any interference by PAF air defence aircraft. The attacks completed the F-16s would continue flying west, out of Pakistani airspace, before dipping southwards and returning to home base. The IsAF aircraft breaking out into the open from the mountain shadows would not have afforded PAF and Pakistani RBS-70 anti-aircraft guns (ex-Sweden) enough time to erect and fire away. (Wrote about it first in the Sunday Observer in the mid 1980s.)

This was the last time India had the chance credibly to stop Pakistan from crossing the N-weapons threshold. Predictably, we fluffed it — Indira losing her nerve. Or, perhaps, because Washington got wind of the mission and pressured Indira into halting it. An attempt to revive a purely Indian attack mission in 1984 when Air Cmde Jasjit Singh was Director, Ops (Offensive), in Air HQ, didn’t even get off the ground — this time Rajiv Gandhi, who had taken over from his assassinated mother, negativing it. (These ops and the politics of the planned strikes analyzed in my books — ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’ and ‘India’s Nuclear Policy’.)

The country has paid dearly and repeatedly for the absolute risk aversion in-built into the Indian govt’s thinking and policies, until now when the Indian military, and particularly the Indian Air Force, too is infected by it, and has become fully risk-averse. Consider how in 2001 after the Pak terrorist attacks on Parliament and again post-terrorist strike in 2008 on Mumbai, the IAF was asked if it could retaliate instantaneously. On both occasions the CASs (Anil Tipnis & Fali Major respectively) at the time begged off, pleading various excuses. And, as retailed by the then COAS Gen Ved Malik, how Tipnis at the start of the Kargil ops went “bureaucratic”, saying he wouldn’t respond to the army’s request for air support w/o proper authorization!

But, I have gone off on a jag. To get back to India-Israel relations: In the early 2000s, had sent a paper to the then Israeli Home Minister Uzi Landau detailing why India and Israel should mesh their arms industries in a mutually beneficial arrangement involving Indian capital for joint advanced weapons R&D in Israel and Israel transferring the production of bulk conventional military weapons systems — Uzi LMGs, tanks, artillery, etc. to India that both Indian and Israeli militaries would off-take, thereby building up trust and intimacy of the closest kind to benefit both. Landau, on a trip to Delhi in those years, visited with me and we talked some more. He was especially taken by my idea of the quid pro quo that investment of Indian capital in developing sophisticated armaments and then sharing them with India would enable Tel Aviv to be less reliant and therefore freer of the strings Washington often pulled to hamper and hinder Israeli foreign and policy aims (most recently by denying for a long time the Elta 2052 computer for the Indian indigenous ASEA radar project, permitting only the less powerful Elta 2032 to be put in it). Had also pushed this with Jaswant in MEA, and with others in the 1st BJP govt. However, for reasons unknown to me this idea never took off, possibly because of Delhi’s apprehensions or, more likely, because Tel Aviv discovered that India is better as a paying customer than as technology development partner and financier sharing in the IPR for the military tech so developed. Whatever the reason, this eminently strategic idea remains uncultivated. As always, when good ideas are not followed up, India is the big loser.

It is an idea Modi can take up with Rivlin and if seriously proposed is something Tel Aviv will be hard put to turn aside.

There’s another idea I had advocated before the Vajpayee govt closed down for the nonce the N-testing option with the “voluntary test moratorium” which Modi, unfortunately, reaffirmed two days back in the N-deal with Japan — close cooperation in the nuclear weapons field. India can offer Israel the underground testing facility to fire off its weapons, because it simply doesn’t have the vacant space for this purpose. It last did it in 1979 in Pelindaba with the help of the White-ruled South Africa. And India would gain from sharing knowledge in weapon/warhead miniaturisation, etc. — something seriously for the Indian govt to consider. Modi will have Rivlin’s ear.

Now Cyber and Space have opened up as areas of intense cooperation. There’s lots of it ongoing, it is true, in the field of micro-satellites for low earth orbits and tactical intel, etc. But not nearly enough in the Cyber security sphere where India, despite its software strengths, is lagging well behind the leaders. More on this some other time.

