Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence Stability in South Asia

Devin T. Hagerty

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030213985
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica militare

This book examines the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan, two highly antagonistic South Asian neighbors who recently moved into their third decade of overt nuclear weaponization. It assesses the stability of Indo-Pakistani nuclear deterrence and argues that, while deterrence dampens the likelihood of escalation to conventional—and possibly nuclear—war, the chronically embittered relations between New Delhi and Islamabad mean that deterrence failure resulting in major warfare cannot be ruled out. Through an empirical examination of the effects of nuclear weapons during five crises between India and Pakistan since 1998, as well as a discussion of the theoretical logic of Indo-Pakistani nuclear deterrence, the book offers suggestions for enhancing deterrence stability between these two countries.

© The Author(s) 2020

Devin T. HagertyNuclear Weapons and Deterrence Stability in South Asiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21398-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Devin T. Hagerty¹

(1)

Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

Devin T. Hagerty

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This book examines the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan, two highly antagonistic South Asian neighbors who recently began their third decade of overt nuclear weaponization. In this introductory chapter, I first provide a brief overview of the Indo-Pakistani nuclear arms competition and some recent trends that threaten to undermine deterrence stability. I then give a synopsis of the underlying political context of Indo-Pakistani relations, focusing mainly on the dispute over the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which goes back to the partition of India and Pakistan when they gained their independence from Britain in August 1947. The combination of nuclear deterrence and continuing subconventional violence, such as the February 2019 attack on Indian forces in Pulwama, Kashmir, creates a kind of “ugly stability” that is unique in the nuclear era—and a main theme of the book. In the last section of this introduction, I preview the book’s organization by outlining the chapter topics and main arguments.

Keywords

Ugly stabilityKashmirIndiaPakistanNuclear weaponsDeterrence stabilityNarendra Modi

End Abstract

The India-Pakistan Nuclear Arms Competition in 2019

Not long after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear explosive tests in May 1998, a group of scholars, research analysts, and government officials gathered around the conference table of an American think tank to discuss the implications of South Asia’s overt nuclearization. At one point in the proceedings, a very senior Indian official was asked what lessons New Delhi might have learned from the U.S.-Soviet experience with nuclear weapons during the Cold War. He visibly bristled, then thundered that India did not need to learn any lessons from the Americans and the Soviets. New Delhi, he said, had no intention of building large nuclear forces, engaging in arms racing, or brandishing its nuclear weapons for warfighting purposes. India would be a restrained, responsible nuclear weapon state, seeking only a “minimum” nuclear deterrent to provide itself with last-resort insurance against nuclear attacks by its adversaries, China and Pakistan. Pakistani officials likewise voiced similar intentions regarding their nuclear weapons program. They, too, would forgo large nuclear stockpiles and the other costly trappings of the superpower nuclear arms race, pursuing only a minimum-deterrent capability of their own.

Twenty years later, these aims have expanded. Contrary to Indian and Pakistani officials’ initial expectations, the nuclear arms competition between New Delhi and Islamabad has begun to bear certain similarities to the Cold War experience of Washington and Moscow. While it would be a great exaggeration to call the South Asian nuclear standoff a microcosm of the superpower balance, especially in its scale, India and Pakistan are resolutely pushing the boundaries of what they have claimed to be the underlying mission of their nuclear capabilities: “credible minimum deterrence.” Both possess roughly 140 nuclear weapons, with their arsenals growing steadily.¹ Each country is striving for a nuclear triad of mobile land-based missiles, fighter-bomber aircraft, and submarine-launched missiles, and each is developing an array of nuclear-capable cruise and ballistic missiles with different ranges, launch configurations, and potency. New Delhi and Islamabad have both signaled their plans to pursue multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV ) capabilities for their ballistic missiles. In recent years, the two sides have given indications of increasing the operational readiness of their nuclear forces—Pakistan by deploying a tactical nuclear weapon system, the short-range Nasr missile, and India by evolving the capabilities, and possibly the intention, to create damage-limiting counterforce targeting options for itself.² The long-established practice of maintaining their nuclear weapons in a de-mated, unassembled form, touted by both countries as a stabilizing measure, could well be eroding.³ India has been deeply engaged in research and development of ballistic-missile defenses (BMD ),⁴ which would increase Pakistan’s sense of strategic vulnerability and induce it to generate countervailing offensive capabilities.

