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The dubious value of nuclear weapons
India and Pakistan are locked in a dilemma that is similar to the one faced by the two superpowers, but one fraught with greater danger. Their launch-to-target time is under five minutes
Ahmad Faruqui
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
The 20th anniversary of the nuclear tests in the subcontinent comes up in May. The case for nuclear weapons is predicated on two assumptions. First, that they will deter war and yield a peace dividend. Second, that they will be accompanied by a reduction in spending on conventional weapons, and yield an economic dividend. Both are false.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Pakistan’s foreign secretary justified Pakistan’s decision to respond with six tests in response to India’s five by saying, “We restored the strategic balance and established nuclear deterrence. We have no doubt that our tests served the interest of peace and stability in South Asia.”
Yet, less than a year after the tests, Pakistan attacked Indian forces at Kargil, probably emboldened by the possession of nuclear weapons. After an initial success, the advance ran out of steam. India hit back hard. Pakistan withdrew its forces, on US urging.
That year also witnessed the shooting down of a Pakistani naval reconnaissance aircraft by India, the intensification of India’s counter insurgency operations in Kashmir, and the subsequent hijacking of an Indian airliner to Afghanistan by a militant Kashmiri group alleged to have ties with Pakistan.
General Musharraf has revealed that he had considered attacking India with nuclear weapons during the operation but the fear of Indian retaliation prevented him from doing so
It is now known that the situation was even more complicated. General Musharraf has revealed that he had considered attacking India with nuclear weapons during the operation but the fear of Indian retaliation prevented him from doing so [link]. So the fear of a nuclear retaliation prevented him from carrying out a first strike, but the fear of nuclear retaliation had not entered his mind when he launched the Kargil operation. He had simply assumed away the idea that India would carry out a first strike.
Two years later, terrorists mounted an attack on the Indian parliament. The war of words between the two countries escalated rapidly into a large-scale mobilisation of conventional forces. At its peak, a million troops were deployed across the international border. Stanford University held two conferences to find solutions to the dangerous impasse. US intelligence put the probability of a nuclear exchange at 50% and stated that it could kill 150 million people.
Seven years later, the Taj hotel in Mumbai was attacked by terrorists, once again leading to a dangerous war of words between the two nuclear powers and threats of retaliation.
Fearful of each other’s motives, the sibling adversaries continue to invest in advancing their nuclear arsenal. Pakistan has proudly added battlefield ballistic missiles to its inventory. And the prospect of a nuclear strike has now entered the rather impolite vocabulary of the threats that are routinely exchanged between the generals.
It has often been said that nuclear weapons prevented war from breaking out between the two superpowers during the Cold War. Yet no less an American hawk than Henry Kissinger said the two countries often behaved like ‘two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision… Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies.’
Each country produced warheads in excess of 10,000, enough to blow up the world’s population several times over. In the pursuit of elusive security, the United States spent $5.5 trillion, of which warheads accounted for only $0.5 trillion. The bulk of the money — a little over $3 trillion – was spent on delivery systems. Almost $1 trillion was spent on the associated command, control, communications and intelligence systems, and $1 trillion on ‘defending’ the warheads and delivery systems by housing them in underground shelters.
After he retired as the head of the US Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal and the associated delivery infrastructure, General George Lee Butler confessed that nuclear deterrence was not a force for stability but a catalyst for conflict. He said deterrence was ‘a formula for unmitigated catastrophe… premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions.’
Today, India and Pakistan are locked in a dilemma that is similar to the one faced by the two superpowers, but one fraught with greater danger. Their launch-to-target time is under five minutes.
A nuclear war cannot be ruled out. One day, India may tire of Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir, and invade Pakistan. Pakistan, unable to hold off a much larger Indian force, may hit Indian cities with nuclear missiles, inviting an Indian nuclear retaliation. And if Pakistan mistakes the firing of an Indian missile bearing a conventional warhead as a nuclear strike, that may trigger a nuclear war.
The second argument that is used to justify nuclear weapons is that they will yield a peace dividend, by serving as a substitute for expensive conventional weapons. Charles Glaser made that point in “Rational Theory of International Relations.” He argued that “by shifting the offense-defense balance heavily toward defense, nuclear weapons enable states that are much less powerful than their adversaries to satisfy their defense requirements and increase their security.”
