The Insanity Of Nuclear War Thinking
The Nuclear Decision
By Alan Johnstone
30 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org
“If the adversary feels that you are
unpredictable, even rash, he will be deterred from pressing you too far.
The odds that he will fold increase greatly, and the unpredictable
president will win another hand.” – Richard Nixon
The UK-based military think-tank has produced a report (1) that uses many declassified documents, testimonies and interviews suggests that the
world has, indeed, been lucky avoiding nuclear catastrophe, given the
number of instances in which nuclear weapons were nearly used
inadvertently as a result of miscalculation or error.
Historical cases of war resulting from misunderstanding demonstrate the
importance of the ‘human judgment factor’ in decision-making. The report
describes the history of the Indian-Pakistan nuclear stand-offs,
the latest being the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks which risked nuclear
escalation through a possible rapid conventional response by India and a
potential nuclear response by Pakistan.
India maintains civilian control over its
nuclear weapons, routinely separates its warheads and missiles, and has
an official policy of no first use. Its strategic posture evolved
significantly as a result of the 1999 and 2002 incidents. After the
2001–02 crisis, it developed a rapid response conventional posture
(dubbed the ‘Cold Start’ doctrine).
India’s military doctrine centres on the use of conventional military
force in order to gain territory as quickly as possible, which might be
used later as potential leverage in demanding concessions from the
Pakistani government. A cable from US Ambassador to India Tim Roemer,
entitled ‘A Mixture of Myth and Reality’, expressed doubts that India’s
conventional force posture would ever be used beyond the purpose of
deterrence owing to operational and logistical complications, and
referred to this type of military planning as rolling “the nuclear dice”.
India particularly relies on a
significant degree of unpredictability in the deployment of eight
specialized divisions known as Integrated Battle Groups (IBG)– including
infantry and artillery units – in Pakistan’s territory to strike at its
military’s cohesion. In response, Pakistan has fielded the nuclear-tipped short-range Nasr missile, thus introducing tactical nuclear weapons into an already charged atmosphere.
Pakistan’s nuclear command-and-control
structure is officially divided between three authorities. The first is
the National Command Authority, which is chaired by the prime minister.
The second is the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), a body comprising
government and military representatives set up as the result of
command-and-control reforms between 1999 and 2001. The third is
Strategic Forces Command, comprised of the military. The storage status of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
during peacetime has not been explicitly clarified, but it is widely
believed that the SPD exercises heightened vigilance against the
possibility that they could go missing. Reports indicate that Pakistan does separate its warheads from its delivery systems,
and that the warheads themselves are separated by ‘isolating the
fissile “core” or trigger from the weapon and storing it elsewhere’.
While Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are therefore not susceptible to being
used while on a hair-trigger alert, the warhead’s components are
nevertheless stored at military bases and can be put together at short
notice. The disputed nature of command and control over Pakistan’s
military raises questions regarding the stability of its nuclear forces
in a context where conventional confrontations can potentially escalate
without authorization from the civilian leadership. The Chatham House
authors describe the near use of nuclear weapons in the confrontations
between India and Pakistan.
Brasstacks
Brasstacks, was an Indian military
exercise that took place in 1986–87 and involved and involved 400,000
Indian troops within 100 miles of the Rajasthan border with Pakistan,
which responded with its own exercises, Flying Horse and Sledgehammer.
The Indian military leadership spent two weeks debating how to respond
before passing on news of the escalation to newly elected Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi. On 18 January 1987, the US ambassador intervened
by meeting with the Indian minister of state for defence and securing an
agreement to resolve the crisis, a message he subsequently passed to
Pakistani officials. Only then did India and Pakistan activate the
crisis hotline. Brasstacks demonstrated miscommunication and
misperception on both sides. India, for example, did not fully notify
Pakistan of the exercise beforehand. In addition, Pakistan claims that
Gandhi earlier agreed that Brasstacks should be reviewed and provided
vague assurances. However, the exercise continued as planned and the
situation escalated further, possibly because Gandhi knew so little
about it.
