How Many Nuclear Weapons Does India Have?

India confirmed its nuclear capabilities just a few years after the genesis of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is one of only a handful of nations that never joined the landmark agreement. Why has Delhi insisted on its right to nukes? And what does it mean for the regional strategic balance? Hint: the answer is, mutually assured destruction.

The Republic of India first flexed its nuclear muscles on May 18, 1974, when it conducted a test of a thermonuclear device in a remote area of the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, roughly 200 km from the Pakistani border. The test, dubbed Operation Smiling Buddha, created a blast yield of between 8 and 12 kilotons of TNT (i.e., up to 80 percent the explosive power of the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The explosion was the culmination of decades of Indian research into nuclear technology going back to 1944, when the country was still a British colony, with the founding of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, Indian scientists’ nuclear research efforts were largely restricted to the peaceful atom, with the South Asian nation commissioning its first research reactor in 1956, and its first commercial nuclear power plant – the Tarapur Atomic Power Station, in 1961. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, insisted on taming the power of the atom and restricting it to peaceful, development-minded purposes, notwithstanding nuclear technology’s inherent dual use potential.

After Nehru’s death in 1964, his successors, interim Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda and Lal Bahadur Shastri, gradually shifted course, citing pressures, including a difficult global and regional geopolitical situation, and tense relations with the People’s Republic of China after the Sino-Indian War of late 1962. Shastri reiterated India’s plans to keep “advances in science” limited “only for peaceful development,” but also gave the go ahead for scientists to develop the capabilities to create “peaceful nuclear explosions.”

Things took a turn under Nanda and Shastri’s successor, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who, fed up with Western attempts to reign in India’s development, greenlit a nuclear weapons program in 1967, ostensibly in response to a string of Chinese nuclear tests. In 1968, as world powers met to discuss the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT for short), India surprised Western powers and its Soviet allies alike by refusing to agree to what Delhi said was an “unfair” and “unjust” situation in which the five recognized nuclear states could dictate to the rest of the world its rights to nuclear technology.

India’s recognition of the significance of nuclear arms may also be attributable to Delhi’s unpleasant experiences with hostile powers threatening to use such weapons against the country. In December 1971, during the two-week Indo-Pakistani War, the United States assembled a large carrier group in the Indian Ocean, and, according to diplomatic messages revealed in the decades since, implicitly threatened to use nukes against India. At that time, Delhi’s Soviet allies came to the rescue, deploying their own naval battlegroup and at least one nuclear Boomer sub to the region, and warning that prompt “countermeasures” would be taken if the US intervened, forcing Washington to back down. Nevertheless, the incident is likely to have left an indelible impact on Delhi’s calculations.

While emphasizing that India cannot rely on nuclear weapons in the event of an armed conflict, Gandhi carefully shifted her country’s nuclear policy during the 1970s from a “no bombs period” approach to a “no bombs now” posture, while reiterating consistently that a nuclear arms race could not strengthen national security, but actually endanger it “by imposing a very heavy economic burden.” She gave the go-ahead for Operation Smiling Buddha in 1972.

In a regime of strict secrecy, preparations for a nuclear test proceeded, and in the spring of 1974, Raja Ramanna, a nuclear scientist who played a key role in the Indian nuclear program, told Gandhi that the conditions were ready for the test to be carried out. By exploding the nuclear device, India became the sixth nation in the world, and the first apart from the "Big Five" members of the United Nations Security Council (the USA, the USSR, France, Britain, and China) to do so. After the test’s success, Dr. Ramanna reportedly called Gandhi to tell her “The Buddha has smiled.”

Operation Smiling Buddha caught the United States off guard, and prompted Washington and its allies to slap sanctions on Delhi. India ignored the restrictions, and managed to ensure its continued economic development and wellbeing thanks in part on reliance on ties with the Eastern Bloc nations.

Pakistan reacted with fury to India’s “peaceful nuclear test,” with Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announcing that Islamabad saw nothing “peaceful” about it, and characterizing it as an Indian attempt at “nuclear blackmail.” Pakistan accelerated its development of its own nuclear weapon, which was already underway, and Bhutto warned that Pakistan “will eat grass, even go hungry, but will get [a nuclear bomb] of our own.”