Yet, in the year following the nuclear tests, India raised its conventional defense spending by 28 percent and Pakistan responded by raising its defense spending by 10 percent. Indeed, Ahsan Butt, in a paper published in Conflict, Security and Development, has shown that the peace dividend was not realised in the subcontinent. India continued to improve its conventional and nuclear arsenal and so did Pakistan. Nuclear weapons did not diminish the arms race in conventional arms.
It continues to drag on, spurred by Pakistan’s desires to wrest Kashmir from India through force and to acquire strategic depth in Afghanistan. And Pakistan also has to maintain its conventional forces to pursue its anti-separatist campaigns in Balochistan and anti-terrorism campaign in FATA.
But given the size of the Indian economy, it will never be able to match India’s conventional forces. That point comes out forcefully in a recent report by the Stimson Center, “Military Budgets in India and Pakistan.” It includes this very compelling graph.
The best way to deter war is to deal with the underlying conflict. As one studies Pakistan’s wars with India, it becomes apparent that all but one were fought over Kashmir and all were initiated by Pakistan.
Pakistan cannot solve the Kashmir problem through war. Even if it could, it is no longer clear Kashmiris want to join Pakistan. Once Pakistan calls off its military initiatives in Kashmir, it will find that it has also freed itself of the fear of an Indian invasion.
Those who think that India’s goal is to break-up Pakistan are raising a false alarm. India is in no position to do what it did in 1971. The whole of East Pakistan was up in arms against Pakistan after the myopic Operation Searchlight was launched by the Pakistan army. It fell to the Indian army in less than two weeks. India cannot risk attacking Pakistan today without provocation.
Michael Howard, the British strategist, noted, ‘Deterrence can no longer depend on the threat of a nuclear war, the costs of which would be grotesquely out of proportion to any conceivable benefits to be derived from engaging in it.”
The writer has written Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan. He can be reached at Ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com
Published in Daily Times, February 5th 2018.
India and Pakistan are locked in a dilemma that is similar to the one faced by the two superpowers, but one fraught with greater danger. Their launch-to-target time is under five minutes
Ahmad Faruqui
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
The 20th anniversary of the nuclear tests in the subcontinent comes up in May. The case for nuclear weapons is predicated on two assumptions. First, that they will deter war and yield a peace dividend. Second, that they will be accompanied by a reduction in spending on conventional weapons, and yield an economic dividend. Both are false.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Pakistan’s foreign secretary justified Pakistan’s decision to respond with six tests in response to India’s five by saying, “We restored the strategic balance and established nuclear deterrence. We have no doubt that our tests served the interest of peace and stability in South Asia.”
Yet, less than a year after the tests, Pakistan attacked Indian forces at Kargil, probably emboldened by the possession of nuclear weapons. After an initial success, the advance ran out of steam. India hit back hard. Pakistan withdrew its forces, on US urging.
That year also witnessed the shooting down of a Pakistani naval reconnaissance aircraft by India, the intensification of India’s counter insurgency operations in Kashmir, and the subsequent hijacking of an Indian airliner to Afghanistan by a militant Kashmiri group alleged to have ties with Pakistan.
General Musharraf has revealed that he had considered attacking India with nuclear weapons during the operation but the fear of Indian retaliation prevented him from doing so
It is now known that the situation was even more complicated. General Musharraf has revealed that he had considered attacking India with nuclear weapons during the operation but the fear of Indian retaliation prevented him from doing so [link]. So the fear of a nuclear retaliation prevented him from carrying out a first strike, but the fear of nuclear retaliation had not entered his mind when he launched the Kargil operation. He had simply assumed away the idea that India would carry out a first strike.
Two years later, terrorists mounted an attack on the Indian parliament. The war of words between the two countries escalated rapidly into a large-scale mobilisation of conventional forces. At its peak, a million troops were deployed across the international border. Stanford University held two conferences to find solutions to the dangerous impasse. US intelligence put the probability of a nuclear exchange at 50% and stated that it could kill 150 million people.
