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S. Paul Kapur is Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the United States Naval War College.

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Dangerous Deterrent

Stanford University Press

Contents

1 The Problem of Proliferation..........................................................12 Militarized Behavior During the South Asian Proliferation Process.....................143 Territorial Preferences and Military Capabilities.....................................324 The Nonnuclear Period.................................................................645 The De Facto Nuclear Period...........................................................926 The Overt Nuclear Period..............................................................1157 Beyond South Asia.....................................................................1418 Dangerous Deterrent...................................................................169Appendix................................................................................185Notes...................................................................................193Bibliography............................................................................243Index...................................................................................253

Chapter One

In the hard-fought and often divisive United States presidential campaign of 2004, rivals George W. Bush and John F. Kerry found precious little common ground, particularly in the arena of foreign policy. However, in the midst of a televised debate, the two candidates nonetheless discovered a point upon which they agreed; both men argued forcefully that the global proliferation of nuclear weapons currently poses the gravest of all threats to U.S. security. Bush and Kerry were not alone in their views regarding proliferation's dangers. They echoed a chorus of other leading voices in the world community, which have characterized the spread of nuclear weapons as one of the foremost global security challenges of our time. As International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei put it, "If the world does not change course" to prevent continued nuclear weapons proliferation, "we risk self-destruction."

Despite such widespread concern, our understanding of nuclear proliferation's impact on the international security environment is limited. Predictions regarding nuclear proliferation's effects are based largely upon analyses of American and Soviet behavior during the Cold War, which may not apply to future nuclear rivalries elsewhere in the world. The spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia, where India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, therefore offers us an important opportunity for study. The Indo-Pakistani security competition has been bitter and enduring, with the two sides fighting four wars since independence in 1947 and waging a low-intensity conflict in the disputed territory of Kashmir since the late 1980s. The introduction of nuclear weapons into this antagonistic relationship enables us to investigate a number of important questions in a political and historical context different from that of the Cold War: Does nuclear proliferation cause ongoing security competitions to diminish or to intensify? Why does proliferation have these effects? And do these findings support or contradict the theories of nuclear deterrence that we derived from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry?

This book addresses these issues. Its findings are sobering, both as we assess the South Asian security environment and as we contemplate the possibility of future cases of nuclear proliferation. The study finds that nuclear weapons have significantly destabilized the subcontinent, due primarily to India's and Pakistan's territorial preferences and relative military capabilities. Specifically, proliferation has created strong incentives for conventional aggression by Pakistan because Pakistan is conventionally weak relative to India and is dissatisfied with the territorial status quo in Kashmir, the key issue of Indo-Pakistani contention. Aggressive Pakistani behavior has in turn triggered forceful Indian responses, which have further destabilized the subcontinent. Thus, this study finds that nuclear weapons have not only failed to prevent subnuclear conflict in South Asia, but they have actually made such conflict more likely.

Nuclear Proliferation: Background

Although nuclear weapons proliferation is a major subject of current international concern, the problem is by no means novel. Almost as soon as the United States acquired a nuclear capability, the U.S. government began to fear that its primary rival in the emerging Cold War would develop the weapons as well. The U.S. nuclear monopoly was the key to its military and diplomatic policy in the late 1940s. Militarily, atomic weapons enabled the United States to deter the Soviet Union from launching a conventional military attack on Western Europe. Diplomatically, the weapons gave the United States the confidence to pursue an assertive foreign policy without fear of a diplomatic crisis escalating to an armed confrontation with the Soviets. Although U.S. officials knew for some time before its 1949 atomic test that the Soviet Union would soon possess the bomb, the Soviets' eventual acquisition of a nuclear capability was jarring and called into question the fundamental assumptions under pinning American foreign policy. Dean Rusk believed that, "U.S. strategic plans now had to be reexamined. Indeed, the nation's entire foreign policy posture required a reappraisal."

The Soviets' acquisition of nuclear weapons did reduce American military and diplomatic leverage over the Soviet Union, but it did not ultimately result in a Soviet invasion of Western Europe or in the escalation of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic crises to the level of military confrontation. Nor did the subsequent nuclearization of Great Britain, France, and China during the 1950s and 1960s end in military or diplomatic disaster. Nonetheless, the United States and the other nuclear states were deeply concerned regarding the dangers of proliferation beyond their small group. They therefore sought to create an international nonproliferation regime to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons. The bedrock of this regime was the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Predicated on the belief that "the proliferation of nuclear weapons would seriously enhance the danger of nuclear war," the treaty required nonnuclear states not to receive, manufacture, or seek assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices.

