NUCLEAR PAKISTAN AND NUCLEAR INDIA:

STABLE DETERRENT OR PROLIFERATION CHALLENGE?

George H. Quester

November 25, 1992
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The views expressed in this report are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of

the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the

U.S. Government. This report is approved for public release;

distribution unlimited.

*******

Comments pertaining to this publication are invited and may

be forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army

War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may

be conveyed by calling the Director or Research via commercial

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FOREWORD

Nuclear proliferation, a security issue which has

transcended the cold war, has been, and is, particularly

troublesome in South Asia. There, India and Pakistan, neighbors

with unresolved disputes since they were granted independence at

the end of World War II, are believed to have nuclear weapons

(although the leaders of both nations deny it) and are

intermittently engaged in conflict with each other.

Professor Quester has examined this unique nuclear

relationship, analyzing the attitudes and behavior of both

nations. He concludes with a paradox: both have "bombs in the

basement," if not in their respective military inventories, and

these weapons present serious dangers to the world simply because

of their destructive potential, even if their leaders have the

best intentions. On the other hand, Indian and Pakistani leaders

appear to have low levels of concern about each others' nuclear

(not conventional military) developments. It is possible to be

optimistic and conclude that the relationship is actually stable

and, like the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship of the cold war,

helps prevent war on the subcontinent, or to be cynical and

conclude that each regime cares more about the prestige of

membership in the nuclear club than the ominous threat posed

thereby against their populations.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish this

report as a contribution to understanding the challenges of

international security in the post-cold war era.

GARY L. GUERTNER

Acting Director

Strategic Studies Institute
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

GEORGE H. QUESTER is Chairman of the Department of Government and

Politics at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses

on defense policy and arms control and on U.S. foreign policy. 

He is the author of numerous books and journal articles on

international politics and international security.
NUCLEAR PAKISTAN AND NUCLEAR INDIA:

STABLE DETERRENT OR PROLIFERATION CHALLENGE?

South Asia has settled into a worrisomely peculiar

relationship on the spread of nuclear weapons. Government

spokesmen for India and Pakistan have been saying seemingly

identical things in the comparison of their countries: “We know

that we don't have nuclear weapons; but we have to assume that

they have them.”

This emerges against a background where India, of course,

detonated what was officially described as a peaceful nuclear

explosive (PNE) in May of 1974--and has not detonated any such

explosives since, but nonetheless has been accumulating what

could be a significant amount of reprocessed plutonium. In the

same years, Pakistan, under Presidents Zulkifar Ali Bhutto and

Muhammed Zia ul-Haq, evaded the world's export restrictions and

worked hard to develop an ability to enrich uranium; none of this

was halted under Prime Minister Benacir Bhutto. Pakistan has not

detonated any nuclear explosives, but such detonations are hardly

needed anymore for any state to be reasonably certain that a bomb

will explode, and there are also rumors that the Chinese have

offered Pakistan advice on the design of a nuclear warhead.1

We are thus at a stage where each nation, in the absence of

international inspections and safeguards to assure anyone to the

contrary, may be accused of having nuclear weapons. Adversaries

may be inclined to worst-case assumptions where there is

ambiguity about one another's capabilities. The outside world,

including many nations which are adversaries to neither India nor

Pakistan, may similarly have to be inclined to be pessimistic

when so much is in doubt, and hence to conclude that both nations

must have nuclear weapons.

A possibility remains, of course, that Pakistan has in

effect been bluffing, that it has not really managed to enrich so

much uranium for bombs yet, and has merely been letting the

rumors circulate to get a deterrent impact or prestige for free.

It is also possible that India has used much of its plutonium (so

the Indian Atomic Energy Agency has indeed claimed), so that it

can not have a large inventory of nuclear weapons. As things

stand, the outside world can not verify this one way or the

other.

Some Paradoxical Layers of Optimism and Pessimism.

How much do the South Asian powers then live in fear of each

other on the nuclear front? How troubled are they by the lack of

verification and information? The answer is complicated, and

beset with paradoxes.

