Islamic Nuke

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>How do we disarm? Let the weather be warm, and people will discard their clothes readily</b> 
   
In a January 29 op-ed in Daily Times , “Ten reasons to doubt nuclear deterrence,” Dr Ahmad Faruqui says: “Pakistanis may disagree on many things but on one issue there is unanimity of opinion – that the country’s nuclear weapons are necessary to keep India at bay. This notion needs to be re-examined…. Today, there are at least 10 reasons to rethink Pakistan’s nuclear programme.” Faruqui then goes on to list his reasons for doubting the efficacy of deterrence and by extension the country’s nuclear-weapon programme and arsenal. Below, I shall attempt to examine his arguments one by one.

1. The Kargil crisis provides evidence that the presence of nuclear weapons emboldens one or both parties to visualise and sometimes execute limited conventional war. There is no way to determine precisely the “red lines” of the other party and such ambiguity can in fact precipitate a nuclear war.

The reference to the May-June 1999 Kargil crisis is a staple with deterrence-pessimists. If nuclear weapons were meant to, and could in fact, deter the adversaries, why did the Kargil conflict happen? Some points need to be made to clear the cobwebs on this issue.

First, the failure or success of deterrence cannot be determined on the basis of a single “deterrence episode”. Deterrence may require a series of crises or confrontations before it becomes stable. This is true as much of conventional as nuclear deterrence, though in the case of the latter, attempts by the adversaries – especially the threatener – to keep the conflict from escalating evince the presence of deterrence and the fear of crossing the red lines.

In other words, studying deterrence requires a longitudinal design rather than a snapshot view. The analyst must look at the trajectory and be prepared to bring in a host of factors to study deterrence. Nuclear weapons do not work in a vacuum; they become effective in an environment that could involve a host of factors: the nature of ongoing conflicts, geographic contiguity between adversaries, political instability and internal strife in one or both states, a desire on the part of one or both to change the status quo, the ability or otherwise of the adversaries to enter into regional or other alliances, the nature of those alliances, their impact on the military capabilities of one or both, commitments to any ideologies, the ability or otherwise of leaders on both sides to communicate and interpret signals, the absence of second-strike capabilities etc., etc.

As Elli Lieberman put it (“The Deterrence Theory: Success or Failure in Arab-Israeli Wars?” McNair Paper Number 45, October 1995): “Leaders challenge deterrence, or go to war, when there are uncertainties about the capability or will of the defender; and, once these uncertainties are reduced through the creation of specific reputations for capability and will, deterrence stability is created even when political pressures to challenge deterrence continue to exist ” [italics added]. He concludes that the phenomenon of deterrence is “temporal, dynamic, and causal” and stability requires conflict. States may need to fight wars to create deterrence stability through “reputations for capability and will”.

Second, in the case of Pakistan and India, one needs to keep in mind the two categories of deterrence and compellence and their distinction. The former is passive, the latter active. Pakistan was wedded to compellence, India to deterrence. India needed to rig the tripwire and wait; Pakistan needed to initiate the action. Deterrence is indefinite in timing, as Thomas Schelling put it in Arms and Influence . If the adversary crosses the line we shoot. When? That depends on the adversary. In classical deterrence, he mustn’t. There would be no threatener and threatened ; both would be threatened and, therefore, neither will initiate an action.

Compellence is more complex and definite in time. The action must be initiated at some point; it cannot be delayed or it will be mere posturing. At the same time, however, it must be tolerable to the initiator over whatever period of time the action is to be taken. This is important because the initiator, while compelling the adversary to act, cannot afford an all-out conflict. In the case of Pakistan, compellence was linked to sub-conventional warfare, bleeding the adversary, while seeking to deny India its advantage in an all-out war through threat of escalation to the nuclear level.

