India has declared a no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy and is in the process of developing a nuclear doctrine based on “credible minimum deterrence.” In August 1999, the Indian government released a draft of the doctrine which asserts that nuclear weapons are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of “retaliation only”. The document also maintains that India “will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail” and that decisions to authorise the use of nuclear weapons would be made by the Prime Minister or his ‘designated successor(s)’. According to the NRDC, despite the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in 2001–2002, India remained committed to its nuclear no-first-use policy.

Grey Area on Nuclear Weapons

A speech by India’s then NSA Shivshankar Menon at National Defence College in New Delhi on October 21, 2010 changed the wording from “no first use” to “no first use against non-nuclear weapon states”, although some argued that this was not a substantive change but “an innocent typographical or lexical error in the text of the speech.” India’s current PM Modi has in the run up to the recent general elections reiterated commitment to no first use policy. In April 2013 Shyam Saran, convener of the National Security Advisory Board, affirmed that regardless of the size of a nuclear attack against India, be it a tactical nuclear weapon or a strategic nuclear weapon, India will retaliate massively. This was in response to reports that Pakistan had developed a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon, in an attempt to nullify an Indian “no first use” retaliatory doctrine.

There are enough evidence of how Pakistan and China has been provocative towards India to declare a nuclear war but India has not given up on its stand given historically India has never made the first move to invade any country.

As reported in Wikipedia. Read HERE.

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