[The new interpretation would be a significant shift in India’s posture that could have far-reaching implications in the region, even if war never comes. Pakistan could feel compelled to expand its arsenal to better survive a pre-emptive strike, in turn setting off an Indian buildup.]
By
Max Fisher
 |
|
A test of India’s
long-range, nuclear-capable missile in 2013. India is said to be
considering allowing for pre-emptive
nuclear strikes against Pakistan in the
event of a war. Credit Pallava
Bagla/Corbis, via Getty Images
|
India may be reinterpreting its nuclear
weapons doctrine, circumstantial evidence suggests, with potentially
significant ramifications for the already tenuous nuclear balance in South
Asia.
New assessments suggest that India is
considering allowing for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Pakistan’s arsenal
in the event of a war. This would not formally change India’s nuclear doctrine,
which bars it from launching a first strike, but would loosen its
interpretation to deem pre-emptive strikes as defensive.
It would also change India’s likely targets,
in the event of a war, to make a nuclear exchange more winnable and, therefore,
more thinkable.
Analysts’ assessments, based on recent
statements by senior Indian officials, are necessarily speculative. States with
nuclear weapons often leave ambiguity in their doctrines to prevent adversaries
from exploiting gaps in their proscriptions and to preserve flexibility. But
signs of a strategic adjustment in India are mounting.
This comes against a backdrop of
long-simmering tensions between India and Pakistan — including over
state-sponsored terrorism and the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir —
which have already led to several wars, the most recent in 1999.
The new interpretation would be a significant
shift in India’s posture that could have far-reaching implications in the
region, even if war never comes. Pakistan could feel compelled to expand its
arsenal to better survive a pre-emptive strike, in turn setting off an Indian
buildup.
This would be more than an arms race, said
Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies
nuclear powers.
“It’s very scary because all the
‘first-strike instability’ stuff is real,” Mr. Narang said, referring to a dynamic
in which two nuclear adversaries both perceive a strong incentive to use their
warheads first in a war. This is thought to make nuclear conflict more likely.
Hidden
in Plain Sight
Hints of a high-level Indian debate over the
nuclear doctrine mounted with a recent memoir by Shivshankar Menon, India’s
national security adviser from 2011 to 2014.
“There is a potential gray area as to when
India would use nuclear weapons first” against a nuclear-armed adversary, Mr.
Menon wrote.
India, he added, “might find it useful to
strike first” against an adversary that appeared poised to launch or that “had
declared it would certainly use its weapons” — most likely a veiled reference
to Pakistan.
Mr. Narang presented the quotations, along
with his interpretation, in Washington last week, during a major nuclear policy
conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“There is increasing evidence that India will
not allow Pakistan to go first,” he told a gathering of international
government officials and policy experts.
Mr. Menon’s book, he said, “clearly carves
out an exception for pre-emptive Indian first use in the very scenario that is
most likely to occur in South Asia.”
The passage alone does not prove a policy
shift. But in context alongside other developments, it suggests either that
India has quietly widened its strategic options or that officials are hoping to
stir up just enough ambiguity to deter its adversaries.
After Mr. Narang’s presentation generated
attention in the South Asian news media, Mr. Menon told an Indian columnist,
“India’s nuclear doctrine has far greater flexibility than it gets credit for.”
Mr. Menon declined an interview request for
this article. When told what the article would say, he did not challenge its
assertions. India’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Whether these signals indicate a real shift
or a strategic feint, analysts believe they are intended to right a strategic
imbalance that has been growing for almost a decade.
The
Pakistan Problem
Should India sustain a nuclear attack, its
doctrine calls for a major retaliation, most likely by targeting its
adversary’s cities. When this policy was announced in 2003, it fit the threat
posed by Pakistan’s arsenal of long-range, city-destroying weapons.
Since then, Pakistan has developed smaller
warheads designed for battlefield use. These were meant to address Pakistan’s
India problem: The Indian military is much larger, virtually ensuring its
victory in an all-out war.
Such weapons could be used against invading
Indian troops, halting a war before it could be lost. This would exploit a gap
in India’s doctrine: It is hard to imagine that India would escalate to total
nuclear war, as its doctrine commands, over a small battlefield strike on
Pakistani soil.
This created a Pakistan problem for India:
Its chief adversary had made low-level nuclear war thinkable, even potentially
winnable. Since then, there have been growing hints of debate over modifying
the Indian doctrine.