Unless India begins relentlessly and remorselessly to think strategic and act strategically, the country has no hope of making a mark in the world.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Culture, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, indian policy -- Israel, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Iran and West Asia, Israel, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, SAARC, society, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia, Western militaries | 13 Comments

Trumping the system

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

A hard bargain, but good for India
——-
DONALD J TRUMP COCKED a snook at the political system, smashed the competition within his own party, alienated just about every constituency in America, rhetorically trampled on old shibboleths, openly courted President Vladimir Putin and the country’s old Cold War nemesis, Russia, even asking the Kremlin to cyber-dabble to derail Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the general election, waved off the A-listers of his own Republican Party panel of policy experts who had disavowed him, trashed the political play-book, and for his excesses was rewarded by the American voter with the presidency of the United States.

Trump’s ascent must remind Prime Minister Narendra Modi of his own rather dramatic rise as an insurgent upsetting the old order within the ruling BJP headed by Lal Krishna Advani, who wanted to contest the top job one last time, and then comprehensively beating the two-term Manmohan Singh-led Congress Party Government at the hustings.

Modi will, however, find Trump in the White House less socially convivial than Barack Obama but politically more simpatico, especially if the former plays the ‘Muslim card’ and gets the US to dump on Pakistan. Indeed, ‘Hindus’ residing in the US, who arranged for a Bollywood-style event in New Jersey a fortnight back in support of Trump, claim to have contributed ‘millions of dollars’ to the Republican’s election campaign, delivered the PIO vote to Trump in this state as also in Florida, and now hope to cash in by shaping the prospective Trump administration’s approach to South Asia. A member of this group, Dharam Dass, originally from Trinidad & Tobago, called me from New York to say this group would enlist the Trump regime in doing bad things to Pakistan, a possibility some in the RSS and BJP may happily clutch at. Such enthusiasms may get a leg up with the 58-year-old former US Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn advising Trump.

A paratrooper, Flynn served with the 82nd Airborne Division and was the theatre intelligence chief during ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan, 2004-2007, and later partook of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Retired in 2014 after two years as Pentagon’s head spook—Director, US Defense Intelligence Agency, he was tapped for advice by a number of Republican presidential hopefuls, among them Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz and Trump, because of his reputation as a hard-charging, no-nonsense, call-a -spade-a- shovel kind of soldier who had run afoul of the Obama administration. They liked his pungent criticism of ‘failed’ Obama policies in West Asia and the Maghreb, his attributing the intervention in Libya following the previous bad experience in Iraq and the nuclear deal with Iran to “zero strategic thinking out of [the Obama] White House” and to “a national security structure that has lost its way when it comes to strategic thinking and strategic decision-making.”

In the event, Flynn ended up joining Trump’s team at a time when better known, more highly regarded defence intellectuals and military professionals shied away from associating with the Republican nominee. Trump’s gratitude may translate into Flynn’s appointment as the next US Secretary of Defense, or National Security Advisor.

So, what are Flynn’s beliefs that may resonate with the Hindu fringe? In an interview published in the Washington Post on August 15th, 2016, he said that “Islam is an ideology and there’s a religious component to it that’s radicalised and in some cases it masks itself behind that religion, especially in our country, because of freedom of religion.” He went on to say that extremism is in the nature of Islam, asserting that “there’s a diseased component inside the Islamic world, the Muslim world… It’s like a cancer and it has metastasized and grabbed hold in a much bigger way”. “There is,” he added, “a problem in the Islamic ideology” but that this “significant expansion of radical Islamism” was not called out by a politically correct Obama.

Obviously, the containment of extremist Islamist ideology in the Muslim world, including Pakistan, could be a baseline for the Modi Government to egg on the Trump administration. Flynn also echoes Trump’s sentiments about restricting the flow of Muslim immigrants into the US from, among other countries, Pakistan. In any case, Flynn’s clincher is in his extending Trump’s line on NATO states having to pay for the US military presence in Europe to American client states in West Asia and in the US Central Command area (encompassing Pakistan and Afghanistan). Wealthy countries in this region, he said, would have to pay “for the relationship they want to have with the United States, to continue to provide some means of security and stability in the region” or, in lieu of financial compensation, Washington, he stated “can put a different set of demands on these guys. Our conversations have been too polite. Our conversations have been political conversations with political people who try to be politically correct and not with people who can say, ‘Okay, what is it we want to have going forward?’” Such a demand could involve, according to Flynn, the countries having to take verifiable steps to cleanse their societies of the extremist virus.