Because of the close historical ties between Pakistan and

India, and the ease with which a citizen of one country could
pass for the other, it is not so unthinkable that each side's

intelligence agencies may have penetrated the decision processes

of the other, i.e., on a scale comparable to the networks of

spies that passed between East and West Germany, far exceeding

what Moscow burrowed into Washington or vice versa. The Western

military attaches and ambassadors in the South Asian capitals

have often come away impressed with the details each knows about

the plans and intentions of the other. In one situation, we would

have called this espionage, but in another it would be

“verification by national technical means,” for it ought to leave

each side less required to go to worst-case assumptions, by

having more real information.

Yet, when it comes to their interpretation of the details of

what they learn about each other, both the Indians and Pakistanis

also draw criticisms from foreign embassies for tending to leap

to hostile and suspicious theories, typically seeing more

deviousness and antagonism in their adversary than their friends

in the outside world would have found reasonable. Thus, as we

noted at the outset, each side tends to tell foreigners that the

other side must have nuclear weapons. Only a few officials in

each capital lean occasionally in the opposite direction, noting

instead that newspaper accounts tend to be sensational and

pessimistic, or noting that the other side might be having

difficulties making maximum use of the fissionable material

production capacities attributed to it.

Yet, we then rise to a third level of each side's

“intelligence” about the other, where the bulk of officialdom

moves again to a surprisingly optimistic note, namely that it is

highly unlikely that the other side would ever dare or choose to

use its nuclear warheads. Indians voice the same phrases about

Pakistanis here that Pakistanis voice about Indians, asserting

that it is arrogant of outside powers to fear that nuclear

warheads are any more likely to be used between India and

Pakistan than between France and Britain, or between the United

States and China or formerly the USSR. Is this a seriously held

conclusion, reflecting again some special channels by which each

is privy to the thinking of the other, or some special

understanding between “brother South Asians”?

When asked to indicate which of the opposing side's

intentions and momentums are the most bothersome, each side's

spokesmen have been much more likely to talk about F-l6s and

AWACS, or tanks or aircraft carriers, or about suspected

assistance to Sikh or Sind separatists, than about the possible

accumulation of nuclear warheads.

How can we explain a continuing tendency to assume the worst

about the adversary's capabilities on the nuclear front, and the

best about his intentions? There are at least three possible

explanations for this bizarre agreement between what most people

have been saying in Islamabad and in New Delhi. First, each side

may simply be quite mistaken, not facing up to the enormity of
the destruction that could be imposed by nuclear weapons on

millions of helpless people, and not understanding all the many

ways such weapons could come into use. Or second, it is possible

that both sides are basically bluffing here, pretending to be

unconcerned, when they are actually deeply afraid of what the

other might do with such weapons, pretending because this is

important to the contest of political wills that is in progress,

pretending also because neither wants to give satisfaction to the

superpowers and other outsiders who have seemed so paternalistic

in counselling South Asia to avoid nuclear weapons.

Or third, each side could indeed be seeing something that

outsiders can not really see, a special relationship between what

were formally portions of British India, a relationship that is

more love/hate than simply hate, a relationship of sophistication

and identification that leaves each somehow reassured that

nuclear proliferation would not lead to nuclear war.

There are some peculiar limits, in any event, to the ability

of either side to make nuclear threats in the South Asian

context. Virtually every Indian city has a sizable minority

population of Muslims. It would hence be difficult for Pakistan,

given its commitment to Islamic peoples and culture, to target

any of such cities with the prospect of killing so many of the

very people it has always claimed to represent. Moreover, the

winds blow from west to east, and it will be similarly difficult

for India to impose nuclear punishment on any targets in Pakistan

without suffering a deadly dose of radioactive fallout as the

aftermath. Most significantly, these are considerations

introduced into discussions by Pakistanis and Indians themselves,

rather than being brought in by outsiders.

Such factors can be interpreted again as a part of a special

South Asian insurance against capricious use of nuclear weapons,

perhaps against all such use. Yet, if kinships and winds (and

locations of nuclear power plants, to be discussed more

extensively below) make nuclear threats so much more empty for

this arena, why then the simultaneous move toward such weapons?

Is it all a matter of prestige?

The Pakistani Non-Proliferation Proposals.

