[LINK] "Errr"

[rfmcdonald]

The title of Alex Harrowell's post at the Yorkshire Ranter is actually quite apropos, inasmuch as it deals with the potential catastrophe wrought by India's Cold Start strategic doctrine, which would see time/space-limited military assaults against Pakistan with the aim of fighting a conventional war despite the nuclear weaponization of both parties. This can backfire, by causing the Pakistani military to institute policies which would make nuclear escalation quite easy.

In the light of this, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Indian military preparations are simply unwise – in a classic post at Arms Control Wonk, Michael Krepon discusses why Pakistan is continuing to build more nuclear weapons and concludes that the factors at work are as follows. First of all, Indian leaders’ public statements are threatening – to use cold-war terminology, although their military planning is moving towards “flexible response”, their declaratory policy contains a lot of “massive retaliation”. The combination is toxic. Trying to make the conventional forces more usable is potentially provocative. Statements about nuclear strategy like this one, combined with faster response times, begin to look a lot like an offensive doctrine:

The Indian Chief of Army Staff, S. Padmanabhan, sang the same tune – that if Pakistan resorted to first use, “the perpetrator of that particular outrage shall be punished so severely that their continuation thereafter in any form will be doubtful.”

Secondly, although nuclear weapons cost a lot to acquire in the first place, they get much cheaper once the programme has been capitalised and the process industrialised. This was a major theme in the high cold war – the original Manhattan Project was designed to scale up to five bombs a month, achieved that ahead of schedule, and in fact scaled even further. Also, they are often considered cheap in terms of their strategic value. Nukes scare people; Pakistan will never be an industrial power like India, but now it has the production line going, it certainly can add more bombs and more target packages faster than the Indian economy can grow. Krepon makes the interesting point that the limiting factor isn’t the nukes so much as the delivery systems – a country like North Korea can build a nuclear device of sorts, and Pakistan can run a bomb factory, but only a fully diversified industrial economy can make the aeroplane or the missile to carry them.

This has certain consequences for the Pakistani strategic targeting plan. In comments at ACW, someone asks whether they might be thinking of making use of man- or at least vehicle-portable weapons, the famous suitcase nukes. Another, slightly less terror-licious point about this is how the Pakistan Air Force is operating. If they have plenty of bombs but relatively few aircraft, they have to preserve the strike-force (the P-Force, perhaps, by analogy with the 1960s RAF V-Force) at all costs. This implies putting as many planes as possible on quick-reaction alert, dispersing them early in a crisis with the weapons, and keeping open the option of dispersing them in Afghanistan. (We may now begin to see why they care so much.) It also suggests that it would be very difficult to target anything in the Pakistan Air Force without threatening the nuclear assets, and that they might be keen to use tactical nuclear weapons – it’s a relatively cheap substitute for a much bigger army, and (as NATO found out in the high cold war) if you have more and more atom bombs hanging about, pure bureaucratic logic tends to get them assigned to targets.

This is a special case of the principle that mayhem is easy and order is difficult, of course.

Harrowell notes that India recognizes the problems of this doctrine and is unlikely to implement it, inasmuch as Cold Start takes a while to start up and the Indians are aware of its serious problems. Nevertheless, this speaks to the fundamental, paradoxical strength of Pakistan, that the state is so weak that few want to do anything that could tip the country over into chaos. If sanctions against Pakistan were imposed after another Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack (as the author mentions), what would happen to the nuclear weapons once the country's economy collapsed?