In this context, the problem for the Modi Government may be this: The Pakistan Army and political circles are past masters at emptying American wallets while ostensibly fighting terrorists. Islamabad has benefitted from similar US programmes of quid pro quo in the ongoing US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, for instance, that have generally ended up enriching and strengthening the traditional elites in that country. And Messrs Trump and Flynn, consistent with their policy vis-a-vis NATO and West Asia, may demand either that India pay in cash for the US blunting the terrorist threat emanating from Pakistan, or pay in kind by fielding Indian Army units alongside US Special Forces deployed in Afghanistan—not the sort of bargain New Delhi may be looking for.

Russia, far from being a bugaboo for Trump, is a country the US president- elect thinks he can do business with as long as the Kremlin shows the US, in Flynn’s words, proper “respect”. China is another matter. Sino-US relations may be in for a bumpy ride because Trump will feel hard-pressed to deliver on his promise to correct the trade imbalance with China, renegotiate new terms, or shut off Chinese access to the US market, and thereby start a trade war. In either case, India is in a position to exploit the US fears of China, on the one hand, and to force Beijing to deliver on its infrastructure investment promises and actually open up the Chinese market to Indian goods, on the other hand.

The core benefit to India (as argued in my ‘Why Trump is Good for India’, Open, July 29th, 2016) could be that it will cure the Indian Government of perceiving the US as the foreign policy crutch of choice in the new millennium. For too long, New Delhi has banked on outside powers to protect and advance its interests. India will have to learn to rely on itself and its own resources as Trump presides over an America that cannot any more afford its own primacy.
———-
Published as “Trust in Trump” in ‘Open’ magazine, Nov 11, 2016, at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/the-american-dream-2016/trust-in-trump

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Iran and West Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Russia, South Asia, Special Forces, Strategic Relations with the US & West, US., Western militaries | 11 Comments

Bound hand & foot, nuclear-wise in Tokyo and the cost of delaying Brahmos to Vietnam

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is Tokyo-bound, there to sign a nuclear cooperation deal along the lines of a similar deal in 2008 with the United States. Have often wondered in my writings this incomprehensible desire of the Indian government headed by whosoever — Manmohan one year, Modi the next — to hamstring the country strategically. This deal with Japan too will have the clause of the deal-break in case India resumes nuclear testing at any time in the future. Because Japan has grown more hypocritical with the years even when compared to India, this anti-nuclear attitude of the Shinzo Abe regime occasions even less understanding, given Japan can become a nuclear weapon state quite literally over little more than a weekend.But the Japanese government, long in the American shadow, is habituated to aping the US.

However, this N-testing provision as deal breaker is sought to be kept hidden by GOI and, at Modi’s request, Tokyo agreed not to mention this conditionality in the public document, but rather in a separate “secret” document, as if this basis for the deal is a big secret. The Modi PMO, however, fears it will unnecessarily remind and rile up the few of us who remain concerned about GOI so easily surrendering its sovereign right to credible nuclear security, by postponing open ended N-tests and thereby persisting with untested and unproven fusion weapons arsenal.

There’s also some doubt whether Modi will be persuaded by Abe to be a bit bolder in his foreign policy where China is concerned, because New Delhi’s posture turns leonine only when Pakistan comes into view. The Indian PM hasn’t had the strategic wit to shrug off American pressure and expeditiously transfer the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile to Vietnam. So, it is unlikely he appreciates the need to strategically hamper China all along its coastline in the South China Sea, the East Sea, and the Yellow Sea, or the value of intensive military cooperation with Japan.

This reluctance of Modi’s makes no sense whatsoever in the light of China shopping its supersonic cruise missile — CM-302 in its export form, YJ-12 at the Zhuhai Air Show. How long do Modi, Doval & Co. believe it will be before the Pakistan Navy secures this missile? It stands to reason they will not even appreciate the fact that India’s repeated buckling under US pressure and postponing the Brahmos transfer has lost New Delhi the opportunity to leverage the threats of arming other states on China’s periphery with this sea-skimming anti-ship missile to prevent to, at least, limit the sale of the YJ-12s to Pakistan.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Defence Industry, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Japan, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Vietnam, Weapons | 15 Comments