Over the coming decades, some countries that had seriously considered pursuing a nuclear capability ultimately decided not to do so. Other states that had actually succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons capacities subsequently decided to dismantle them and accede to the nonproliferation regime. By 2000, a total of 187 states had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

A handful of other states, however, had steadfastly refused to foreclose the option of acquiring nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan were among this group reserving the right to develop a nuclear capacity, and by the 1980s, they had become the subject of intense international concern. The international community found the possibility of Indo-Pakistani proliferation particularly worrisome because of the two countries' violent history. Independent India and Pakistan had been born out of a bloody partition of British India in 1947, which saw the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people and the resettlement of 10 to 12 million. Since then, the countries had fought three wars, two of them over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Although the Kashmir issue had appeared to subside during the 1970s and the early 1980s, by 1989 it was once again a major source of tension, with a Pakistan-backed insurgency wracking Indian Kashmir, and India flooding the territory with hundreds of thousands of security forces in an attempt to crush the uprising. Thus, many feared that if India and Pakistan in fact acquired a nuclear weapons capability, the likelihood of a nuclear conflict in South Asia would be considerable. CIA Director James Woolsey, for example, argued in 1993 that "mutual Indian and Pakistani suspicions have fueled a nuclear arms race, increased the risk of conflict, and gravely increased the cost of war, if it should occur ... The arms race between India and Pakistan poses perhaps the most probable prospect for future use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons."

India's and Pakistan's nuclear programs dated back to their first decade of independence. Although the Indian government had established a Department of Atomic Research in 1954, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had publicly opposed the development of nuclear weapons. However, in the wake of their devastating loss in the 1962 Sino-Indian War and of China's 1964 nuclear test, the Indians began to reconsider their position. After Chinese threats to open a second front during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, unsuccessful attempts to secure a nuclear guarantee from the existing nuclear powers, and much internal debate, India abandoned its earlier antinuclear position. Choosing explicitly to keep its options open, it refused to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, anxious to augment India's enhanced regional position in the wake of the Bangladesh War and to improve her domestic political fortunes, subsequently authorized India's first nuclear test, which took the form of a fifteen-kiloton "peaceful nuclear explosion" (PNE) on May 18, 1974.

Pakistan's nuclear research program began in 1957 with the establishment of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Pakistan's nuclear efforts remained peacefully oriented through the mid-1960s with the country's leaders convinced that its conventional capabilities were sufficient to handle the Indian threat. This attitude began to change with Pakistan's failure to prevail in its 1965 war with India, the American decision to cut off the flow of U.S. arms to Pakistan in retaliation for that conflict, and growing evidence of India's conventional superiority. Pakistan refused to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Then in 1972, after its crushing loss to India in the Bangladesh War, Pakistan began a full-fledged quest to develop a nuclear weapons capacity.

India and Pakistan rejected the nuclear nonproliferation regime on both philosophical and strategic grounds. First, they believed that the regime created a world of inequality in which the existing nuclear powers enjoyed the political and military benefits that came with possession of the ultimate weapon, while other states had to reconcile themselves to second-class status. This double standard was particularly repugnant given India's and Pakistan's colonial history. Second, the nonproliferation regime failed to recognize the legitimate security concerns of nonnuclear states. Many nonnuclear countries were located in extremely dangerous regions and sorely needed nuclear weapons' deterrent effects to ensure their survival. Thus, in the Indian and Pakistani view, the nuclear nonproliferation regime was morally bankrupt and strategically unsound. As Indian Senior Advisor on Defense and Foreign Affairs Jaswant Singh argued,

The first 50 years of Indian independence reveal that the country's moralistic nuclear policy and restraint paid no measurable dividends, except resentment that India was being discriminated against ... If the permanent five continue to employ nuclear weapons as an international currency of force and power, why should India voluntarily devalue its own state power and national security? Why admonish India ... for not falling in line behind a new international agenda of discriminatory nonproliferation ... Nuclear weapons powers continue to have, but preach to the have-nots to have even less.

The Pakistani government maintained that "peace and security in South Asia cannot be promoted and sustained on the basis of discrimination and double standards. Those who advocate non-proliferation and disarmament must themselves be seen to practice this." "We will not accept commitments which would permanently jeopardise the ability of Pakistan to deter the nuclear and conventional threats which India poses to our security."