Leading the Operation Brasstacks was
Indian Chief of Army Staff General K. Sundarji, and there is reason to
believe he intentionally escalated the crisis in the hope of provoking
Pakistan into a military confrontation that would allow India to take
out Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear weapons programme. The Pakistani
intelligence service, which, rightly or wrongly, interpreted Brasstacks
as a test of will with the potential for confrontation and chose to
reciprocate with its own military exercises. Shortly afterwards the
nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan acknowledged the existence of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
Kargil Crisis
The 1999 Kargil crisis arose out of a
conventional military conflict between India and Pakistan over the
disputed territory of Kashmir. In May 1999, Pakistani troops and
pro-Pakistani militants were spotted by Indian intelligence in the
Kargil region of Kashmir on the Indian side of the Line of Control
(LoC). The Indian Air Force bombed Pakistani bases along the LoC in
Kargil.
The incident soon escalated into a military confrontation involving the threat to use nuclear weapons.
In the midst of the crisis, Pakistan moved its nuclear weapons from
storage. At the end of May, Shamshad Ahmad, Pakistan’s foreign
secretary, declared that Pakistan would “not hesitate to use any weapon in its arsenal to protect its territorial integrity”.
The conflict ended thanks to the
successful mediation of US President Bill Clinton, who was able to
persuade Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to withdraw his forces
from the Indian side of the LoC in Kargil. It then emerged how little
Sharif knew of the Kargil incursion relative to the head of the
military, General Musharraf. A government minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali
Khan, later commented that Pakistan’s army “very consciously only
provided [Sharif] an outline of the exercise in which the focus was
totally different … [It] did not involve the armed forces or crossing
the [Line of Control].”
Clinton explicitly asked Sharif if he was
aware of how “advanced the threat of nuclear war really was” and
whether he knew that Pakistan’s military had begun preparing its nuclear
arsenal. Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif explained “I was taken
aback by this revelation because I knew nothing about it. The American
President further told me during the meeting that the nuclear warheads
have been moved so that these could be used against India.”
Bruce Riedel, an adviser to Clinton at
the time of the Kargil incident, implied that Sharif was under
considerable pressure to reach a solution which would allow Pakistan to
save face.
Sharif feared that otherwise
“fundamentalists would move against him and this meeting would be his
last with Clinton”. Furthermore, Sharif’s denial that he gave the order
to prepare Pakistan’s missile forces raised concerns about the nature of
military and civilian control at the time of the Kargil conflict.
The Kashmir Again
In 2001 and 2002, India and Pakistan went
into a renewed cycle of hostility as a result of the unresolved Kashmir
conflict and additional provocations. For 10 months, between December
2001 and October 2002, India and Pakistan kept one million soldiers in a
state of high readiness. India had rejected the first use of nuclear
weapons, but President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan refused to do the
same and stated that the “possession of nuclear weapons by any state
obviously implies they will be used under some circumstances”.
The Chatham House report describes:
India assumed that Pakistan would not
resort to nuclear use if it was involved in a limited conventional war,
as the United States would intervene early before the crisis escalated
to that level. India’s defence minister maintained that Pakistan would
eventually refrain from a nuclear strike because a nuclear exchange
would ‘destroy’ Pakistan while India would ‘win’ and lose ‘only a part
of its population’.
The conflict was resolved when US Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage made public a pledge by Musharraf to
move against specific terrorist groups (such as Lashkar-e-Taiba) and
seek negotiations with India. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was also
involved in the talks with the Pakistani side to defuse the nuclear
dimension of the crisis. “All this chatter about nuclear weapons is very
interesting, but let’s talk general-to-general,’ Powell on one occasion
maintained in a conversation with the Pakistani military leadership.
“You know and I know that you can’t possibly use nuclear weapons […]
It’s really an existential weapon that has not been used since 1945. So
stop scaring everyone.”
One socialist journal at the time wrote
“What a barbaric age we live in. Still, borders are to be fought over.
Still, gods to be avenged and, still, that age-old cursed prize – profit
– to be sought in every stinking orifice. And were the mushroom clouds
to start rising over Islamabad and New Delhi, western capitalists would
still ponder how they could cash in on this hell, this hell of their
system’s making.” (2)
Conclusion
India and Pakistan rely heavily on the
diplomatic mediation of third-party states, particularly the US, to
resolve their stand-offs and its presence in the region as “insurance
against escalation to war”. Yet the 2001–02 crisis highlighted that
“what-if”… is it possible in the next crisis, US diplomacy may fail to
prevent nuclear first use by Pakistan and/or nuclear retaliation by
India.
Decisions about nuclear use in many of these cases came down to only a handful of people.
Nuclear weapons require constant vigilance and caution. For as long as
nuclear weapons exist, the risk of an inadvertent, accidental or
deliberate detonation remains.
Alan Johnstone is a member of The Socialist Party Of Great Britain
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