How Credible N-deterrence in Place: INDIA ?

India is committed to No First Use doctrine but that does not prevent some reckless enemy to strike first with nuclear bombs. It appears prudent therefore to go for Credible Nuclear deterrence, and be prepared for a retaliatory nuclear strike. Therefore, New Delhi had planned to construct nuclear shelters, equipped with electronic network linking some hundreds nuclear warheads on long range surface-to-surface ballistic missile systems. These will be digitally linked to a central command of Nuclear Defence War Council (NDWC). The NDWC, using the electronic codes, is expected to protect the country from a N-attack by instantly ordering retaliatory nuclear strikes. This complex techno-scientific system is called "Credible N-deterrence" meaning -to survive a surprise nuclear attack, and retaliate with massive overwhelming nuclear warheads for a total obliteration of the enemy.

Twelve prototypes of nuclear shelters are under construction by our Defence Research and Development Organization. These are self-contained units with sleeping bunks for 30 top personnel, equipped with captive power and water supply systems. Toilets and decontamination module including waste disposal and fire-fighting systems are also installed within the underground shelters. These radiation-proof shelters are meant to protect only a few of specialized n-force personnel for a short-term survival in a near-miss situation. Because, in case of a direct nuclear hit, it's going to be instant vaporization of entire nuclear war zone.

Nevertheless, construction of nuclear shelters is only a small side of the long drawn nuclear war games. Stockpiled radioactive materials pose serious technical problems of safekeeping and management. No amount of money can return all the land and water to their original purity for civic usage that had been contaminated by long-lived radioactive waste generated either from "peaceful purposes" or from dismantling of nuclear warheads. In Russia and in the US, an estimated 2000 such nuclear facilities had been out of commission since the collapse of the Cold War in 1985. But their long-term safe keeping within the next 50 years would cost an estimated 60 billion dollars.

Meanwhile, 10,000 nuclear warheads with 1000 tonnes of weapons grade stockpiled Plutonium would pose additional problems for the former cold-war warriors. Over the next 50 years, roughly seventy billion dollars would be required for just safe-keeping management of valuable and yet useless life threatening radioactive materials.

There is also a very high societal cost to pay for acquiring the credible nuclear capability. Possession of nuclear weapons requires an extremely complex and secret backup infrastructure, for which we need specially trained technical manpower confidentially kept in secret establishments. Specially programmed scientists and engineers shall have to be kept away from civil industrial productive sectors. Nuclear Defence personnel are isolated with severe restriction on their family life and socialization. Those who man the most destructive arsenal in human history are not allowed to speak about their professional achievements. And secrecy subjects them to extremely high stress and tension causing mental health problems, often leading to suicidal tendency.

In building credible N-deterrence, in fact, we are repeating the folly of the Cold War pundits who in 1950s regarded n-weapons as the currency of power. By 1985, Moscow and Washington both had stockpiled 50,000 nuclear warheads and achieved Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) capability of annihilation of Earth ten times over. During the 80s, Nuclear Nights and Nuclear Winter paradigm were established by the concerned scientists. That a nuclear war cannot be fought, nor can it be won. Consequently, disarming, decommissioning and the safe keeping of thousands of useless but life-threatening Nuclear Weapons had become the most complex and costly problems for scientists and engineers of the Nuclear Weapons States. Still, New Delhi plans to build nuclear shelters, along with advanced n-weapons delivery systems, and hundreds of n-warheads ready for retaliatory credible n-deterrence.

Our country's Defence pundits who designed the Credible N-deterrence must consider that for how long the credible nuclear command would survive inside the shelter and that would they ever come out alive or would they simply evaporate. We know now for certain that after a nuclear detonation the heat flare, within 20-30 kilometers of the hypocenter, rises within 2-3 seconds to intensity of thousands of Celsius. The primary fires issued from the hypocenter will raise scattering sparks, blazing debris, and short-circuits in electric mains would produce extensive 'secondary fires' causing blast waves, demolishing constructed structures, exploding entire inflammable materials and fuel tanks and storages in towns and cities, disrupting and destroying instantly entire electromagnetic communication systems.

Massive firestorms would throw thousands of tonnes of debris up into heavens, and in return journey that will descend on earth with increasing destructive force. No civil defence and fire control mechanism will function in a nuclear war theatre. A few commanders and the civic authority comprising the Nuclear Defence War Council even if they survive a few hours, would not be able to come out of the shelters. Because the entire hydrological system would have been destroyed and the doors would not open.

The concerned scientists had estimated that an average baseline scenario in a nuclear conflict would produce about 200 million tonnes of aerosol, 30 percent of which being the sunlight absorbing elemental carbon. Consequently the sunlight would be totally obscured from the vast region as a result of the fires caused by nuclear detonation. Thus the colossal amount of heat energy, carbon dioxide and aerosol emitted in a very short span of time, would upset the eco-system and dynamic equilibrium that sustains life on this planet. Radioactive dust and debris rising from the obliteration of towns and cities would cover the sky and without sunlight, total darkness of nuclear night will prevail. Within a few days without the warmth of the Sun, the entire eco-system would have frozen in the nuclear winter.

The basic issue, then, is not the cost of the nuclear weapons or the nuclear shelters but the threat N-war systems pose to our biological existence. The Credible Nuclear Deterrence aims to deter whom and that it aims to defend whom. For us Indians, therefore, the question is not of our national security but the survival of entire life-support eco-system on the Indian subcontinent. A nuclear conflict would lead to irreversible calamity for the whole SAARC region, a clear possibility of total obliteration of the great civilization extended all the way from the Hindukush of the Karakoram Range of Himalaya, to Kanyakumari and Rameshwaram. It would be practically impossible for any life to escape the unprecedented eco-devastation. "Traveling the slippery slope towards a nuclear arms race will keep us perpetually on the edge of a nuclear abyss," says retired Air Marshal Brijesh Jayal.

There is still time for us to cease the MAD nuclear arms race.