In this book, the leading authority on India's nuclear program offers an informed and thoughtful assessment of India's nuclear strategy. Basrur shows that the country's nuclear culture is generally in accord with the principle of minimum deterrence but sometimes drifts into a more open-ended view.

"This book brings together the many pieces of India's nuclear puzzle and the ramifications for South Asia. The author examines the choices facing India from New Delhi's point of view in order to discern which future courses of action appear most appealing to Indian security managers. He details how such choices, if acted upon, would affect U.S. strategic interests, India's neighbors, and the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Publisher Fact Sheet The definitive history of India's long flirtation with nuclear capability, culminating in the nuclear tests that surprised the world in May 1998.

India has come a long way from being a nuclear pariah to a de facto member of the nuclear club. The transition in its nuclear identity has been accompanied by its transformation into a major economic power and underlines a pragmatic turn in its foreign-policy thinking. This book provides a historical narrative of the evolution of India’s nuclear policy since 1947, as the country continues its pursuit for complete integration into the global nuclear order. Situating India’s nuclear behaviour in this context, the book explains how India’s engagement with the atom is unique in international nuclear history and politics. Aided by declassified archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on how status, security, domestic politics, and the role of individuals have played a key role in defining and shaping India’s nuclear trajectory, policy choices, and their consequences.

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London, 1991) under title: Indian nuclear strategy.

This book details the evolution of India's nuclear journey, from the 1960s to the present day, the historical events leading to the 1974 nuclear test, the reluctant nuclearization that occurred thereafter and the first phases of an operational nuclear deterrent in the late 1980s.

This book examines the Indian nuclear policy, doctrine, strategy and posture, clarifying the elastic concept of credible minimum deterrence at the center of the country's approach to nuclear security. This concept, Karnad demonstrates, permits the Indian nuclear forces to be beefed up, size and quality-wise, and to acquire strategic reach and clout, even as the qualifier minimum suggests an overarching concern for moderation and economical use of resources, and strengthens India's claims to be a responsible nuclear weapon state. Based on interviews with Indian political leaders, nuclear scientists, and military and civilian nuclear policy planners, it provides unique insights into the workings of India's nuclear decision-making and deterrence system. Moreover, by juxtaposing the Indian nuclear policy and thinking against the theories of nuclear war and strategic deterrence, nuclear escalation, and nuclear coercion, offers a strong theoretical grounding for the Indian approach to nuclear war and peace, nuclear deterrence and escalation, nonproliferation and disarmament, and to limited war in a nuclearized environment. It refutes the alarmist notions about a nuclear flashpoint in South Asia, etc. which derive from stereotyped analysis of India-Pakistan wars, and examines India's likely conflict scenarios involving China and, minorly, Pakistan.

Karsten Frey gives an analytic account of the dynamics of India's nuclear build up, putting forward a new comprehensive model which goes beyond the classic strategic model of accepting motives of arming behaviour, and incorporates the dynamics in India's nuclear programme.

India is now enmeshed in the deterrence game—actively with its traditional adversary Pakistan, and potentially with China. At the same time it is finding easier access to fissile materials and strategic technologies. In order to deal with these developments safely and wisely, the nation needs a much more sophisticated and multidisciplinary understanding of the strategic, technological, operational, and cost issues involved in nuclear matters. In this important book, Indian strategic analyst Verghese Koithara explains and evaluates India's nuclear force management, encouraging a broad public conversation that may act as a catalyst for positive change before the subcontinent experiences unthinkable carnage. The defense management system of a nuclear power absolutely needs to be sound and thorough. In addition to the considerable demands of managing its nuclear forces, it also must control conventional forces in a manner that forestalls nuclear escalation of a conflict by either side. Expanding and upgrading nuclear forces without enhancing deterrence is dangerous and should be avoided. India's nuclear force management system is grafted onto a woefully inadequate overall system of defense management. Koithara dissects all of these issues and suggests a way forward, drawing on recent developments in deterrence theory around the world.

"In May 1998, India and Pakistan put to rest years of speculation about whether they possessed nuclear technology and openly tested their weapons. Some believed nuclearization would stabilize South Asia; others prophesized disaster. Authors of two of the most comprehensive books on South Asia's new nuclear era, Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, offer competing theories on the transformation of the region and what these patterns mean for the world's next proliferators." "With these two major interpretations, Ganguly and Kapur tackle all sides of an urgent issue that has profound regional and global consequences. Sure to spark discussion and debate, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb thoroughly maps the potential impact of nuclear proliferation."--Cubierta.