Pakistan had put forward as many as six different proposals

under President Zia that the United States and the Soviet Union,

and the many other outside powers concerned with heading off

nuclear proliferation, would have welcomed, including having each

South Asian state sign the NPT, or otherwise accept full-scope

IAEA inspections.2

 All were declined by India, on various

arguments, some of which seem disingenuous and far-fetched,

others of which may have more plausibility.3

As part of all the paradoxes and ambiguities we are sorting

out here, one might also ask whether the Pakistanis would really
have welcomed an Indian acceptance of such proposals, or whether

they were instead bluffing about their endorsement of such

non-proliferation arrangements, confident that India would reject

them. (The analogy to President Reagan's origination of the “zero

option” INF proposal, on the assumption that the Soviets would

probably reject it, is obvious.) It might have been a

fascinatingly clever ploy for the Indians suddenly to accept one

or another of the Zia suggestions, and thus to see Pakistan lose

support in America and elsewhere, as it had to renege on its own

proposals. But (again with the INF analogy in mind), if India had

accepted the Pakistani proposals, Pakistan might then have felt

trapped, and both sides might then have actually been trapped.

The Minor Issue of Delivery Systems.

It has to be stressed that our attention should be directed

here to nuclear warheads, and not to the delivery systems needed

to carry such warheads. The distances to most of the plausible

targets in the confrontation between India and Pakistan are

short, and the array of conventional delivery systems that can

also carry nuclear weapons is more than sufficient to put cities

like Rawalpindi and Lahore and Bombay and New Delhi at risk. For

some very elegant discussions of possible counterforce attacks,

whereby either side would try to disarm the nuclear forces of the

other, rather than to direct countervalue attacks against cities,

the additions of missiles or of higher capability aircraft

delivery systems might become more relevant.

But the hard fact for South Asia is the same as for the

Middle East: the crowding of populations into urban areas has

packaged up a great number of easily attacked targets. One would

hardly want to be visiting one of the cities mentioned if a

nuclear war had begun, somehow counting on any defects of

delivery systems as an assurance against nuclear devastation. The

current world concern about Indian tests of missile systems, or a

possible Pakistani acquisition of similar systems, is thus

understandable, but may be relatively misplaced.

Some Mutually Understood Advantages of Avoiding Detonations.

Assessing what each state's general population thinks about

the nuclear equation is not so simple. When the Indian government

proclaims that “India does not have nuclear weapons,” some voters

and some opposition politicians seize on this to protest that

India is being left defenseless in the face of Pakistani or

Chinese threats. Yet the evidence is that very many Indians are

indeed quite sophisticated about all this, enough to be assuming

that their country is only a screw-driver turn away from a

double-digit nuclear arsenal “in the basement,” and thus to be

content and pleased.4

The Pakistani public had also, under President Zia and 

under Prime Minister Benacir Bhutto, been given its governments'
official line that no nuclear weapons are being sought, and

responded with occasional signs of protest at this--in face of

the Indian threat, but with lots of knowing winks--at the

prospect that there are also indeed Pakistani bombs close to

assembly.

Both societies thus seem to have a desire for bombs, but

each, despite the burdens of illiteracy and poverty, also

displays a fair amount of sophistication on how a bomb in the

basement might thus offer most of the advantages of an overt

nuclear stockpile, without incurring its costs.

Interviews with officials in Islamabad demonstrate how well

the Pakistani government understands the disadvantages of either

detonating a device or proclaiming a weapons program, as compared

with a policy of simply leaving some ambiguity in place. In

effect, the Pakistanis have been emulating the Israeli pattern of

the past two decades, rather than the Indian action of 1974, even

though this would naturally enough be a comparison they would

resent.

Demonstrating that the Indian government understands the

advantages of a policy of avoiding detonations is much more

obvious and easy: India has not detonated any nuclear explosions

since the one in 1974, thereby setting the world's record for

waiting until the second detonation. Every other entrant into the

nuclear weapons club, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain,

France and China, proceeded to follow the first detonation with

many more.

One has indeed heard Pakistani officials enunciating a

low-key endorsement of a mutual avoidance of testing, as they

claim positive results for the course they have pursued in making

their country able to explode a nuclear device. “By our policy,

we are keeping the Indians from resuming testing.”

