Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades, the most dangerous
place on Earth has been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. It’s possible
that a small spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might
-- given the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors --
lead inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case the
result would be catastrophic. Besides causing the deaths of millions of Indians
and Pakistanis, such a war might bring on “nuclear winter” on a planetary scale, leading to
levels of suffering and death that would be beyond our comprehension.
Alarmingly, the nuclear competition
between India and Pakistan has now entered a spine-chilling phase. That danger
stems from Islamabad’s decision to deploy low-yield tactical nuclear arms at
its forward operating military bases along its entire frontier with India to
deter possible aggression by tank-led invading forces. Most ominously, the decision
to fire such a nuclear-armed missile with a range of 35 to 60 miles is to rest
with local commanders. This is a perilous departure from the universal practice
of investing such authority in the highest official of the nation. Such a
situation has no parallel in the Washington-Moscow nuclear arms race of the
Cold War era.
When it
comes to Pakistan’s strategic nuclear weapons, their parts are stored in
different locations to be assembled only upon an order from the country’s
leader. By contrast, tactical nukes are pre-assembled at a nuclear facility and
shipped to a forward base for instant use. In addition to the perils inherent
in this policy, such weapons would be vulnerable to misuse by a rogue base
commander or theft by one of the many militant groups in the country.
In the nuclear standoff between the two
neighbors, the stakes are constantly rising as Aizaz Chaudhry, the highest
bureaucrat in Pakistan’s foreign ministry, recently made clear. The
deployment of tactical nukes, he explained, was meant to act as a form of
“deterrence,” given India’s “Cold Start” military doctrine -- a reputed
contingency plan aimed at punishing Pakistan in a major way for any
unacceptable provocations like a mass-casualty terrorist strike against India.
New Delhi refuses to acknowledge the
existence of Cold Start. Its denials are hollow. As early as 2004, it was discussing
this doctrine, which involved the formation of eight division-size Integrated
Battle Groups (IBGs). These were to consist of infantry, artillery,
armor, and air support, and each would be able to operate independently on the
battlefield. In the case of major terrorist attacks by any Pakistan-based
group, these IBGs would evidently respond by rapidly penetrating Pakistani
territory at unexpected points along the border and advancing no more than 30
miles inland, disrupting military command and control networks while
endeavoring to stay away from locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation.
In other words, India has long been planning to respond to major terror attacks
with a swift and devastating conventional military action that would inflict
only limited damage and so -- in a best-case scenario -- deny Pakistan
justification for a nuclear response.
Islamabad, in turn, has been planning
ways to deter the Indians from implementing a Cold-Start-style blitzkrieg on
their territory. After much internal debate, its top officials opted for
tactical nukes. In 2011, the Pakistanis tested one successfully. Since then, according to Rajesh
Rajagopalan, the New Delhi-based co-author of Nuclear South Asia: Keywords
and Concepts, Pakistan seems to have been assembling four to five of these
annually.
All of this has been happening in the
context of populations that view each other unfavorably. A typical survey in this period by the Pew Research Center found
that 72% of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of India, with 57% considering
it as a serious threat, while on the other side 59% of Indians saw Pakistan in
an unfavorable light.
This is the background against which
Indian leaders have said that a tactical nuclear attack on their forces, even
on Pakistani territory, would be treated as a full-scale nuclear attack on
India, and that they reserved the right to respond accordingly. Since India
does not have tactical nukes, it could only retaliate with far more devastating
strategic nuclear arms, possibly targeting Pakistani cities.
According to a 2002 estimate by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a
worst-case scenario in an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war could result in eight to
12 million fatalities initially, followed by many millions later from radiation
poisoning. More recent studies have shown that up to a billion people worldwide might be put in danger of famine and
starvation by the smoke and soot thrown into the troposphere in a major nuclear
exchange in South Asia. The resulting “nuclear winter” and ensuing crop loss
would functionally add up to a slowly developing global nuclear holocaust.
Last November, to reduce the chances of
such a catastrophic exchange happening, senior Obama administration officials
met in Washington with Pakistan’s army chief, General Raheel Sharif, the final
arbiter of that country’s national security policies, and urged him to stop the
production of tactical nuclear arms. In return, they offered a pledge to end
Islamabad’s pariah status in the nuclear field by supporting its entry into the
48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to which India already belongs. Although no
formal communiqué was issued after Sharif’s trip, it became widely known that
he had rejected the offer.
This failure was implicit in the testimony that DIA Director Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart
gave to the Armed Services Committee this February. “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
continue to grow,” he said. “We are concerned that this growth, as well as the
evolving doctrine associated with tactical [nuclear] weapons, increases the
risk of an incident or accident.”
Strategic Nuclear Warheads
Since that DIA estimate of human
fatalities in a South Asian nuclear war, the strategic nuclear arsenals of
India and Pakistan have continued to grow. In January 2016, according to a U.S.
congressional report, Pakistan’s arsenal probably consisted of 110 to 130
nuclear warheads. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, India has 90 to 110 of these. (China, the other regional actor, has
approximately 260 warheads.)
