India's Nuclear Bomb And National Security (routledge Advances In Asia-pacific Business)

India’s Nuclear Bomb and National Security This book gives an analytic account of the dynamics of India’s nuclear build-up. In contrast to conventional studies on the issue, the author puts forward a new model, which goes beyond the classic strategic concept of accepting securityrelated motives of arming behaviour. According to this, the structural conditions of India’s regional security environment were permissive to India’s nuclear development but not sufficient to make India’s nuclearization imperative for maintaining its national security. At the core of the argument lies the question about India’s security considerations and their impact on India’s nuclear policy development. The author explores this analytic model by including explanatory variables on the unit-level, where interests are generally related to symbolic, less strategic, values attributed to nuclear weapons. These play a significant role within India’s domestic political party competition and among certain pressure groups. They have also influenced India’s relationship with other countries on non-proliferation matters. This book identifies the role of the strategic elite in determining India’s nuclear course. Furthermore, it argues that one of the pivotal driving forces behind India’s quest for the nuclear bomb is India’s struggle for international recognition and the strong, often obsessive sensitivities of India’s elite regarding perceived ‘acts of discrimination’ or ‘ignorance’ by the West towards India. Karsten Frey is Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, IBEI. His research focus is on issues of global nuclear proliferation. Routledge Advances in South Asian studies Edited by Subrata K. Mitra South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany South Asia, with its burgeoning, ethnically diverse population, soaring economies, and nuclear weapons, is an increasingly important region in the global context. The series, which builds on this complex, dynamic and volatile area, features innovative and original research on the region as a whole or on the countries. Its scope extends to scholarly works drawing on history, politics, development studies, sociology and economics of individual countries from the region, as well as those that take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the area as a whole or to a comparison of two or more countries from this region. In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any one orthodoxy, the series draws broadly on the insights germane to area studies, as