Ten reasons to doubt nuclear deterrence

Daily Times, January 29, 2006
VIEW: Ten reasons to doubt nuclear deterrence —Ahmad Faruqui

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

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.

The genesis of the nuclear programme goes back to the 1971 war. Pakistan drew the wrong conclusions from its defeat. The war would have been unthinkable had General Yahya Khan not connived with certain politicians in West Pakistan to postpone the National Assembly session in March. This decision brought about the death of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Once East Pakistan plunged into a civil war and India intervened, the defeat of the beleaguered Pakistani army garrison was a foregone conclusion. However, a similar defeat in the west was not inevitable.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had famously committed Pakistanis to developing nuclear weapons even if they had to “eat grass”, decided to initiate a nuclear programme in 1972. Some felt his policies were vindicated when India unveiled a “smiling Buddha” at Pokhran in 1974. However, that may have been India’s response to Bhutto’s decision to go nuclear. But it is likely that India was responding to China’s nuclear weapons programme while simultaneously fulfilling a long-held desire of its scientific elite to demonstrate that they were second to none.

Today, there are at least 10 reasons to rethink Pakistan’s nuclear programme. First, 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.

Second, 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.

Third, 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. While one may question the merits of supporting the Taliban, having to change the policy under duress to protect the nuclear assets was a reversal of logic since nuclear assets were supposed to allow the country to have an independent foreign policy.

Fourth, 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. There has been no nuclear dividend; $4 billion are being spent annually on maintaining a military force of 600,000 and equipping them with advanced weaponry.

Fifth, 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.

Thus, Pakistani nuclear expenditures will keep on accelerating as more advanced ballistic missiles and warheads continue to be deployed regionally. The military will require tactical and strategic missiles that can be fired from land, sea and air. Over time, it will seek more sophisticated means of storing, transporting and launching the weapons, all of them worth billions. Ultimately, the military that has a first strike capability will find it necessary to develop a second strike capability and so on.

Sixth, 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.

Seventh, with nuclear weapons there is always the risk of accidental launch. Safeguards and protocols can never eliminate the risk of failure. Eighth, there would always be a risk of terrorists acquiring the weapons, especially in Pakistan’s regional environment.

Ninth, some defence analysts have argued that nuclear weapons are simply an anodyne, 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”.

And last, 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.

Nowhere was the military disutility of nuclear weapons more visible than during the Cold War during which time, to quote Henry Kissinger, the US and the USSR behaved “like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision.”

Each country produced warheads in excess of 10,000. The US nuclear programme represented 29 percent of its military budget and had even half of that money been spent on social programmes, it would have permanently eliminated poverty and deprivation from American society. As for the USSR, none of its nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles could save it from collapse.

Sadly, the territorial dimension of national security continues to be paramount in Pakistan’s policy making, even under a prime minister who is a former banker. From this ill-conceived premise flows the false deduction that nuclear weapons are the best method of protecting Pakistan’s independence.

Thus, a poor nation that should be spending two or three times the amount on development that it spends on defence spends roughly equal amounts on the two. Pakistan’s priorities should be eliminating poverty and illiteracy — which drive ethnic, sectarian and urban lawlessness and threaten its future survival.

Dr Ahmad Faruqui is director of research at the American Institute of International Studies and can be reached at Faruqui@pacbell.net