As will be discussed at greater length in Chap. 5, New Delhi’s pursuit of more sophisticated nuclear and related technologies stems in great measure from its apparent ambition to achieve rough qualitative parity with China in the nuclear realm; however, its most immediate effect is to intensify the Indo-Pakistani nuclear rivalry.⁵ Concerns are growing among South Asia nuclear analysts that India and Pakistan are inexorably moving beyond the minimum-deterrent imperatives of assured, survivable second-strike capabilities toward an interaction characterized by a mutual quest for escalation dominance, arms racing, and the gradual creation of warfighting forces and doctrines. Like their superpower predecessors, Indian and Pakistani strategic elites seem intent on escaping, rather than embracing, the logic of the nuclear revolution, which suggests that once two adversaries have deployed survivable second-strike nuclear capabilities, mutual deterrence should prevail between them, military victory in any meaningful sense is impossible to achieve, and relative capabilities are less important than each side’s absolute capacity to severely punish its opponent with nuclear devastation.⁶ If this assessment is accurate, the stability of India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence may be jeopardized as the two sides edge closer to damage-limitation capabilities and strategies, and the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” begins to fuel preemptive temptations between them.⁷

The Political Context

The core driver of South Asia’s nuclear arms competition is the bitter political relationship between India and Pakistan, which has been pathological since the moment they gained their independence from the British in August 1947. Leading up to, during, and after the partition of territory in Punjab and Bengal, communal conflict raged between Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. Half a million to a million people are believed to have been killed during the migration of Hindus and Sikhs into the new India and Muslims into the new Pakistan. Approximately 12 million people crossed the newly drawn borders.⁸ Soon thereafter, the two sides fought their first war, over the disputed former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, between October 1947 and January 1949. Kashmir’s contested status was also the casus belli in the 1965 India-Pakistan war, and the territory was the scene of additional fighting during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, which resulted in the creation of the new state of Bangladesh out of what had previously been East Pakistan. The 1971 war was officially brought to an end by the Simla Agreement of 1972, in which India and Pakistan pledged to resolve the Kashmir dispute peacefully and bilaterally—in other words, not to attempt to alter the territory’s status through the use of military force.

At the very end of the 1980s, an Islamist insurgency erupted on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LOC ) dividing Kashmir. Although the insurgents’ grievances were initially rooted in Indian domestic politics, more specifically the chronic meddling of Indian governments in Kashmiri state politics, Pakistan soon stepped in with weapons, other material resources, training, and sanctuary for thousands of militants who were now waging a subconventional campaign of armed violence against the Indian security forces, which soon numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A serious Indo-Pakistani crisis flared up over Kashmir in early 1990, bringing the two sides to the brink of war before their nascent nuclear capabilities and U.S. diplomacy caused them to back away from military conflict.⁹ The Pakistan-supported insurgency in Indian Kashmir has continued in fits and starts for the last three decades, with regular eruptions of violence between the insurgents and the government, and between Indian and Pakistani military forces across the LOC. An estimated 50,000 people have died in the fighting.¹⁰ The most serious India-Pakistan battles took place during the 1999 conflict near Kargil, initiated by the Pakistan Army, and these are analyzed in Chaps. 2 and 3.

In addition to stoking the violence in Kashmir, Islamabad has also supported mass-casualty terrorist attacks in India proper, the most spectacular of which were the December 2001 assault on the Parliament complex in New Delhi and the multi-day Mumbai massacre of November 2008, both of which set off crises that will be covered in Chaps. 2 and 3. India has been led since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (“Indian People’s Party”—BJP) has pursued a more muscular foreign policy and national security agenda than that of the Congress Party it succeeded. In September 2016, after a deadly cross-LOC attack on an Indian military encampment near the Kashmiri town of Uri, Modi ordered so-called surgical strikes against what the Indian government said were terrorist “launch pads.” While New Delhi had secretly carried out such small-scale strikes before, the fact that the government publicized India’s retaliation in 2016 fed a narrative suggesting that Modi’s hawkish bent might portend a more forceful, militarized Indian response to a future Pakistani subconventional provocation. This indeed proved to be the case after Jaish-e-Mohammed’s (JeM’s) deadly February 2019 suicide bombing in Pulwama. India’s retaliatory airstrikes in Balakot marked the first time since the 1971 Bangladesh war that the IAF had carried out attacks against undisputed, sovereign Pakistani territory. They also represented a significant escalation of firepower over the 2016 cross-LOC raids undertaken by Indian special forces after the Uri attack. With New Delhi having so demonstrably upped the ante, Islamabad had little choice but to follow suit with Pakistan’s own airstrikes, but limited them to Indian Kashmir. Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (“Pakistan Movement for Justice”—PTI) had been in power for less than a year sin...