K. Subrahmanyam may be the most exceptional strategic thinker that Western Wonks have never read. During the 1990s, we disagreed intensely about so many things that a mutual friend arranged for a cooling off session over lunch at the India International Centre in Delhi. After an awkward silence, my dining companion asked, “So what shall we talk about, the weather?” Our conversations then became far easier.

For those unfamiliar with the Subrahmanyam oeuvre, I would recommend starting with India and the Nuclear Challenge, an edited volume published in 1986. Back then, Indian strategic analysts spoke with feeling about the immorality of the Bomb. Here are some excerpts that contemporary nuclear abolitionists can relate to:

The doctrine of nuclear deterrence is not an eternal verity but is largely based on a belief system… If one were to accept the simplistic argument that nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented and hence nuclear deterrence will have to continue, that argument can be stretched to other means of perpetrating genocide. What prevents the other means from being used or threatened to be used as weapons of mass destruction is certain in-built restraints and norms of behaviour and values. A victor ten or fifteen centuries ago put to death all men in the conquered land… Today…it is not done because of the changes that have come about in our values and attitudes.

This has happened in a number of areas in our own lifetime. Concepts and institutions which were considered inescapable and having no alternatives have become totally unacceptable and discarded into the dustbin of history. Slavery was a hoary institution… Monarchy and the divine right of kings had their day… No one today will fight for a king… The colour bar and discrimination based on it was prevalent even a couple of decades ago, but is no longer defended as a way of life… Colonialism is indefensible today – though in its heyday it was hailed as a civilising mission… All that has changed within our lifetime.

It is now clear even to the followers of the cult of nuclear deterrence that nuclear wars cannot be fought and won… The sensible way out is to delegitimize and outlaw nuclear weapons as instruments of war.”

So why would Subrahmanyam, the most eminent living Indian strategist, lobby tenaciously for an Indian bomb? Because of coercive diplomacy, international standing and, yes, deterrence:

The nuclear challenge is not just the one posed by the Pakistani efforts to acquire nuclear weapons or even the Chinese challenge. [Writing elsewhere, Subrahmanyam estimated that Pakistan acquired a usable nuclear device three years before India.] It is a challenge arising out of the global strategic environment in which nuclear weapons have been accepted as the currency of power, nuclear capability has transformed the game of power to coercive diplomacy and the subcontinent is surrounded on all sides by nuclear weapons…

It is imperative to… devise a strategy which will enable India to have access to the currency of international power … even while this country struggles to replace it with a more benign one. If India is to succeed in this struggle, it must first survive as a cohesive nation state, become an increasingly influential factor in the international system and develop power to induce changes in the global order.”

Professor Raj Krishna made the same point in the April-June 1965 issue of India Quarterly after India suffered a humiliating defeat in a border war with China:

It is an illusion to suppose that military weakness rather than military power makes a nation more influential in pressing for disarmament…. Virtue is respected only when it is backed by power; power without virtue is disastrous; but virtue without power is helpless. The fate of the merely virtuous is often decided in the assemblies of the powerful without reference to and at the expense of the virtuous.

Today, India still finds itself betwixt and between on nuclear matters – “an intermediate caste” – to use M.C. Changla’s old characterization. While New Delhi now prides itself as being a responsible state with nuclear weapons, its sense of exceptionalism, the absence of a domestic consensus, and perhaps less than perfect nuclear test results make it hard for India to join decent company by signing the CTBT. And so India remains a fence sitter, unable to take a leadership position on nuclear disarmament while remaining apart on nuclear testing.

Subrahmanyam was clear then and now that H bombs are “essentially terror weapons,” and that lower yields would suffice for instruments of such limited utility. Another brilliant Indian strategic thinker, now deceased, K. Sundarji, also wrote against the need for thermonuclear weapons:

Very large yields to compensate to some extent for the lack of accuracy are also not required. As to which zone in a city gets hit, this is not of much consequence. The yield need not be very high. The weapons that struck Nagasaki and Hiroshima were between 15 and 20 kt, and the world knows the result.

During the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons became the calling cards of the P-5, but even their nuclear weapon strategists acknowledged, when they stopped testing in the atmosphere, that yields are militarily meaningless beyond a certain point. By signing the CTBT, New Delhi could, in effect, declare that larger yields matter far, far less than the global cessation of nuclear testing and the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. Pakistan would then surely sign the CTBT, removing one driver of the nuclear competition in southern Asia.

No major power with nuclear weapons has been so bold as to declare, in effect, that thermonuclear weapons are not required for minimum, credible, nuclear deterrence. Doing so would be the most exceptional act of Indian leadership on nuclear issues since Jawaharlal Nehru led global efforts stop nuclear testing and abolish the Bomb.