New Delhi: India on Monday took exception to the comments by US President Barack Obama last week urging India and Pakistan to reduce their nuclear arsenals, describing the remarks as lacking in understanding of India’s defence posture.

In New Delhi, foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup, in response to a question, said that “conventionally India has never initiated military action against any neighbour".

“We also have a no-first use nuclear weapons policy. Since the context was the Nuclear Security Summit, the President’s own remark that ‘expanding nuclear arsenals in some countries, with more small tactical nuclear weapons which could be at greater risk of theft’ sums up the focus of global concern," Swarup said.

The reference was to Obama’s remarks at a press conference after the fourth and last Nuclear Security Summit he hosted in Washington on 31 March-1 April.

“One of the challenges that we are going to have here is that it is very difficult to see huge reductions in our nuclear arsenal unless the US and Russia, as the two largest possessors of nuclear weapons, are prepared to lead the way," Obama had said at the press conference, according to report by the Press Trust of India.

“The other area where I think we need to see progress is Pakistan and India, that subcontinent, making sure that as they develop military doctrines, that they are not continually moving in the wrong direction," Obama had said.

India and Pakistan came out of the nuclear closet in 1998 after conducting five and six atomic tests, respectively. Pakistan, which does not have a no-first use policy, says its nuclear arsenal is aimed at blunting the superiority of India’s conventional weapons.

Recent news reports said that Pakistan was developing tactical nuclear weapons to foil possible Indian plans to conduct a short, limited war under the nuclear threshold if provoked by a terrorist attack.

A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) is supposed to have a much lower yield than a strategic nuclear weapon and can be deployed in a war. But in practice, the TNW is also a weapon of mass destruction. India’s nuclear doctrine does not distinguish between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Ties between the two neighbours are usually tense due to their competing claims over Kashmir, the Himalayan region which has been the trigger for three of the four wars between the two nations since 1947. India accuses Pakistan of fomenting an Islamic insurgency in Kashmir, a charge Pakistan denies though it admits to extending diplomatic, political and moral support to the Kashmiri cause.

The two countries came to the brink of war in 2001, mobilising troops along their common borders after an Islamist militant attack on the Indian parliament.

Tensions also spiked after 10 Islamist militants attacked India’s financial capital in 2008, killing at least 166 people in a three-day period. Besides the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, the international community is also worried about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Islamist militant groups which have bases in Pakistan.

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