Seven years later, the Taj hotel in Mumbai was attacked by terrorists, once again leading to a dangerous war of words between the two nuclear powers and threats of retaliation.
Fearful of each other’s motives, the sibling adversaries continue to invest in advancing their nuclear arsenal. Pakistan has proudly added battlefield ballistic missiles to its inventory. And the prospect of a nuclear strike has now entered the rather impolite vocabulary of the threats that are routinely exchanged between the generals.
It has often been said that nuclear weapons prevented war from breaking out between the two superpowers during the Cold War. Yet no less an American hawk than Henry Kissinger said the two countries often behaved like ‘two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision… Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies.’
Each country produced warheads in excess of 10,000, enough to blow up the world’s population several times over. In the pursuit of elusive security, the United States spent $5.5 trillion, of which warheads accounted for only $0.5 trillion. The bulk of the money — a little over $3 trillion – was spent on delivery systems. Almost $1 trillion was spent on the associated command, control, communications and intelligence systems, and $1 trillion on ‘defending’ the warheads and delivery systems by housing them in underground shelters.
After he retired as the head of the US Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal and the associated delivery infrastructure, General George Lee Butler confessed that nuclear deterrence was not a force for stability but a catalyst for conflict. He said deterrence was ‘a formula for unmitigated catastrophe… premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions.’
Today, India and Pakistan are locked in a dilemma that is similar to the one faced by the two superpowers, but one fraught with greater danger. Their launch-to-target time is under five minutes.
A nuclear war cannot be ruled out. One day, India may tire of Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir, and invade Pakistan. Pakistan, unable to hold off a much larger Indian force, may hit Indian cities with nuclear missiles, inviting an Indian nuclear retaliation. And if Pakistan mistakes the firing of an Indian missile bearing a conventional warhead as a nuclear strike, that may trigger a nuclear war.
The second argument that is used to justify nuclear weapons is that they will yield a peace dividend, by serving as a substitute for expensive conventional weapons. Charles Glaser made that point in “Rational Theory of International Relations.” He argued that “by shifting the offense-defense balance heavily toward defense, nuclear weapons enable states that are much less powerful than their adversaries to satisfy their defense requirements and increase their security.”
Yet, in the year following the nuclear tests, India raised its conventional defense spending by 28 percent and Pakistan responded by raising its defense spending by 10 percent. Indeed, Ahsan Butt, in a paper published in Conflict, Security and Development, has shown that the peace dividend was not realised in the subcontinent. India continued to improve its conventional and nuclear arsenal and so did Pakistan. Nuclear weapons did not diminish the arms race in conventional arms.
It continues to drag on, spurred by Pakistan’s desires to wrest Kashmir from India through force and to acquire strategic depth in Afghanistan. And Pakistan also has to maintain its conventional forces to pursue its anti-separatist campaigns in Balochistan and anti-terrorism campaign in FATA.
But given the size of the Indian economy, it will never be able to match India’s conventional forces. That point comes out forcefully in a recent report by the Stimson Center, “Military Budgets in India and Pakistan.” It includes this very compelling graph.
The best way to deter war is to deal with the underlying conflict. As one studies Pakistan’s wars with India, it becomes apparent that all but one were fought over Kashmir and all were initiated by Pakistan.
Pakistan cannot solve the Kashmir problem through war. Even if it could, it is no longer clear Kashmiris want to join Pakistan. Once Pakistan calls off its military initiatives in Kashmir, it will find that it has also freed itself of the fear of an Indian invasion.
Those who think that India’s goal is to break-up Pakistan are raising a false alarm. India is in no position to do what it did in 1971. The whole of East Pakistan was up in arms against Pakistan after the myopic Operation Searchlight was launched by the Pakistan army. It fell to the Indian army in less than two weeks. India cannot risk attacking Pakistan today without provocation.
Michael Howard, the British strategist, noted, ‘Deterrence can no longer depend on the threat of a nuclear war, the costs of which would be grotesquely out of proportion to any conceivable benefits to be derived from engaging in it.”
The writer has written Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan. He can be reached at Ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com
Published in Daily Times, February 5th 2018.
