Dr. Ashok Kapur is a Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This article was first published in the IDSA Journal, 3(4), April 1971, pp. 485-509. An abridged version of the original is republished here.
This article deals with two questions: first, what is the security framework in which an Indian decision-maker must operate? Secondly, what are the specific policy restraints which affect Indian decision-making? Both these questions are cast in terms of Indian nuclear policy and it is assumed that the actual existence of a conventional Indian military deterrent against China and Pakistan is a ‘given’ in the present military and political equation in South Asian politics. The argument of this paper centres on the problem of defining ‘security’.