US elections — News X Round Table

Posted on November 8, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Over the last weekend the News X TV channel aired a “round table” with Kanwal Sibal, the longtime Syrian journalist in Delhi al-Awwad, Pramit Chaudhri of Hindustan Times, and myself, on whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is better for India. It was a wide-ranging discussion. I argue, among other things, (as I did) in an Open magazine piece and featured on this blog a while back, that Trump, owing to his isolationist mindset and impulse to withdraw to Fortress America and pullback from NATO and Asia, will compel India to rely on its own resources to manage the China challenge, etc. rather than on external powers as has happened in the Manmohan Singh years and, more surprisingly, the three years of Modi. But with Hillary it will be more of “the same old, same old”. This discussion available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XjGDJ5UG-U.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, domestic politics, Geopolitics, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Iran and West Asia, Israel, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., West Asia | 3 Comments

The significance of the ‘Mighty Dragon’

Posted on November 5, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter aircraft, known as the ‘Mighty Dragon’, flew publicly for no more than a couple of minutes – without pulling any manuevers — at the 12th Zhuhai Air Show in Guangdong province in southern China on November 1st. But it was enough to send worry coursing through the military corridors in the Asia-Pacific region.

The reasons are not hard to see. This aircraft is being developed by China as a stealth aircraft for long range strike, a counterpart of the American F-22 Raptor. With an unfueled range of as much as 1,500 nautical miles, the J-20, depending from where it is launched, can reach deep inside India in the west to farthest points in what Beijing refers to as the “second Island chain” stretching from Japan to Papua-New Guinea and northeastern Australia in the Pacific. Moreover, with a large weapons-carrying capacity, masses of this aircraft that China, with hard currency reserves totaling some $4 trillion, can now easily afford and produce, will be able easily to overwhelm almost any local opposition. While most of its specific features and capabilities are unknown and can only be speculated about, the J-20 is reportedly superior to the only competition in its class, the F-22, in terms of operational radius and the size of its onboard arsenal.

However, the aircraft on show at Zhuhai seems to be a prototype, not the final product. While the Chinese PLA Air Force have announced 2018 as the year for inducting the J-20 into service, it will more likely be another decade before it is technologically mature. Over ten years elapsed between the industrially advanced US Company Lockheed Martin, for instance, first displaying the F-22 and its joining the US Air Force. What can be deduced from its size are the facts that the J-20 can carry more fuel (and, therefore, has longer range) and more wordnance than the Raptor.

But Western analysts were quick to damn the J-20 as a bad copy of the F-22 and the advanced multi-role combat aircraft F-35, amalgamating design features from both these aircraft into it. Many years back, the US government had charged China with hacking the designs of the F-22 and the F-35 from the Lockheed Martin computers. The Russians meanwhile claim the J-20 resembles the MiG 1.44 design the Chinese bought from the Mikoyan Guryevich Design Bureau.

But what is important is not that the Chinese have built a fifth generation strike aircraft by stealing secrets from the US but the fact that they designed, developed, and are now manufacturing an entirely indigenous aircraft with great fighting potential. That China has been engaging in intensive technology espionage is nothing new; nor is it a surprise that they have obtained mastery in reverse engineering complex fighter aircraft, which started with it turning out inferior but cheap copies of ex-Soviet fighter planes late 1950s onwards. In fact China’s combat aviation industry has grown so versatile and competent, one of the most renowned aerospace analysts, Dr. Carlo Kopp of Australia, writes that “In terms of China’s ability to manufacture and deploy significant numbers of the J-XX [J-20] it is worth observing that in terms of raw “bang for buck” China’s defence industry is outperforming the United States’ industry by a robust margin.” And of the J-20, he asserts, that it “represents a techno-strategic coup by China, and if deployed in large numbers in a mature configuration, a genuine strategic coup against the United States and its Pacific Rim allies.” The plane’s development, he goes on to say, is “an excellent case study of a well thought out response to [the American air force] deployment” which will require “a disproportionate response in material investment to effectively counter.”

What is particularly galling from the Indian point of view is that India, despite a much earlier and better start, rather than being well ahead of China in the aerospace sector and in producing advanced combat aircraft, has become the world’s largest importer. It may be recalled that the entirely Indian designed and built Marut HF-24 that flew in 1961 was the first the supersonic jet aircraft to be built outside the US and Europe in the world. It was designed by a Indo-German team headed by the foremost fighter aircraft designer of his time, Dr Kurt Tank, who had built Hitler’s air force, and included a number of talented Indians aircraft designers.