This shows an interesting dialectic between compellence and deterrence. The empirical evidence here is not that Kargil shows a failure of deterrence but that (a) India kept the conflict confined to Kargil and (b) it began to look into – and wargame – the concept of limited war. This response was very different from 1965 when India expanded the zone of conflict by attacking Lahore after Pakistan had engaged it in Kashmir and had reached within striking distance of Jammu-Katuha Road.

As for the red lines, given the non-deployment of nuclear forces, Pakistan and India need to manipulate risk within ambiguity. For Pakistan this means not spelling out a doctrine and keeping the red lines vague. In other words, ambiguity must be enhanced to deter the adversary. This paradox works the same way as deterrence generally does: to make war less and less possible by making it more and more possible. The important thing, however, is that while there must be ambiguity in relation to what kind of response may attend the crossing of a line (not spelled out), there must be no ambiguity about the capability itself and the will to use it. The ground between ambiguity about the red lines and the projection of capability and the will to use it then needs to be covered with deft signalling (Ejaz Haider, “Ambiguity and risk manipulation,” TFT , May 28-June 03, 2004, Vol. XVI, No. 14).

2. It is not clear that Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry prevented India from a pre-emptive war in Kashmir in 2002. Perhaps India was implementing coercive diplomacy and never intended to go to war. Furthermore, the importance of American influence on the antagonists cannot be underestimated.

Much of the argument in relation to Kargil also holds true for any mention of the December 2001-October 2002 standoff. After the attack on Lok Sabha, India decided to mobilise. It was a reaction to a series of events – attack on J&K parliament, Srinagar Corps HQs, hijacking of an Indian Airlines aeroplane etc. However, analyses and reports coming out of India at the time showed that the dominant thinking was to undertake operations that involved a combination of special forces and air and missile attacks without the attempt to hold territory and exploit. The fear of crossing the “ambiguous” red line was always there.

There is no gainsaying about the US factor. But the important point, as noted above, is that deterrence does not work in a vacuum. Pakistan and India do not just signal to each other; they also signal to extra-regional actors. India found a convergence of interest with the US on the issue of Islamist proxies employed by Pakistan and used the standoff to get the US and the EU involved in effecting a stand down. It was a sensible move since the threat of use of force worked better than the actual use of force would have. As for Pakistan, in this case it was the threatened party and would not have initiated any action itself. Instead, it prepared for a likely Indian offensive action and simply waited.

It is important to note that after India stretched the standoff beyond a certain point, the US State Department issued a travel advisory for the region. That decision put the squeeze on India’s economy and forced it to stand down. This point is important because it throws light on two aspects of the near-conflict: India could not have initiated a conflict on its own steam; it managed to extract some concessions from Pakistan because it was doing so also dovetailed with the US policy on Islamist proxies. Implication: deterrence worked between the two sides.

3. Pakistan’s nuclear assets have become a liability in the post-9/11 world. General Pervez Musharraf cited several reasons why he made a U-turn on Pakistan’s Afghan policy, one of which was to protect the country’s nuclear assets.

Deterrence is also a matter of outreach; how far can a country manage a strategic strike. Pakistan does not have the means to threaten the US mainland. That would require an ICBM or SSBN capability. Pakistan’s policy is not geared towards picking up a conflict with the US. In theory Pakistan could have decided to cock a snook at the US but that would have been against the basic determinant of its policy, i.e., India is the main adversary. Pakistan could not have risked being in a nutcracker. Doing so would have had a much higher cost than doing a volte-face on Afghanistan.

4. By going nuclear, Pakistan should have been able to reduce its expenditure on conventional forces and prevent the future of the country from being mortgaged.

Coming from a security analyst, this argument is surprising. Empirical evidence shows that Kenneth Waltz’ idea that nuclear forces would allow a country to spend less on conventional defence and maintain only “trip-wire” forces was flawed. The Brookings Institution’s study of the cost of US nuclear programme from the Manhattan Project to 1998 – at the dollar value of 1996 – shows that for every rise in expenditure on the strategic forces, there was a corresponding 20 percent increase in the conventional defence expenditure. Indeed, that nuclear capability compels the adversaries to spend on conventional defence to raise the nuclear threshold. There is no reason to believe that nuclear capability would have worked any differently in the case of Pakistan. As the SIPRI list indicates, India has already made its way into the club of fifteen top spenders on defence.