As the 1990s ended, with both India and
Pakistan testing their new weaponry, their governments made public their
nuclear doctrines. The National Security Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear
Doctrine, for example, stated in August 1999 that “India will not be the first to
initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should
deterrence fail.” India’s foreign minister explained at the time that the
“minimum credible deterrence” mentioned in the doctrine was a question of
“adequacy,” not numbers of warheads. In subsequent years, however, that
yardstick of “minimum credible deterrence” has been regularly recalibrated as
India’s policymakers went on to commit themselves to upgrade the country’s
nuclear arms program with a new generation of more powerful hydrogen bombs
designed to be city-busters.
In Pakistan in February 2000, President
General Pervez Musharraf, who was also the army chief, established the
Strategic Plan Division in the National Command Authority, appointing
Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai as its director general. In October 2001,
Kidwai offered an outline of the country’s updated nuclear doctrine
in relation to its far more militarily and economically powerful neighbor,
saying, “It is well known that Pakistan does not have a ‘no-first-use policy.’”
He then laid out the “thresholds” for the use of nukes. The country’s
nuclear weapons, he pointed out, were aimed solely at India and would be
available for use not just in response to a nuclear attack from that country,
but should it conquer a large part of Pakistan’s territory (the space
threshold), or destroy a significant part of its land or air forces (the
military threshold), or start to strangle Pakistan economically (the economic
threshold), or politically destabilize the country through large-scale internal
subversion (the domestic destabilization threshold).
Of these, the space threshold was the
most likely trigger. New Delhi as well as Washington speculated as to where the
red line for this threshold might lie, though there was no unanimity among
defense experts. Many surmised that it would be the impending loss of Lahore,
the capital of Punjab, only 15 miles from the Indian border. Others put the red
line at Pakistan’s sprawling Indus River basin.
Within seven months of this debate,
Indian-Pakistani tensions escalated steeply in the wake of an attack on an
Indian military base in Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists in May 2002. At that
time, Musharraf reiterated that he would not renounce his country’s right to
use nuclear weapons first. The prospect of New Delhi being hit by an atom bomb
became so plausible that U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in the Embassy
compound to survive a nuclear strike. Only when he and his staff realized that
those in the bunker would be killed by the aftereffects of the nuclear blast
did they abandon the idea.
Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the two
countries found themselves staring into the nuclear abyss because of a violent
act in Kashmir, a disputed territory which had led to three conventional wars
between the South Asian neighbors since 1947, the founding year of an
independent India and Pakistan. As a result of the first of these in 1947 and
1948, India acquired about half of Kashmir, with Pakistan getting a third, and
the rest occupied later by China.
Kashmir, the Root Cause of Enduring Enmity
The Kashmir dispute dates back to the
time when the British-ruled Indian subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority
India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, and indirectly ruled princely states were
given the option of joining either one. In October 1947, the Hindu maharaja of
Muslim-majority Kashmir signed an “instrument of accession” with India after
Muslim tribal raiders from Pakistan invaded his realm. The speedy arrival of
Indian troops deprived the invaders of the capital city, Srinagar. Later, they
battled regular Pakistani troops until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire on
January 1, 1949. The accession document required that Kashmiris be given an
opportunity to choose between India and Pakistan once peace was restored. This
has not happened yet, and there is no credible prospect of it taking place.
Fearing a defeat in such a plebiscite, given the
pro-Pakistani sentiments prevalent among the territory’s majority Muslims,
India found several ways of
blocking U.N. attempts to hold one. New Delhi then conferred a special status
on the part of Kashmir it controlled and held elections for its legislature,
while Pakistan watched with trepidation.
In September 1965, when its verbal
protests proved futile, Pakistan attempted to change the status quo through
military force. It launched a war that once again ended in stalemate and
another U.N.-sponsored truce, which required the warring parties to return to
the 1949 ceasefire line.
A third armed conflict between the two
neighbors followed in December 1971, resulting in Pakistan’s loss of its
eastern wing, which became an independent Bangladesh. Soon after, Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi tried to convince Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto to agree to transform the 460-mile-long ceasefire line in Kashmir
(renamed the “Line of Control”) into an international border. Unwilling to give
up his country’s demand for a plebiscite in all of pre-1947 Kashmir, Bhutto
refused. So the stalemate continued.
During the military rule of General Zia
al Haq (1977-1988), Pakistan initiated a policy of bleeding India with a
thousand cuts by sponsoring terrorist actions both inside Indian Kashmir and
elsewhere in the country. Delhi responded by bolstering its military presence
in Kashmir and brutally repressing those of its inhabitants demanding a
plebiscite or advocating separation from India, committing in the process
large-scale human rights violations.