Had the Indian government used the HF-24 project as a seedbed for talent and specialized skills to establish a full-fledged aviation industry in the country, India would by now have been among the leading countries in this sphere and the source of advanced military technologies generally. But then the humiliating 1962 War with China followed and a panicky Indian government began haphazardly to grow the Indian military. Thus, the MiG-21 from the Soviet Union was speedily inducted into IAF followed in the 1970s by the British Jaguar strike aircraft even though the Marut was a better in that role of low level attack. The successor aircraft to the HF-24 called HF-73 would have been even better, except the craze for foreign combat aircraft and for importing them had by now been institutionalized. And the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) that began by producing the wholly indigenous Marut has been reduced over the years to manufacturing various MiG planes and the Jaguar aircraft under license and has become skilled at little else except screw-driver technology.

HAL and other Defence Public Sector Units have stagnated at this low level of industrial competence, never ingesting such technology as was “transferred”, leave alone innovating technology. Some small things were reverse engineered, not whole aircraft or other weapons systems and weapons platforms, and the armed services sank further and further into the wasteful habit of importing all their requirements. Other than making an arms dependency of India, the import culture in defence hardware has spawned a system of deep corruption, with military officers, civil servants and politicians all being paid off handsomely by foreign equipment suppliers. This is the condition India finds itself in – the country spends more and more on defence imports and gets less and less in return.

China in the meantime is on the cusp of becoming a genuine global power, able to create and produce the most advanced military technologies and, increasingly, disadvantage India by onpassing Chinese-made aircraft, tanks, artillery, ships and submarines to Pakistan.

This is strange because, when pushed to the wall and imports were unavailable, India has designed and produced the most advanced armaments ranging from the Arihant-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile firing submarines, nuclear weapons, to the Agni series of extremely lethal and sophisticated missiles.

May be, if the Modi government cuts off the import option to the Indian military and begins to show confidence and to have faith in Indian talent and capabilities, and moves to integrate the public sector and private sector resources, the country could begin to realize self-sufficiency in weaponry. This will be the beginning of India becoming a great power.
——-
The above piece was published (in translation) in the Hindi language Daily, ‘Dainik Bhaskar’ on November 4, 2016.

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, civil-military relations, corruption, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Technology transfer, Weapons | 18 Comments

Gutting the Tejas or Seventies’ fighter for 21st Century IAF zindabad!

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The Narendra Modi-led BJP government has waxed “nationalistic” but almost every step and decision it has taken in the defence industrial sector to-date has not only regressed the possibility of India emerging as a military aviation and aerospace power but pretty much guaranteed India will remain the biggest importer of armaments in the world and an arms dependency.

In its continuing display of complete lack of faith and confidence in indigenous products, talent and capabilities, and wholly disregarding the quite extraordinary and proven operational qualities and world-wide market potential of the home-designed and built Tejas Light Combat Aircraft, the Modi regime has now put out that India is in the market for as many as 300 combat aircraft worth anything up to $13-15 billion — only the up-front cost, as long as all these planes are “made” physically in India. This is seen as being in line with Modi’s “Make in India” policy, but it is actually a simpletonish take on indigenous manufacture.

“Make in India” is different from the more significant “Made in India”, which GOI has not cottoned to, despite the fact that at the heart of the latter concept is the designing aspect. Designing the Tejas is of the greatest significance, not the fact that it has foreign-sourced components. No major aerial weapons platform in Indian use is, by this definition, “Made” in India. But a large number of them fit the category of “Make” in India involving the same old, same old — the Meccano level screwdriver technology of assembling aircraft, Bofors guns, whatever, as per the design blueprint and the SKD (semi knock down) kits and CKD (completely knocked down) kits given by the supplier, that HAL and our Ordnance factories are a cock-a-hoop about. This is the same old scheme of licensed manufacture dressed up in new “Make” in India rhetoric. Except, instead of the Defence Public Sector Units doing the assembling, private sector companies, such Tata, L&T, and Reliance Aerospace, will now also do it, with no more likelihood than in the past of these companies ingesting imported technologies to the point where they are able to innovate the technology. And India will be left marching in place.