B. S. Nagal, a lieutenant general who led
India’s nuclear command from 2008 to 2011, argued in a 2014 article for a
policy of “ambiguity” as to whether India would launch a pre-emptive nuclear
strike.
Also that year, the Bharatiya Janata Party
said it would consider changing India’s doctrine, but then abandoned this
position. It took power in national elections a few weeks later.
Last November, Manohar Parrikar, then the
defense minister, said India’s prohibition against nuclear first use was too
restrictive, though he added that this was only his opinion.
Another reason analysts suspect change:
India’s doctrine initially served to persuade the United States to drop
economic sanctions it had imposed over nuclear tests. Given President Trump’s
softer stance on proliferation, that impetus may no longer apply.
‘The
Seductive Logic’
Mr. Menon, in his book, seemed to settle on
an answer to India’s quandary: “Pakistani tactical nuclear weapon use would effectively
free India to undertake a comprehensive first strike against Pakistan,” he
wrote.
The word “comprehensive” refers to a nuclear
attack against an adversary’s arsenal, rather than its cities. It is meant to
instigate and quickly win a nuclear exchange, leaving the other side disarmed.
Taken with a policy of pre-emption, these two
shifts would seem to address India’s Pakistan problem, in theory persuading
Pakistani leaders that a limited nuclear war would be too dangerous to pursue.
For India, Mr. Narang said, “you can really
see the seductive logic” to such an approach. This would be “really the only
pathway you have if you’re going to have a credible nuclear deterrence.”
It is impossible to know whether statements
like Mr. Menon’s are intended to quietly reveal a policy shift, while avoiding
the crisis that would be set off by a formal change, or merely stir doubt.
Either way, the intent appears the same: to
create just enough uncertainty in the minds of Pakistani leaders that they
become restrained by the potential threat of pre-emptive Indian strikes.
But if that threat is plausible, then the
distinction between a real threat and a feint blurs.
Use
It or Lose It
Shashank Joshi, a fellow at the Royal United
Services Institute, said he suspected that Mr. Menon was signaling something
subtler: a warning that India’s strategy could adapt in wartime, potentially to
include first strikes.
That distinction may be important to Indian
officials, but it could be lost on Pakistani war planners who have to consider
all scenarios.
Mr. Joshi, in a policy brief for the Lowy
Institute, an Australian think tank, tried to project what would happen if
India embraced such a policy, or if Pakistan concluded that it had.
First would come the arms race.
The fear of a first strike, Mr. Joshi wrote,
“incentivizes Pakistan to undertake a massive nuclear buildup, in order to
dispel any possibility of India disarming it entirely.”
India, whatever its strategy, would feel
compelled to keep pace.
Second comes the tightening of nuclear
tripwires, Mr. Joshi warned, as “this reciprocal fear of first use could pull
each side in the direction of placing nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert.”
Finally, in any major armed crisis, the logic
of a first strike would pull both sides toward nuclear escalation.
“If Pakistan thinks India will move quickly,
Pakistan has an incentive to go even quicker, and to escalate straight to the
use of the longer-range weapons,” Mr. Joshi wrote.
This thinking would apply to India as well,
creating a situation in which the nuclear arsenal becomes, as analysts dryly
put it, “use it or lose it.”
‘That
Can Blow Back Real Quick’
The most optimistic scenario would lock South
Asia in a state of mutually assured destruction, like that of the Cold War, in
which armed conflict would so reliably escalate to nuclear devastation that
both sides would deem war unthinkable.
This would be of global concern. A 2008 study
found that, although India and Pakistan have relatively small arsenals, a full
nuclear exchange would push a layer of hot, black smoke into the atmosphere.
This would produce what some researchers call
without hyperbole “a decade without summer.” As crops failed worldwide, the
resulting global famine would kill a billion people, the study estimated.
But nuclear analysts worry that South Asia’s
dynamics would make any state of mutually assured destruction less stable than
that of the Cold War.
For one thing, Pakistani leaders view even
conventional war with India as an existential threat, making them more willing
to accept nuclear risks. For another, a large-scale terrorist attack in India
could be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as Pakistan-sponsored, potentially
inciting war. The disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, where conflict sometimes
boils over, adds a troubling layer of volatility.
“Maybe it is this Reaganesque strategy,” Mr.
Narang said, comparing India’s potential strategic shift to President Ronald
Reagan’s arms race with the Soviet Union. “But Pakistan has a much bigger
security problem than the Soviet Union did. And that can blow back real quick.”