June 9, 2016
Pakistan is developing a new generation of nuclear-tipped tactical missiles that has alarmed India and the world.
The buddy-buddy relations between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Barack Obama were evident at the Oval Office on June 7-their seventh meeting in two years. But the ghost of Pakistan hovered in the room like a Betaal, as an Indian official put it, likening our north-western neighbour to the irksome character in the ancient fable. India had recently lobbied successfully to get the US Congress to put a temporary hold on the sale of eight nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan by refusing to subsidise their cost.
The more alarming concern for India, the US and the rest of the world, however, is Pakistan's development of a new generation of nuclear-tipped missiles that threaten to lower the nuclear threshold and make the sub-continent, as a US official put it, "the most dangerous place in the world to live in". Pakistan has reportedly inducted these 'tactical' nuclear weapons as part of its artillery arsenal to pulverise any advancing Indian army division in the event of a war.
Prior to this, both India and Pakistan had developed a panoply of 'strategic' nuclear weapons designed to strike terror among civilian populations in metros, or to knock out major military targets some distance away from the border. India's Agni V, for instance, can strike targets over 5,000 km away and can be launched from as far south as Chennai to strike Islamabad or Beijing. Pakistan, too, has developed the Ghauri and Shaheen to strike anywhere in India, and has lately extended their range to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, where India has an important tri-service base. But never before were nuclear weapons meant to be used as a tactical manoeuvre on the battlefield to thwart an advancing army corps.
The Nasr, as the midget red-and white nuclear-tipped missile has been christened, is a slim pencil-shaped rocket with fins, which can traverse a distance of 60 km, or little more than the range of an artillery gun. In its current configuration, shown during Pakistan's Military Day parade last year, the Nasr was housed in a multibarrel launch vehicle that could fire four of them simultaneously. Unlike conventional munitions, whose lethality comes from their explosive force and shrapnel, a nuclear-tipped missile doesn't only kill or immobilise enemy troops with the force of the blast. The extreme heat it produces, followed by the radiation it emits, can lead to debilitating sickness or kill a large number of troops within minutes of a strike.
Graphic by Nilanjan Das
Click here to Enlarge Though they had been in the works for the past five years, the first official confirmation that Pakistan had deployed tactical nuclear weapons to thwart an Indian aggression was made by the country's foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, at a press briefing before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's bilateral meeting with Obama last October. The timing of Chaudhry's announcement was significant and clearly meant to warn both the US and India. For months, there was speculation that Pakistan had requested the US to give it a civil nuclear deal similar to the one India signed in 2005. In return, the US was forcing Pakistan to roll back its nuclear weapons programme, including stopping the development of tactical nuclear weapons and agreeing to sign the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that would further limit its nuclear capability.When The Washington Post's David Ignatius leaked the details in what he termed 'a diplomatic blockbuster' just weeks before Sharif's visit to the US, Islamabad went into overdrive to deny the report. The Pakistan army, which controls the country's nuclear arsenal, was reportedly furious with the civilian establishment for trying to dilute its nuclear deterrence against India. Sharif was forced to say, en route to the US: "We will protect the national interests of Pakistan during my meetings with the US leadership." He added, for good measure, that "we should not forget who the prime minister was in 1998 when we became a nuclear power", reminding his country that the tests had happened during his watch.
It was also a significant message to India. At that point, relations between the neighbours had touched a new nadir. A planned meeting of the national security advisors (NSAs) of both countries in Delhi had ended in a fiasco and had to be called off. There was growing suspicion and fear in Pakistan that Modi's 'blow hot, blow cold' policy was a cover for the new 'offensive defence' doctrine advocated by Ajit Doval, his hawkish NSA. Doval had always maintained that the only answer to Pakistan's repeated terror strikes was for India to develop the capability to strike at Pakistan's vital interests without escalating it to an all-out war. By flaunting Nasr, as an expert put it, Pakistan was "showing India its nuclear middle finger and telling Doval to dare".
Experts now see the Pakistan army's belligerence, and its continued backing of terrorist groups targeting India, as an emboldening because of the development and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons. There is no let-up on terror strikes against India, as demonstrated by the Pathankot attack in December and the recent strikes in Jammu & Kashmir. The Pakistan army appears smug in the belief that India will now think thrice before contemplating an 'offensive defence' attack. The threat that Pakistan is sending is that it will quickly escalate any retaliation to a nuclear dimension, spooking the world and getting major powers to hold India back. It is also being seen as the reason why, while Sharif makes conciliatory gestures towards Modi, the army appears against normalising relations.
Chinese President Xi Jingping with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Photo: Getty images Pakistan justifies the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons as a response to India's Cold Start doctrine. Though India officially denies the existence of such a doctrine, it was first enunciated by the Indian army after the Kargil War in 1999 and the terror attack on Parliament in 2001. Policy experts had complained that it took months for the Indian army to ready its strike corps for a counter-attack on Pakistan. Since then, India is supposed to have developed a proactive strategy to mobilise major formations at short notice to launch a surprise strike.To counter such a strike, Lt Gen (retd) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, advisor to Pakistan's National Command Authority (NCA), which controls its nuclear weapons, asserted that Pakistan had to develop tactical nuclear weapons that could thwart a surprise thrust by Indian troops on its border. In March this year, Kidwai told a gathering at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad: "We are not apologetic about the development of tactical weapons. They are here to stay. Pakistan will not cap or curb its nuclear weapons programme or accept any restrictions."