In all such license manufacture deals, moreover, the really high value components and assemblies, such as the Fire Control System in the avionics suite, sensors, etc. will come as “black boxes” that the supplier companies will make money out of selling to India, for the duration of the production of the production run of that particular platform, piece of equipment. In fact, the Swedish firm Saab in competition with Lockheed Martin with its F-15 and Boeing’s F-18 to sell the Gripen NG as MiG-21 replacement has been more honest than the American majors in stating publicly that the final negotiated unit price of their aircraft will depend upon how much indigenization India wants, the higher the Indian content, the steeper the price. In other words, if like Rafale India buys the Gripen off the shelf, it’ll be a lower price than if GOI is intent on realizing the fiction of “Make” in India, when the price will go through the roof. Except Saab has promised help with the Tejas-1A, an interim plane preceding Tejas Mk-II. But the trend is that whatever the Tejas model, it will end up outfitting no more than 4-5 token air defence squadrons.

The talk is Modi is going American and buying the F-16, and soon Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will sign an agreement with LM to produce the F-16 fighter aircraft involving a local partner, likely Tata (Dassault of France hoping the 38 aircraft deal will lead to buying another 90 Rafales, has chosen the politically well-connected Gujarati firm of Reliance Aerospace to advance this aim). LM and Boeing began shaping their offers around the time Modi visited the US and President Barack Obama for the first time in Oct 2014, when the US President is reported to have impressed on Modi the desirability of buying the F-16/F-18. That’s when Modi’s calculation firmed up that buying expensive military hardware would concurrently buy the goodwill of the Western country he was visiting at any time. A few months later in April 2015, he pulled the Rafale rabbit out of his metaphorical hat to the great delight and acclaim of President Francoise Hollande and his entourage in Paris.

Rafale was a phenomenally wasteful buy. The transaction for the F-16 will trump it. The problems attending on the latter are many and the Modi government has a lot of explaining to do to the country. For instance, how come the F-16/F-18, old, very old, combat aircraft dating their initial development to the late 1960s, which were rejected outright by the IAF (in the MMRCA race) because Air HQ had claimed it lacked any potential for “further development”, is now suddenly acceptable to the IAF brass as its bulk aircraft of the future? And is it the considered policy of the Modi government that India pay by beggaring itself for, and be armed with, junk? And, what about IAF’s fears that the Pakistan Air Force being intimately acquainted with the F-16 for over 35 years can, on the turn of a page, devise tactics to counter it?

American commentators make the case that India could become the sole supplier in the world of Block 70 F-16s enhanced possibly to ‘Viper’ 5th-gen aircraft configuration with the Northrup Grumman SABAR (scalable agile beam radar)AESA radar, spares and services. But any F-16 cannot be advanced more than 4.5 gen w/o radical structural changes, which are not on. They also contend that India can extract the condition of sales stoppage to PAF. This would be small consolation considering Russia will most definitely and happily sell to PAF the Su-30s, which can run circles around most extant aircraft and certainly the F-16/F-18. So, PAF will be in the enviable position of working both the F-16 and the Su-30 to India’s aerial disadvantage. The strategic genius of the Modi govt and IAF never ceases to amaze. This will happen because Moscow will calculate it has nothing to lose with India increasingly imposing stiff new conditions on ongoing deals as an excuse to buying Western stuff. It was a belief that no doubt got a fillip by Parrikar telling the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoygu over the weekend that he needed Moscow to commit to 50% of R&D of the 5th generation fighter to be done in India when the aircraft is already in service with the Russian air force and there’s no more R&D to do! The fact that the Russians have incorporated three changes demanded by IAF — a more powerful engine derived from the 117 power plant as interim power plant before the new Saturn Izdeliye engine can be put in it, a 360 degree radar, and 2 IRSTs (Infra-Red Search and Track) systems, has apparently not impressed the Indian side.

Not that the spendthrift Modi regime cares, but let’s compare the costs involved. The aged and worn out F-16 assembly line from Fort Worth, Texas, will be moved to India. Factoring in the costs of setting up this antique production facility here and a maintenance infrastructure in India, will mean F-16 per plane cost of around $280 million, without weapons. This for an almost fifty year old aircraft! By the time, you factor the weapon cost, a “Make” in India F-16 unit cost will be upwards of $350 million — the price of the cost-prohibitive Rafale! Boeing, trying to be clever, has promised establishing an entirely new and more modern production line, except India will pay lots more for it. The unit cost of the F-18, in the event , is anyone’s guess. F-18’s selling point is it is also a carrier aircraft, yes, but requiring gigantic boats of 90,000+ tonnes of displacement, which can be blown out of the water by supersonic and the even more deadly hypersonic cruise missiles (homing in, broadsides, at seven times the speed of sound). But we Indians believe in afterlife and the Indian carrier hosting F-18s will have one too!

