This is not to suggest that each of the actors may not comment on the assessments of the others; only that their expertise in one area does not confer the same degree of authority when they make pronouncements in other areas. It will be no more different than the views expressed by any concerned citizen of the country.

The Indian nuclear doctrine as declared by the government in January 2003 consists of the following principal elements: one, building and maintaining a credible minimum deterrent; two, a posture of “No First Use”, that is, nuclear weapons will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere; three, nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage; four, nuclear retaliatory attacks can only be authorised by the civilian political leadership through the Nuclear Command Authority; five, non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.

Presumably within these parameters the Strategic Forces Command has determined the number and size of the deterrent force needed to carry out its mandate, although these, for obvious reasons, would not be made public.

Given these requirements from the Strategic Nuclear Command, it would be upto the scientists to determine whether or not they can fulfill these requirements. Hopefully these retired scientists do not believe that either the nuclear doctrine is flawed or the Strategic Nuclear Command does not know its mathematics. As far as the design and fabrication of nuclear weapons are concerned, the DRDO/DAE joint press release of May 17, 1998 said that, “The tests conducted during May 11-13, 1998 have provided critical data for the validation of our capability in the design of nuclear weapons of different yields for different applications and different delivery systems. These tests have significantly enhanced our capability in computer simulation of new designs and taken us to the stage of sub-critical experiments in the future, if considered necessary.”

... contd.