5. The perception that a minimum nuclear deterrent requires a constant and unchanging amount of funding is false, since the level of Pakistan’s minimum deterrent is tied to whatever India regards as its minimum deterrence. That, in turn, is tied to India’s regional ambitions, which are tied to China’s regional ambitions.

The unofficial paper put out by former foreign ministers Agha Shahi, Abdul Sattar and former Air Marshal Zulfikar Ali Khan (“Responding to India’s Nuclear Doctrine,” Dawn , October 5, 1999), made clear that minimum credible deterrence is not a static but a fluid concept. Pakistan does not look for symmetry, but it has to work out ratios and respond to India’s weaponisation within asymmetrical capabilities. However, it must be noted that Shahi et al wrote the paper in response to India’s Draft Nuclear Doctrine, which spoke of deployment of nuclear weapons and a triad of nuclear forces based on land, sea and in the air. That scenario has not come to pass yet. In any case, one can always debate the warhead limit, especially if the country has acquired a higher conventional capability and a second-strike capability. Faruqui is correct when he says that Pakistan will constantly have to review its assessment of minimum credible deterrence and would want to acquire a second-strike capability. It is expensive, which is why Pakistan has to look for options and approaches within its resource constraints. So far, the two sides have chosen to not deploy their arsenals. The trouble is that opponents of nuclear capability use the factor of ambiguity to express fear of a war; at the same time they use the economic argument to oppose deployment and the acquisition of second-strike capability.

If the idea is that spending on defence is costly and Pakistan cannot afford it then it doesn’t need to keep an army. It could keep the police and paramilitary to quell internal troubles and outsource its security to either India or the United States.

6. Were a “do or die” situation to develop for the state of Pakistan, what would be the military value of using nuclear assets to keep territory that would become uninhabitable the moment they were used? And what about the morality of killing millions of innocent civilians merely to make a statement about the sanctity of man-made borders that came into being just half a century earlier? Seen from this vantage point, nuclear war emerges as a psychopathic nationalised projection of suicide bombing.

This is an amazing argument for two reasons: one, it changes the framework of discussion from strategy to morality; two, it completely fails to understand the fact that deterrence is about not killing the millions by a capability that works both ways. Since both can kill, neither will. As Schelling put it: “…the tripwire can threaten to blow things up out of all proportion to what is being protected [going by Faruqui’s argument, in this case the country that came into being just half-century ago], because if the threat works the thing never goes off.”

Also, while nuclear weapons have not killed anyone since Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and those cities were bombed because Japan could not deter the US), conventional weapons continue to do so. The moral argument should also involve their non-use unless we were to accept that killing of one man is less reprehensible, at least statistically, than the presumed killing of millions.

7. With nuclear weapons there is always the risk of accidental launch. Safeguards and protocols can never eliminate the risk of failure.

The best work in regard to living with high-risk technologies is Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents . The work has been flogged around the world and is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of the anti-nuclear lobby. Perrow argues, after studying a number of systems, that the risk of accident can never be eliminated. Therefore, while we cannot make do without some technologies and need to make efforts to reduce the risk associated with accidents in those systems, nuclear reactors and weapons do not fall in that category and must be eliminated.

Perrow’s argument is very convincing. However, by ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are the currency of power in today’s world and the powerful nuclear-weapon states are not prepared to roll back the capability, he is mistaken in positing that nuclear-related systems can be eliminated simply on the basis of a moral argument. Pakistan and India are caught, beyond their own rivalry, in the vortex of a world system led by the NWSs. Under the Bush administration, we have seen non-proliferation and arms control being thrown by the wayside. The risk of living with nuclear technology, therefore, enters the complex domain of geopolitics. Also, the risk has less to do with the weapons and more to do with reactors. And reactors are not just used by NWSs but also by non-nuclear weapon states. Even so, a world sans nuclear weapons and technology would be a great world. Until that happens, even if Pakistan and India could disarm, the world could still be destroyed by the Americans, the British, the French, the Russians and the Chinese, not to speak of the Israelis. Someone needs to get them to disarm first, starting with America and Russia.

