October of last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the
1962 Cuban missile crisis. Many Asian policymakers will read the lessons of
that harrowing episode with some self-satisfaction.
When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear weapon tests
in 1998,
foreign
analysts repeatedly told them that, as poor countries with weak
institutions, they could not be entrusted with such awesome weaponry. Nascent
nuclear powers were simply less reliable stewards than their Cold War
counterparts. Over a decade on, and multiple crises later — Kargil in 1999, a
military standoff in 2001-2, and the Mumbai attacks of 2008 — India and
Pakistan have experienced nothing quite as perilous as the Cuban scare.
U.S. officials claim that Pakistan readied nuclear weapons
during the Kargil conflict without the knowledge of then-Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif. But, even at the height of their crises neither India nor Pakistan have
attempted, as the U.S. did in 1962, anything quite as foolish as
depth-charging
nuclear-armed submarinesor scrambling aircraft equipped with nuclear
air-to-air missiles towards hostile airspace. The dawn of Asia’s nuclear age
has been calmer than that of Europe, and far calmer than the nuclear alarmists
predicted.
But,
as
Paul Bracken and others have warned, we should not get complacent. When
India tested its Agni-V missile in April,
I and others raised a
number of potential
issues: Indian scientists were making cavalier statements of nuclear
posture best left to political leaders, and the development of multiple
warheads for each missile (known as MIRVs) and missile defense technology could
all be destabilizing if not handled extremely carefully.
India has legitimate
deterrence requirements vis-a-vis China, but it would be counterproductive for
this to become an open-ended expansion.
Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory is, however, altogether more
worrying.
This issue is usually framed in terms of numbers. Pakistan
possesses
what
is thought to be the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world and
if present trends continue, could equal or surpass Britain’s stockpile within a
decade.
So far, the Western world has viewed this expansion as a
nonproliferation issue, not a security one. But, over the longer-term, that
could change. As a recent report from the EU
Non-Proliferation Consortium noted, “EU members might have military
facilities within reach of Pakistani longer-range missiles … or temporary bases
and personnel” and, “in the case of a deterioration in Pakistan’s relations
with the West, this could be a subject of concern.” Pakistan is free to dismiss
European and American anxieties, but this will only reinforce the country’s
longer-term isolation.
There is also a second, more serious concern. Pakistan is
developing a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) that target not
Indian cities, but Indian military formations on the battlefield. The purpose
of these, as former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Maleeha Lodhi
explained in
November, is “to counterbalance India’s move to bring conventional military
offensives to a tactical level.” The idea is that smaller nuclear weapons, used
on Pakistani soil, would stop invading Indian forces in their tracks.
The rise of tactical nuclear weapons has been
well
documented over the past two years.
What has received less scrutiny,
however, is the doctrine on which this rise has been based. Pakistan’s nuclear
advocates make the case that their approach is no different than NATO’s Cold
War nuclear posture towards the Soviet Union, and like NATO is
the inevitable result of a conventionally weaker country trying to
negate its more powerful adversaries’ conventional advantage. But the problem is
that this comparison misses some key facts.
First, NATO never intended to physically block a Soviet
invasion with tactical nuclear weapons. By the 1960s, it had become clear that
NATO would still lose even if it unleashed nukes. This goes for Pakistan too.
According
to one calculation, it would take up to 436 Pakistani nuclear weapons just
to halt a single Indian armored division — a clearly absurd number, that leaps
higher still if one assumes lower yield weapons and more dispersed Indian
formations. Moreover, as Michael Krepon recently
wrote, “Pakistan lacks the real-time surveillance capabilities to destroy
[moving] armored columns, except where they are funneling into bridge crossings
of water barriers.”
Second, NATO came to understand that tactical nuclear use
would devastate the countries supposedly being defended. As the saying went,
“the shorter the [nuclear] range, the deader the Germans.” Substitute
“Punjabis” for “Germans”, and you have a clearer idea of the problem. The key
insight is that NATO’s focus was on using nuclear weapons to send political
signals — namely, to signal resolve with actions short of a strategic nuclear
exchange — not to win on the battlefield. This distinction tends to be lost in
discussions of Pakistan.
Third, tactical nuclear weapons are understood to be
especially credible precisely because their forward deployment makes them so
vulnerable. NATO, aware of this “use them or lose them” dilemma, pre-delegated launch
authority for at least some of its tactical
nuclear weapons — specifically, atomic demolition munitions — in Germany in the
late 1950s.
There is some evidence that Pakistan has or will soon follow
suit. In 2005, for instance, Feroz Hassan Khan, a senior official in Pakistan’s
Strategic Plans Division (SPD), explained
that “partial pre-delegation” of weapons would be an “operational
necessity because dispersed nuclear forces as well as central command authority
… are vulnerable.” The SPD is widely admired for its professionalism, but
pre-delegation inevitably dilutes command and control of nuclear weapons,
however competent officials might be.
The differences between NATO in the 1950s and Pakistan in
the 2010s should be obvious. Despite Germany’s Cold War problems with domestic
terrorism, and occasionally questionable base security in NATO countries, it
was hardly as if the Rhineland was
wracked with jihadists. NATO’s military officers were also unquestionably
under the command of elected civilian leaders.
Fourth, and finally, NATO’s reliance on tactical nuclear
weapons was short-lived. After 1979, the Alliance withdrew more and more of
these weapons from Europe. In fact, from 1980 to 1990 NATO
removed a third of
its nuclear weapons from Europe, much of this coming in the early part of the
decade when the USSR was unveiling a new offensive military doctrine
(ironically, elements of which are echoed in India’s Cold Start army doctrine
today). But NATO felt able to do this because its conventional military
capabilities were improving, thanks to Western technological superiority over
the Russians.
Pakistan, by contrast, is conventionally falling behind in
terms of military spending and technology. The gap between Indian and Pakistani
military spending continues to grow. This suggests that Pakistan will continue
to emphasize tactical nuclear weapons, which will entrench the risks laid out
here. To be sure, India has also shown an interest in short-range
nuclear-capable missiles (for instance, the Prahaar), but with
nowhere near the same enthusiasm, and in a context in which Indian civilians
are wary to entrusting the armed forces with such weapons in an operational context.
The Pakistani military argues that it needs to defend
against India’s Cold Start. But Cold Start —
itself
of questionable feasibility — is about shallow incursions, hardly
comparable to nation-threatening Soviet thrusts to the Atlantic. As the nuclear
historian George Perkovich
recently
wrote,
“the willingness to risk a breakdown in nuclear deterrence would
only be rational if the threat that is being countered or deterred is of an
existential scale. To risk suicide to redress a threat that is not itself
mortal would be irrational.” A state cannot just choose to costlessly re-define
all lesser threats as mortal ones. Simply reducing the nuclear threshold lower
and lower is an unsustainable and unnecessary strategy, and can make it more
rather than less likely that deterrence will fail in the event of a crisis.
Pakistan already has sufficient numbers and types of nuclear
weapons to ensure its survival, and, like NATO before it, to send political
signals through limited nuclear use even if a war does break out. Yet
Pakistan’s present course, premised on a series of misunderstandings of
tactical nuclear weapons, will increase friction with those nations who count
themselves allies of Pakistan and generate new risks quite out of proportion to
anything the country might gain.
Shashank
Joshi is a Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
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