Modi is throwing around tens of billions of dollars of the country’s monies as if it were confetti — $20 billion for the Rafale (if only 36 are procured) and $35-40 billion for the upgraded (but without major architectural changes) and at most 4.5 generation F-16/F-18. Imagine what investing such amounts of money would do for the Tejas, a 4.5 generation fighter. Meanwhile, China has just flown its wholly, fully, completely indigenous 5th gen J-20 stealth fighter at the Zhuhai Air Show.

That such a great home grown aircraft as Tejas is thus being slowly, and with great deliberation, strangled by the Indian govt and IAF, just as these two entities had in the 1970s killed the other Indian MADE and extraordinary supersonic combat aircraft the Marut HF-24 Mk-II (also known as the HF-73), reveals just how devoid of strategic vision and will, of confidence and faith in India’s capabilities and in self-respect, the Modi govt is. That the imports-happy IAF never felt even a twinge of self-doubt when flying foreign aircraft when desi aircraft were there for its nurturing, is by now an old story. $30 billion in the Tejas programme would result in a 4.5-gen combat aircraft (more than equal of the ’70s vintage F-16] that would wipe the floor with the competition in the global market, especially in Africa and Latin America. But that would mean NO repeated pleasure trips to the IAF brass and MOD officials to the US and to oola la! – Paris, etc., no Green cards, no offshore accounts, no palatial residences for CASs after retirement, no, etc. etc.

Posted in Africa, arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, corruption, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Latin America, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, russian assistance, society, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons, Western militaries | 26 Comments

Seeing the light but dimly (on N issues)

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

It is a time for the few of us who have always felt that the Govt of India have been un-serious about the country’s nuclear security, pandered to every Washington nonproliferation whim, succumbed to every international arms control and nonproliferation measure engineered by the five NPT-recognized weapon states, surrendered its sovereign right to obtain the level of strategic deterrence India requires, and otherwise foolishly led the fight for a world free of nuclear weapons, to heave a great sigh of relief. The Indian representative at the UN Commission on Disarmament (CD), DB Venkatesh Varma, for the first time that I can recall, voiced the government’s grave reservations about both the means of disarmament — a conference in March 2017 — and its desired outcome — tasked to negotiate a “legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”, at the meeting of the UN’s First Committee. India joined 15 other nations in abstaining in the the General Assembly on the non-binding resolution moved by Austria, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa and Brazil which was, however, approved by 123 votes to 38.

India, Varma said, has been “constrained” to abstain on the resolution and is “not convinced” that the proposed conference in 2017 “can address the longstanding expectation of the international community for a comprehensive instrument on nuclear disarmament.” And while reiterating the need for consultations to bridge the “deep and substantive” divide between the nuclear weapon states (NWS) and non-NWS India, he added, “attaches the highest priority to nuclear disarmament and shares with the co-sponsors the widely felt frustration that the international community has not been able to take forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations” and “share the deep concern about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons”, in explaining India’s abstention. He also reminded the CD that India did not partake of the meeting earlier this year in Geneva of the open-ended working group, and so commits to nothing. However, India, Varma stated “has supported the commencement of negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament on a Comprehensive Nuclear Weapons Convention, which in addition to prohibition and elimination also includes verification. International verification would be essential to the global elimination of nuclear weapons, just as it has been in the case of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Progress on nuclear disarmament in the CD should remain an international priority”. “International verification” are code words for killing all such initiatives because the US is and has always been seminally opposed to international inspectors poking around its nuclear complex. This is the real hurdle to any meaningful disarmament.

The nuclear Have-nots in their frustration have sought for a long time to deny the benefits of the Bomb to the five states recognized as NWS by the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, or had the good sense (India, Pakistan) to not sign it and have since acquired nuclear weapons. If they believe the NWS can be prevailed upon to part with their arsenals and return to their pristine non-nuclear weapons state status then they are more optimistic and have to get real. After nearly 50 years of banging their collective head on a stone wall of dismissal and disregard for the very notion of a ‘nuclear zero’ world they seem to have learned nothing.