8. There would always be a risk of terrorists acquiring the weapons, especially in Pakistan’s regional environment.

This argument, like the previous one, moves away from the issue of deterrence and presents the problem of unauthorised possession and use of nuclear weapons. It builds on the scripts of Hollywood flicks about terrorists and broken arrows. But in doing so, it ignores the issue of delivery of a nuclear weapon. How would terrorists deliver the device? They could not do so without missiles or bombers or submarines. For them to acquire any of those delivery vehicles/platforms, they would either need to be sponsored by a state or capture a state to that end. However, once they do that and are on defined territory, they would be as amenable to deterrence as any state would be. The rational-choice paradigm would kick into play. If it didn’t, they would be destroyed.

On the other hand, were they to use RDD (Radioactive Dispersal Device) or the “dirty bomb”, they would not be able to make much of a difference because RDD, which packs radioactive material with conventional explosives, is unlikely to spread too much radiation, though the conventional explosives used to set off radiation may have a more lethal impact in the vicinity of the explosion (Ejaz Haider, “Nuclear weapons and terrorism,” TFT , August 12-18, 2005; Vol. XVII, No. 25).

9. Some defence analysts have argued that nuclear weapons are… a relatively painless means to prevent war, and that they will never be used. Not only is this at odds with historical practice at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is also contradicted by the recent statement of France’s Jacques Chirac in which he signalled a willingness to use them under “special” circumstances and earlier statements by leading members of the Bush administration who see military value in deploying “tactical mini-nukes”.

It is surprising that Faruqui has chosen to conflate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the new thinking on the use of tactical nuclear weapons to make the point about the use of nuclear weapons and rubbish deterrence. The fact is that the US was unlikely to have used nuclear gravity bombs against Japan if the latter also possessed the nuclear capability. This point is so straight as to be banal and tautological.

The more important point relates to the use of TNWs. The 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review argued in favour of “forward deterrence”, the use of TNWs against targets that could not be deterred through the use or threat of use of the strategic arsenal. The policy has been bitterly criticised within the US and outside. If ever such a scenario were to come to pass, it would mean two things: a nuclear-armed adversary can only be deterred through threat of punishment in equal measure; two, the norm of non-use against non-nuclear armed adversary will be broken. In both cases, we will see a movement towards rather than away from the possession of nuclear weapons by those who do not have them right now but may fear the US or any other country. By positing this argument, Faruqui tends to strengthen the idea of deterrence rather than diluting it.

10. It is often said that poor countries have a right to nuclear weapons since the rich countries have them; not letting the former have them is reprehensible and reeks of double standards, a kind of nuclear apartheid. Such an argument is putting forward the specious proposition that rich countries should not be allowed to have a monopoly on making monstrously big mistakes.

In a world where security is scarce and where rich countries are bent upon making monstrously big mistakes, it is perhaps better to begin by convincing them to correct their follies. Before one can set the children right, the parents need to review their behaviour. As Dr Benjamin Spock argued in Dr Spock’s Baby and Childcare , by denying toy guns to your child you would be putting him in a difficult situation, especially if all his friends are going around totting guns.

We live in a dangerous world; it’s a world where powerful states determine the rules. Faruqui and other disarmament advocates are right in calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The question, however, is: How do we do it?

Salvador de Madriaga, the inter-War Chairman of the League of Nations Disarmament Commission, said about disarmament in 1973: “The trouble with disarmament was (it still is) that the problem of war is tackled upside down and at the wrong end…Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter. Let the weather be warm, and people will discard their clothes readily and without committees to tell them how they are to undress.”
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