It was Kidwai who, as director-general of the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), the operational wing of Pakistan's NCA, in 2002, had listed four conditions that would elicit a Pakistani nuclear riposte. These were: if India conquers a large swathe of Pakistani territory; if it destroys a large part of its armed forces; if it strangulates the Pakistani economy; or if it causes political destabilisation. Pakistan also retained the option of striking first and its nuclear threshold is deliberately ambiguous so as to generate uncertainty in the minds of Indian leaders. In contrast, India has a No First Use (NFU) nuclear doctrine but reserves the right to massively retaliate if Indian forces, populace or territory suffer a nuclear, biological or chemical strike.
× Feroz Hassan Khan, author of Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistan Bomb, believes that Pakistan's new deterrence strategy is based on risk manipulation. "Tactical weapons create a high level of uncertainty that India could not proceed with a conventional war for fear of the unknown," he says. India's counter is to call Pakistan's 'nuclear bluff', and punish it for waging proxy war. If Pakistan resorts to using tactical nuclear weapons, a top official in India's NCA, told India Today, "We will retaliate so massively that Pakistan, as we know it, will cease to exist."
The worry for US nuclear experts such as Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Stimson Center, is that "neither side believes that the other's stated nuclear use doctrine is credible and that, by itself, creates a dangerous uncertainty." Worse, Pakistan is now the fastestgrowing nuclear weapons power in the world and has overtaken India's arsenal in size. Krepon points out that Pakistan is playing the "catch-up game" and, in the last decade, has constructed four reactors that can produce 25 to 50 kilogram of weapons-grade plutonium-four times the amount India is producing. When added to its stockpile of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), which can also be used to make bombs, Pakistan can produce as many as 14 to 27 nuclear weapons every year, as compared with the two to five nukes that India can build. Pakistan is now said to have 120 nuclear bombs as compared with India's 110.
In spite of this, India remains committed to its doctrine of 'credible minimum deterrence'. A former top NCA official says, "Tactical nukes are as dated as the Cold War between Soviet Union and the US. There is a meaningless distinction between 'tactical' and 'strategic' because the distances in the subcontinent are short as compared with Moscow and Washington DC. If Pakistan hits us with a tactical nuke, we are going to hit it hard with everything we have."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi with president Barack Obama at the Oval office on June 7. Photo: Getty images Despite Pakistan's suspicions, India denies it has tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal. The official reveals that, after Nasr's development, the issue was reviewed three times by the NCA in meetings chaired by the prime minister, and each time the armed forces said there was no need to develop a counter or alter India's No First Use doctrine. As he points out, "We have never treated India's nuclear capability as part of our offensive arsenal. We developed it only for defence and to deter anyone planning a nuclear strike against us." Instead, the Indian army has now prepared itself to absorb a tactical nuclear strike by equipping its troops with suits that can withstand such attacks and evolving other strategies.While India has not altered its nuclear course, it has used every occasion to highlight the dangers of Pakistan's tactical nuclear weapons, particularly to the US. Ashley Tellis, who has written several defining books on India's nuclear programme, believes that Pakistan is wrong in its belief that it has 'checkmated' India by developing tactical weapons. He points out that even the US has all but abandoned tactical nukes because they are not effective war-fighting instruments. Tellis points out that it would take "300 to 400 Hiroshima-sized weapons, not tactical weapons, to stop an armoured corps". He says that Pakistan just doesn't have the numbers to sustain such a nuclear battle.
Other experts point to the inherent dangers of maintaining an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons because the chances of misuse and accidental use rise manifold. Jeffrey D. McCausland of the Stimson Center, pointed out in an in-depth study last year that Pakistan's military planners would find battlefield nuclear weapons a logistical nightmare, calling such an induction "dangerous and problematic". For one, it would require a pre-delegation of authority to field military commanders, which increases the risk of miscalculations and weapons falling into the wrong hands. Also, because of the proximity of the borders to large towns such as Lahore, there is a danger of radioactive clouds being blown back to Pakistan and affecting its own people.
So what do India and the world do with Pakistan's renegade nuclear plans? There is a limit to the pressure India can put on the US and other major powers as New Delhi is first seeking clarity on its own global nuclear status. With its imminent acceptance as a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) coupled with its bid to be a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), India hopes to sit on the high table of nuclear decisionmaking. It could then use the forums to put pressure on Pakistan to restrain its nuclear ambitions. George Perkovich, another US expert who has written a seminal book on India's nuclear programme, believes that "for India to put boots on the ground and battle Pakistan would be a mistake. It needs to develop zero-cost methods to put pressure on Pakistan and further isolate it."
Graphic by Tanmoy Chakraborty
Click here to Enlarge Noted Pakistan expert Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution has advocated a US civil nuclear agreement for Pakistan in a bid to 'mainstream' its role. He views it as a prerequisite for Pakistan to achieve strategic stability and normalise relations with India. Krepon believes the US should make such an offer only if Pakistan undertakes nuclear-related initiatives such as committing to a recessed deterrence posture and cutting down on tactical nuclear missiles, apart from joining the FMCT negotiations and signing the CTBT. And, like India, it should agree to separate its civilian and nuclear facilities.India is appalled by such an offer to mainstream Pakistan and believes that Islamabad has to demonstrate far greater nuclear restraint and responsibility before any concessions are made. India constantly reminds other nations of how physicist A.Q. Khan sold Pakistan's nuclear secrets to a number of countries including North Korea and Iran and that its non-proliferation record remains suspect
Pakistani experts such as Feroz Hassan Khan, who once served in the nuclear establishment, advocate a more moderate and nuanced nuclear posture by Pakistan. As he points out in a recent paper, "Ultimately nuclear weapons only make strong states stronger; they do not make weak states impregnably secure. They can be diversions of the precious resources that weak states possess. Nuclear weapons are an ineradicable part of Pakistan and it does need a credible nuclear deterrent. Yet, for Pakistan to achieve real security, it must focus on some long-term societal, economic and social problems that nuclear weapons cannot address." Sensible words. If only the leaders and generals in Pakistan would listen.
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