Creating the nuclear command: India courts insecurity
The Vajpayee government couldn't get Pakistan to stop supporting militants in Kashmir -- despite lobbying with the US and the recent standoff. The Musharraf government feels frustrated that it cannot get India to discuss Kashmir...This combination of compulsion and frustration is potentially fatal. If India and Pakistan don't prevent their own descent into the Nuclear Abyss through bilateral talks, they will invite external mediation...However problematic, won't such intervention be preferable to Nuclear Armageddon?
Within a week of Gen Pervez Musharraf's chilling disclosure that he would have unleashed "unconventional war" -- presumably with nuclear weapons -- had even one Indian soldier crossed the border during the recent 10-months-long standoff, India's Cabinet announced the formation of a Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) and the appointment of a head of the Strategic Forces Command.
This will sharpen India-Pakistan hostility and heighten the South Asian nuclear danger.
Three elements of the NCA and the official "nuclear doctrine" are significant. First, like the 1999 "Draft" of the National Security Advisory Board, it emphasises a "credible minimum deterrent", with which India will inflict "unacceptable damage" upon adversaries.
The "deterrent" is highly ambitious and open-ended. The US frowned on the original "Draft" (which is why it was never officially adopted). But post-9/11, it relented. This, besides Pakistan's nuclear sabre-rattling, explains the announcement's timing.
Second, the new decision dilutes India's no-first-use (NFU) commitment. New Delhi will retaliate with nuclear weapons against "a major attack against India or Indian forces anywhere" -- made even with "biological or chemical weapons".
India is emulating the US's December 2002 "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction". Disproportionate nuclear retaliation will kill lakhs of non-combatant civilians, against the few hundred soldiers which chemical or biological weapons usually kill.
Third, only the NCA's Political Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, can authorise a nuclear strike. The Executive Council (EC) will only provide decision-making "inputs".
However, the new structure will facilitate greater involvement of the military. The EC will probably include services personnel advising on security threats. They will be given technical information about nuclear weapons by the concerned atomic engineers.
Civilian control is doubtless preferable to military control. But it doesn't guarantee responsible decision-making. A democratic government ordered Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Clearly, India -- which for 50 years regarded nuclear deterrence as a strategic folly and moral-political perversity -- is preparing for actual nuclear war-fighting by assembling all the components of a full-fledged arsenal.
This is the operative part of the new decision. The rest -- "strict controls" on nuclear-related exports and commitment to a "nuclear weapons-free world" -- is largely rhetorical.
As for Pakistan, its Nuclear Command was established almost three years ago. Pakistan is believed to be more advanced than India in marrying nuclear warheads to missiles. It has a nuclear first-strike doctrine. Pakistan was at a high level of readiness to strike during Kargil and in the latest border confrontation.
Islamabad announced in 2000 that its NCA would be chaired by the Head of Government (now Prime Minister Jamali). But its nuclear programme has always been under military control. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had to beg the US for information on it because her own generals refused it to her. The Pakistan NCA's January 6 meeting confirms the military's control.
India-Pakistan relations are today at a historic low -- worse than during the 1971 war. They have no direct surface or air links, nor normal diplomatic relations.
Both indulge in abusive exchanges. India condemned Gen Musharraf's December 30 "disclosure" as "highly dangerous" and "provocative" and used it to dismiss any "forward movement" in relations with Pakistan.
However, Defence Minister Fernandes on January 7 said "there will be no Pakistan left" if India attacks it. India too had nuclear-strike plans. Its just-retired army chief S. Padmanabhan confirmed: "We were absolutely ready to go to war... [and] to cope with" Pakistan's nuclear capability.
This "coping" could only have been a retaliatory nuclear strike. India Today confirms that in January and end-May/early-June, India almost launched major conventional attacks on Pakistan. It held back under US pressure.
Then, on January 9, the Agni was tested. Such war preparations and high-frequency abusive exchanges, amidst intense strategic rivalry, mean that the threshold for an India-Pakistan nuclear confrontation has fallen to a new low -- probably lower than during the Cold War since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
India and Pakistan recklessly foster the illusion that they can face a "nuclear" challenge, that nuclear wars are winnable, that "protection" is possible against these mass-annihilation weapons.
This is dangerous macho mythology. There are no victors in nuclear war. There is no defence -- military, civil or medical -- against nuclear weapons.
The best "security" they can provide is of a negative kind -- based on insecurity, balance of terror, through so-called deterrence. But deterrence can break down, leading to retaliation. Nuclear retaliation is an act of senseless revenge, not of regaining security.
Nuclear deterrence assumes high rationality and symmetrical perceptions of "unacceptable damage" by adversaries. In reality, such perceptions vary. For the US, losing 3,000 civilians in 9/11 was "unacceptable". For some Pakistani generals, even losing five cities might not be.
For deterrence to work, adversaries must have perfect assessments of each other's capabilities. This does not hold in India and Pakistan, whose history is full of strategic misperception/miscalculation. Thus, each now boasts it came out "the winner" in the recent border confrontation. In reality, neither did.
Deterrence leads to an arms race. That's the experience of the Cold War.
What explains India's and Pakistan's irrational obsession with deterrence? Each government is acting under domestic compulsions, and out of frustration at its inability to get the better of the other. Both woo the US. Both have witnessed Rightward domestic-political shifts.
Following the Gujarat elections, the Vajpayee government is under Hindu-fundamentalist pressure to ratchet up its hostility with Pakistan. In Pakistan, the civilian government faces pressure from a rejuvenated Islamic Right.
The Vajpayee government couldn't get Pakistan to stop supporting militants in Kashmir -- despite lobbying with the US and the recent standoff. The Musharraf government feels frustrated that it cannot get India to discuss Kashmir.
This combination of compulsion and frustration is potentially fatal. If India and Pakistan don't prevent their own descent into the Nuclear Abyss through bilateral talks, they will invite external mediation.
However problematic, won't such intervention be preferable to Nuclear Armageddon?
Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.
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