In order to stop infiltration by
militants from Pakistani Kashmir, India built a double barrier of fencing
12-feet high with the space between planted with hundreds of land mines. Later,
that barrier would be equipped as well with thermal imaging devices and motion
sensors to help detect infiltrators. By the late 1990s, on one side of the Line
of Control were 400,000 Indian soldiers and on the other 300,000 Pakistani
troops. No wonder President Bill Clinton called
that border “the most dangerous place in the world.” Today, with the
addition of tactical nuclear weapons to the mix, it is far more so.
Kashmir, the Toxic Bone of Contention
Even before Pakistan’s introduction of
tactical nukes, tensions between the two neighbors were perilously high.
Then suddenly, at the end of 2015, a flicker of a chance for the normalization
of relations appeared. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a cordial
meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on the latter’s birthday,
December 25th, in Lahore. But that hope was dashed when, in the early hours of
January 2nd, four heavily armed Pakistani terrorists managed to cross the
international border in Punjab, wearing Indian Army fatigues, and attacked an
air force base in Pathankot. A daylong gun battle followed. By the time order
was restored on January 5th, all the terrorists were dead, but so were seven
Indian security personnel and one civilian. The United Jihad Council, an umbrella
organization of separatist militant groups in Kashmir, claimed credit for the attack. The Indian government, however,
insisted that the operation had been masterminded by Masood
Azhar, leader of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad (Army of Muhammad).
As before, Kashmir was the motivating
drive for the anti-India militants. Mercifully, the attack in Pathankot turned
out to be a minor event, insufficient to heighten the prospect of war, though
it dissipated any goodwill generated by the Modi-Sharif meeting.
There is little doubt, however, that a
repeat of the atrocity committed by Pakistani infiltrators in Mumbai
in November 2008, leading to the death of 166 people and the burning of that
city’s landmark Taj Mahal Hotel, could have consequences that would be dire
indeed. The Indian doctrine calling for massive retaliation in response to a
successful terrorist strike on that scale could mean the almost instantaneous implementation of its Cold Start
strategy. That, in turn, would likely lead to Pakistan’s use of tactical
nuclear weapons, thus opening up the real possibility of a full-blown nuclear
holocaust with global consequences.
Beyond the long-running Kashmiri
conundrum lies Pakistan’s primal fear of the much larger and more powerful
India, and its loathing of India’s ambition to become the hegemonic power in
South Asia. Irrespective of party labels, governments in New Delhi have pursued
a muscular path on national security aimed at bolstering the country’s defense
profile.
Overall, Indian leaders are resolved to
prove that their country is entering what they fondly call “the age of
aspiration.” When, in July 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh officially launched a domestically built nuclear-powered ballistic
missile submarine, the INS Arihant, it was hailed as a dramatic step in
that direction. According to
defense experts, that vessel was the first of its kind not to be built by one
of the five recognized nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, China,
France, and Russia.
India’s Two Secret Nuclear Sites
On the nuclear front in India, there
was more to come. Last December, an investigation by the Washington-based
Center for Public Integrity revealed that the Indian government was investing $100 million
to build a top secret nuclear city spread over 13 square miles near the village
of Challakere, 160 miles north of the southern city of Mysore. When completed,
possibly as early as 2017, it will be “the subcontinent’s largest military-run
complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and
aircraft-testing facilities.” Among the project’s aims is to expand the
government’s nuclear research, to produce fuel for the country’s nuclear
reactors, and to help power its expanding fleet of nuclear submarines. It will
be protected by a ring of garrisons, making the site a virtual military
facility.
Another secret project, the Indian Rare
Materials Plant, near Mysore is already in operation. It is a new nuclear enrichment complex
that is feeding the country’s nuclear weapons programs, while laying the
foundation for an ambitious project to create an arsenal of hydrogen
(thermonuclear) bombs.
The overarching aim of these projects
is to give India an extra stockpile of enriched uranium fuel that could be used
in such future bombs. As a military site, the project at Challakere will not be
open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency or by Washington,
since India’s 2008 nuclear agreement with the U.S. excludes access to
military-related facilities. These enterprises are directed by the office of
the prime minister, who is charged with overseeing all atomic energy projects.
India’s Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act place everything
connected to the country’s nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who
tried to obtain a fuller picture of the Indian arsenal and the facilities that
feed it have been bludgeoned to silence.
Little wonder then that a senior White
House official was recently quoted as saying, “Even for us, details of the
Indian program are always sketchy and hard facts thin on the ground.” He added,
“Mysore is being constantly monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress
in Challakere.” However, according to Gary Samore, a former Obama administration
coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, “India intends to
build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China.
It is unclear, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful
arsenal, but they will.”
Once manufactured, there is nothing to
stop India from deploying such weapons against Pakistan. “India is now
developing very big bombs, hydrogen bombs that are city-busters,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani nuclear and national
security analyst. “It is not interested in… nuclear weapons for use on the
battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for eliminating population
centers.”
In other words, as the Kashmir dispute
continues to fester, inducing periodic terrorist attacks on India and fueling
the competition between New Delhi and Islamabad to outpace each other in the
variety and size of their nuclear arsenals, the peril to South Asia in
particular and the world at large only grows.