As their nuclear programs progressed, and particularly as India and Pakistan approached a de facto nuclear weapons capability during the 1980s,16 there was much speculation as to whether the two countries would actually exercise their nuclear options and achieve an overt capacity. Analysts worried that continuing Indo-Pakistani tensions were in fact likely to lead to such an outcome. As Leonard Spector argued, "If current trends persist ... there is reasonable cause for concern that momentum will build for integrating nuclear armaments into the armed forces of both nations and for conducting tests." Speculation on the subject continued during the 1990s after India and Pakistan had crossed the de facto nuclear threshold. Leading scholarly analysis during this period was extremely sanguine regarding the unlikelihood of overt Indo-Pakistani nuclearization. Devin Hagerty, for example, confidently predicted that India and Pakistan would almost certainly not seek to develop an overt nuclear capacity but rather would continue to maintain an "opaque" capability.

The events of spring 1998 put this discussion to rest. On May 11 and 13, 1998, India carried out a total of five nuclear explosions at Pokhran in the Rajasthan Desert. Despite intense international pressure not to respond, Pakistan followed on May 28 and 30 with a total of six nuclear detonations of its own in the Chegai Hills. There was some controversy as to the magnitude of the explosions. The Indian government claimed to have detonated a thermo nuclear device of 43 kilotons, a fission device of 12 kilotons, a 0.2 kiloton device on May 11, and devices of 0.2 and 0.6 kilotons on May 13. However, Western analysts were skeptical as to the size of the May 11 explosions and doubted whether the May 13 tests had even occurred. One leading American seismologist put the size of the May 11 detonations at a total of ten to fifteen kilotons. The Pakistanis, for their part, claimed that their five devices tested on May 28 totaled forty to forty-five kilotons and put the largest of these devices at thirty to thirty-five kilotons. American analysts estimated the total yield of the Pakistani tests to be in the range of nine to twelve kilotons. Despite this controversy, however, the incontrovertible fact was that India and Pakistan were now both nuclear weapons– capable states and possessed the ability to inflict enormous levels of destruction upon one another.

The Question

This study seeks to determine the effects that India's and Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons has had on the South Asian security environment. It focuses specifically on proliferation's impact on conventional military stability in the region. Clearly, nuclear proliferation has not led to nuclear war in South Asia. Less obvious, however, are nuclear proliferation's conventional effects. The issue of conventional stability is important both because conventional conflict can itself be extremely costly and because conventional conflict between nuclear powers can potentially escalate to the nuclear level. Thus, if nuclear proliferation has undermined South Asian conventional stability, it has rendered the region considerably less safe. If, by contrast, proliferation has enhanced South Asian conventional stability, the nuclearization of South Asia has substantially increased regional security. Nuclear weapons' impact on South Asian security in turn will have implications for broader academic debates over the effects of nuclear proliferation and for American security policy, which assumes that the spread of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world is extremely destabilizing and dangerous. This study therefore asks the following question: What impact has nuclear proliferation had on conventional military stability in South Asia?

Unfortunately, despite intense debate, neither the policy nor the scholarly communities have been able to shed much light on this question. As I demonstrate, South Asian proliferation has left both policymakers and scholars mired in a seemingly intractable debate over nuclear weapons' effects on the region.

The Debate over Proliferation's Effects on South Asian Security

The Policy Community

Indian and Pakistani policymakers have argued that the spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia would stabilize regional security. "If deterrence works in the West ... by what reasoning will it not work in India?" asked Jaswant Singh. "If the permanent five's possession of nuclear weapons increases security, why would India's possession of nuclear weapons be dangerous?" Pakistani Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad argued, "In South Asia, nuclear deterrence may ... usher in an era of durable peace between Pakistan and India, providing the requisite incentives for resolving all outstanding issues, especially Jammu and Kashmir."

The international community, by contrast, has long believed that proliferation would make South Asia less secure, and it reacted with considerable alarm to the 1998 Indo-Pakistani nuclear tests. For example, the United Nations Security Council, stating that "the proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction constitutes a threat to international peace and security," demanded that "India and Pakistan refrain from further nuclear tests." In addition, it called on them "immediately to stop their nuclear weapon development programs, to refrain from weaponization or from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons" and urged the two countries "to become parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty without delay and without conditions."

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Excerpted from Dangerous Deterrentby S. Paul Kapur Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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