Nuclear South Asia Is More Stable Than You Think

A piece on Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel published in early May by Monika Chansoria reiterates the near-ubiquitous view that Pakistan’s evolving nuclear weapons posture, especially its development of tactical nuclear forces, is "straining South Asia’s deterrence stability." As if on cue, a few days later Pakistan conducted a test-firing of the Ghaznavi, a short-range ballistic missile that embodies the sort of dangers she emphasized.

Observers like Chansoria are right in saying that the challenges of fashioning stable deterrence in South Asia cannot be lightly dismissed. The singular intensity of the India-Pakistan strategic rivalry — entailing contiguous but bitterly contested territory, sharp historical animosities, internal frailties vulnerable to outside exploitation, and conflicting national identities — makes for a monstrous security dilemma without parallel in the history of nuclear deterrence. These factors underlay the region’s widespread reputation as the "most dangerous place in the world," as President Bill Clinton famously described it, a nuclear flashpoint made all the more volatile in by Pakistan’s propensity for risk-taking and adventurism.

Moreover, a number of strategic trends now taking shape have disconcerting implications. To start, the regional security environment promises to become more acute in the years ahead. The departure of NATO combat forces from Afghanistan later this year is bound to sharpen security competition between India and Pakistan. Both countries regard Afghanistan as a key theater of their strategic rivalry and the likely power vacuum there will have neighboring powers scrambling for influence, perhaps igniting a regional proxy war. Beyond the particular rhythms of bilateral relations, the emergence in Asia of what has been called the "Second Nuclear Age" presents an altogether new challenge. The expansion in the number of countries possessing or demonstrating nuclear weapons capabilities is making strategic calculations more complicated throughout the region.

Another cause for concern is the return of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the halls of power in New Delhi. The party carried India over the nuclear threshold in 1998 and, given the traditional hawkishness of its views about Pakistan, it could end up pushing Indian strategic weapons behavior in new and dangerous directions, such as ending New Delhi’s voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing. Likewise, the mixed signals the BJP sent during the just-concluded parliamentary elections about revising the country’s nuclear doctrine and responding forcefully to cross-border terrorism hint at an increased potential for military tensions with Pakistan.

For its part, Pakistan is engaged in a multipronged buildup of its nuclear arsenal, including a substantial expansion in its production of fissile material as well as an increase in the number and type of delivery vehicles. Moreover, in recent years it has placed greater emphasis in its pronouncements on the need for diversified nuclear capabilities and strike options geared to all levels of conflict. These developments have accentuated concerns about Pakistan’s capacity to control the challenges of unauthorized and inadvertent escalation during a war-threatening crisis or outright conflict with India.

As Chansoria emphasizes, these crisis-stability fears are brought into sharp focus by Pakistan’s development of the Nasr, a mobile dual-capable battlefield ballistic missile with a range of only 60 kilometers. In view of its extreme range limitations, the missile’s effectiveness depends upon close forward deployment in combat zones, thus raising the possibility of precipitate launch decisions in the event missile units are about to be overrun by advancing Indian forces or communications links are severed in battle. As Nasr batteries take up positions in the field, they could also become inviting targets for Indian preemptive action, thus generating incentives to launch a deliberative disarming strike.

Moreover, the missile’s dual-use ambiguity raises the possibility that the unintended Indian destruction of nuclear-armed missile systems comingled with conventional forces engaged in battle would likely be construed as action intended to disarm Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, thus giving Pakistani commanders strong incentive to use their remaining nuclear assets while they still can. Similar dynamics would be at play if India destroys command and control infrastructure that is shared by both conventional and nuclear units.

All of these are serious concerns and yet the outlook for deterrence stability in South Asia is not as bleak as Chansoria and many others make out. The bulk of the analysis about nuclear proliferation in the region has long suggested that strategic factors unique to the India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry — the relationship’s crisis-prone character combined with the lack of reliable early-warning capabilities and the short time-to-target distances involved in South Asia — would inevitably impel them to adopt counterforce strategies and preemptive or time-sensitive postures that are liable to precipitous overreaction in the heat of a serious confrontation. These predictions have not yet come to pass for either country some 16 years after both became overt nuclear weapons powers and even after two serious military confrontations:the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 2001-02 "Twin Peaks" crisis, in which general hostilities seemed nigh and the possibility of nuclear use appeared ominous.

Indeed, Pakistan is even more of a puzzle on this score than India, given its constrained strategic geography, conspicuous anxiety about its conventional military shortcomings vis-à-vis its nemesis, and the profound influence of a military establishment renowned for worst-case strategizing. Yet Pakistan continues to maintain a relatively relaxed operational posture for its nuclear forces. As a normal practice, it does not deploy ready-to-use systems in the field or in alert mode, and though the evidence is not entirely clear, Pakistan in all likelihood has not even primed its nuclear capabilities during earlier periods of crisis with India. While Pakistani officials stress that weapons can be made ready at short notice, warheads are not thought to be mated with their delivery vehicles and by most accounts the warheads are maintained in a disassembled state, with fissile cores stored separately from explosive triggers.

As long as Pakistan continues to refrain from postures in which nuclear weapons are operationally deployed, the development of tactical nuclear forces will not have as deleterious an impact on crisis stability that many fear. Pakistani military officials contend that there are no plans to deploy the Nasr in the field or shift to an explicit doctrine of nuclear war-fighting. Rather, Pakistan’s investments on this front appear at this point to be based on a strategy of manipulating Indian risk assessments. As one expert argues:

"Pakistan’s battlefield capability seems presently configured as a force-in-being rather than a warfighting arsenal. Unlike the US-NATO posture during the Cold War, there is little evidence that Pakistani doctrine or strategy assumes battlefield use of a nuclear device. Instead, Pakistan’s strategy ap
pears designed to manipulate the risk of use so that it increases with the severity of the conflict."

The possibility of accidental and inadvertent conflict inheres in the very possession of nuclear arsenals, and the concerns raised by those pessimistic about the fragility of nuclear deterrence in South Asia may well turn out to be tragically accurate. But the logic of their argument about future dangers would be a whole lot stronger were they to offer a better explanation for why similar warnings in the past have fallen short.

David J. Karl is president of the Asia Strategy Initiative, an analysis and advisory firm focused on the intersection of politics and economics in Asia, and heads its practice on South Asia. He previously served as director of studies at the Pacific Council on International Policy.