22.8.12

India's nukes


India’s “hard-headed” leadership had fought “explicit or implicit threat” by global powers to change its “behaviour, NSA Shivshankar Menon said. “On at least three occasions before 1998 other powers used the explicit or implicit threat of nuclear weapons to try and change India’s behaviour,” Menon said without elaborating. The NSA made it clear that India will continue to have nuclear weapons till universal nuclear disarmament becomes a reality.
“We do think that we would be more secure in a world that is truly free of nuclear weapons. But until we arrive at that happy state, we have no choice, and a responsibility towards our own people, to have nuclear weapons to protect them from nuclear threats,” Menon said.
Observing that nuclear weapons make a contribution to the country’s security in an uncertain and anarchic world, Menon said, “the possession of nuclear weapons has, empirically speaking, deterred others from attempting nuclear coercion or blackmail against India.”
In an apparent reference to Pakistan, he said unlike certain other nuclear weapon states, India’s weapons were not meant to redress a military imbalance, or to some perceived inferiority in conventional military terms, or to serve some tactical or operational military need on the battlefield.

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