The surest way to demolish the present thoroughly unfair and unequal global nuclear order would be for the Latin American states leading this most recent charge, such as Brazil and Mexico to abrogate the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco that rendered the Caribbean and Central and South America a nuclear weapons free zone, and for the tech-wise capable Brazil to embark on a nuclear weapons programme, which will prompt its rival, Argentina, to shrug off its nuclear reticence. These twinned events will formally mark the breakdown of the NPT order and the message will reverberate through P-5 corridors, albeit, not to much effect on the NWS beyond the hand-wringing by disarmament idealists in the US and western Europe.

India could tip the NPT order over into the abyss, as I have been advocating for nearly two decades now, simply by resuming open-ended testing of high-yield thermonuclear weapons, something desperately needed to inject credibility into the fusion weapons arsenal we profess to possess, and to finally bring the weapons reliability and quality on par with India’s first rate missile delivery systems, in particular the Agni-5 IRBM. This is most seriously in the national interest, but no Indian government has had the nerve, the guts, and the political will to take the decision to restart N-testing because of the fear of US reaction and the potential trashing by Washington of the 2008 nuclear deal. Actually, nothing will serve India’s interests better nor be more welcomed by those who are truly nationalist-minded than for the nuclear deal to be junked. It will allow New Delhi to regain self-respect and genuine latitude of action and autonomy in foreign and strategic policies. Alas, Vajpayee started India’s downward slide, and Manmohan Singh and since 2014 Narendra Modi have preferred to be permitted White House visits than to firm up India’s thermonuclear stance. Whence, India is in the state it is — losing face and losing ground on all fronts.

If the vote to abstain in CD suggests a certain stiffening of the country’s hitherto noodle-spined outlook and policy, there’s contrary evidence to show that this vote is but a mirage, a diversion to cover up for staying true to the nuclear deal-course plotted by Washington.

It is not clear why the Modi regime, for instance, so wants an agreement for civil nuclear cooperation with Japan, which Tokyo has agreed to “in principle”. It has no real technologies to peddle other than one of its corporations, Toshiba, desiring to sell the Westinghouse 1000 line of reactors to India. This segues into Modi’s (as it did with Manmohan’s) conviction that the shortcut to making up the energy deficit is to fast forward nuclear power. To achieve this Modi has stressed imports of enriched uranium fueled reactors, which will for their lifetime be hostage to imported fuel bundles. It will ensure India adheres to its N-deal commitments, thereby ruling out further Indian explosive nuclear testing.

The more feasible alternative that makes economic sense of trusting in the indigenous natural uranium, heavy water moderated, INDU power plants is, of course, outside the pale. But it is consistent with the Modi government’s view also in the defense sector. Thus, Modi would in both these industrial spheres representing leading technologies rather enrich and sustain foreign nuclear and defence industries at humungous cost to the country than invest the same sums in installing INDU power plants at a speeded up pace at home and developing and selling in the global market the 220MW and the more advanced 700 MW INDU power plants.

That Modi time and again makes the wrong issue the standard to judge the success of his foreign visits by, is evident from GOI’s emphasis on signing a N-civilian cooperation deal with Japan, when Tokyo is clearly unwilling to accommodate New Delhi’s insistence that such an agreement not contain Japan’s right to resile from it in case India resumes testing. Modi is to visit Tokyo for the annual summit on Nov 11-12. Coming from Japan — a country that’s a virtual nuclear weapons state and can actually field an N-weapons inventory inside of a few weeks, this is a bit rich. But, of course, Japan has long chosen to ride its nuclear victimhood (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) into a permanent opposition to India’s nuclear weapons. Why it is not strategically plain to Tokyo that a nuclearised Japan and India at the eastern and western flanks of China, and to the Indian government that nuclear warheaded Brahmos cruise missile-armed Vietnam in China’s soft underbelly in Southeast Asia, will squelch for once and for all Beijing’s dreams of dominating Asia, is a mystery.

So there’s ample foolishness and very little clear-headed thinking going round in New Delhi and Tokyo. This is so perhaps because governments in both these countries seem tied to America’s apron strings and are doing their best to live up to being “umriki tattoos”.

Posted in Africa, arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Defence Industry, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Japan, Latin America, Missiles, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, nuclear power, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, UN, United States, US., Vietnam, Weapons | 6 Comments