Mrs. Gandhi continued to insist that her country’s nuclear advances were peaceful in nature, and, in a personal letter to Bhutto, emphasized that there were “no political or foreign policy implications” of its test, and that India condemns “and will continue to condemn military uses of nuclear energy as a threat to humanity.”

Gandhi made good on her commitment, and through the rest of the 1970s and well into the 1980s, India refused to build nuclear weapons. In that time, India’s Pakistani neighbors first gained the technical knowhow to build and detonate a nuclear device using highly enriched uranium, and, according to CIA estimates, had built between 7 and 12 nuclear devices by 1990.

Indian government sources have subsequently revealed that Pakistan threatened to nuke India in 1987 during Operation Brasstacks, a large-scale combined arms exercise by the Indian Armed Forces in its western state of Rajasthan, which Islamabad saw as a threat, and possible attempt to wipe out its fledgling (but as yet unconfirmed) nuclear status.

In 1989, as Delhi continued to call for regional and global nuclear disarmament, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi formally approved the creation of an Indian nuclear deterrent. The country conducted its second (and so far last) series of nuclear tests in May 1998, with Operation Shakti witnessing the detonation of five bombs, including both fusion and fission weapons, with a combined power of 45 kilotons of TNT (Hiroshima x 3). The tests sent a clear a message to Pakistan, China, and the rest of the world that India was now a full-fledged nuclear power. Pakistan conducted its own series of nuclear tests weeks later, confirming to the world its own, long-suspected nuclear status.

In the two-and-a-half decades since, India has amassed a nuclear arsenal of 160 warheads, five nukes fewer than Pakistan, which has 165.

India is one of only five countries with a nuclear triad. This means the country has the ability to deliver nukes via ground-based strategic missiles, aircraft, and warships.

As a country with a well-developed domestic military-industrial base, India has been able to create a wide range of missile systems, including the Prithvi tactical short-range ballistic missile (range 150-600 km), the Agni series of medium, intermediate, and intercontinental missiles, with a range between 700 km for the Agni-1 and up to 12,000 km for the Agni-VI). The Agni-VI is still under development, but is expected to have multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRV) capability – that is, to carry multiple nuclear warheads per missile, once it is fielded later this decade.

Indian Air Force aircraft capable of carrying nukes include its Western European-sourced Jaguars, Rafales, and Mirage 2000s, and its Russian designed Sukhoi Su-30MKIs.

The South Asian nation’s triad capabilities are rounded out by the INS Arihant strategic strike submarine, which is nuclear powered, and contains four vertical launch tubes allowing it to fire either K-4 or K-15 Sagarika nuclear missiles (the former have a range of 3,500 km, while the latter have a range of 750 km).

The prospects of a nuclear conflagration between India and Pakistan are frightening. A 2019 study by scientists from Rutgers University calculated that over 125 million people would be killed immediately in both countries in the nuclear fire. Up to 36 million tons of heavy soot would then rise into the upper atmosphere, spreading across the planet and absorbing solar radiation, heating the air while reducing sunlight by up to 35 percent, and cooling the Earth’s surface up to five degrees Celsius, and reducing rainfall as much as 30 percent. Along with the direct casualties, additional research by Rutgers has revealed that up to two billion people total would die from the subsequent global hunger and famine caused by the environmental impact of an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

Fortunately for the planet, India’s nuclear doctrine is designed to lessen the dangers of nuclear war, with the South Asian nation one of only two nuclear powers with an explicit nuclear "no first use" doctrine.

“India’s nuclear doctrine can be summarized as follows: i. Building and maintaining a credible minimum deterrent; ii. A posture of ‘no first use’: Nuclear weapons will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere; iii. Nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage; iv. Nuclear retaliatory attacks can only be authorized by the civilian political leadership through the Nuclear Command Authority,” the doctrine states.

All that means, hypothetically at least, that the ball is in the would-be aggressor’s court as far as the use of nuclear weapons are concerned. If the Indian subcontinent is to go up in flames, it will not be at Delhi’s instigation.