One also has heard the case made, in both India and

Pakistan, that India lost more, politically and otherwise, than

it gained when it detonated a bomb in 1974. The enhancement of

international prestige was no longer what it had been for China a

decade earlier in 1964, as some of the novelty had worn off, and

as the world no longer regarded mastering the physics of nuclear

explosions as such a great accomplishment. The resentment of the

outside world, not just of the nuclear-weapons states, but also

of a very large number of Third World states and other

non-weapons states, was manifest. The reductions in economic aid

to India were tangible, and the particular loss of aid to India's

nuclear program was a serious setback for whatever New Delhi had

intended to do in nonmilitary nuclear endeavors.

Is There Any Meaning In “Weaponizing”?

If both the South Asian states are astute enough to see this

reasoning, and thus to avoid an overt announcement of a nuclear
weapons program, as well as avoiding any more detonations even of

a “peaceful nuclear explosive,” how much importance should anyone

attach to what is now another much-discussed threshold

distinction, the various steps that are often cited as

“weaponizing”?

Many of us would be skeptical and cynical as to whether this

distinction means anything at all. To repeat, the Indian PNE was

a bomb for all practical purposes, with various people around New

Delhi in 1974 indeed being witty in referring to it as “the

peaceful bomb.”

Yet the Indian government sticks by its claims that “we have

no bombs”; and the outside world (amazingly to this author) has

in the past decade again begun posing a question to itself on

“whether India will decide to get bombs,” if Pakistan or China or

some other state does this or that, i.e., whether New Delhi will

“weaponize” its nuclear program. Apart from just coming out with

an open statement that “we have bombs,” making the weapons status

declared and overt, what else could possibly be involved here?

The world assumes, and the South Asian publics assume, in

the absence of inspection-supplied evidence to the contrary, that

India may have between 25 and 75 nuclear weapons, drawn from the

reprocessed plutonium at its disposal, and that Pakistan may now

have three or four such weapons, made with the uranium it has

been enriching.5

 Such bombs would indeed be typically kept

slightly disassembled, for elementary reasons of safety. If such

bombs were thus never quite completed, but were always simply a

few turns of the screw away, this might indeed help the national

leaders of either India or Pakistan look an American ambassador

in the eye while saying “I can assure you that we have no bombs.”

Perhaps they could even pass a lie-detector test because of this

useful verbal quibble. But surely this can not be what any

outside analyst would be defining as “weaponizing,” for this

would be a very slender reed indeed, as the bombs could be

assembled for use in a matter of days or hours, rather than weeks

or months or years.

What else could “weaponizing” then be referring to?

Attention is sometimes directed to whether aircraft are being

adapted to carry nuclear weapons, with allegations that F-l6s

have to be given special racks or hard-points for this mission.

But such adaptations may hardly be required any more, for no

one's first nuclear weapons are today going to be as crude and

huge as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The device

detonated by the Indians in 1974, or its Pakistani equivalent,

could be transported on most fighter-bombers or air transports,

to devastate the cities of South Asia.

If one wished to make the “weaponizing” distinction more

meaningful, the definition should perhaps instead shift to

training. There is (happily) as yet no evidence that either the

Indian or the Pakistani militaries are being trained in the
techniques of using nuclear weapons, or even in the responses

that would be required if the other side uses nuclear weapons.

Diplomats in New Delhi thus draw some reassurance from an

assumption that the teams that would deliver Indian nuclear

weapons to targets in Pakistan (or in China or anywhere else) are

not yet being assembled, and that the standard operating

procedures are not being developed.

Yet this kind of restraint is more meaningful for some

contingencies than for others. It is an assurance that neither

South Asian power is planning to introduce nuclear weapons on a

first-strike basis early in any war. One does not nuclearize a

conventional war, in hopes of winning the victories that

otherwise would go to the other side, without first exercising

the command and control arrangements that will be required,

without first carefully training one's troops in the targets to

be attacked, and in the precautions to be taken against matching

responses from the other side.

Yet this distinction indeed means nothing for the more basic

nuclear deterrence role for which nuclear warheads are

classically intended. If China or any other state had launched a

nuclear attack on an Indian city over the past decade, what does

anyone in the world expect that the Indian government would have

done with the expertise it has accumulated on “peaceful nuclear

explosives”? Almost certainly, it would have slapped some bombs

together and sent some small group of its air force on a

desperate mission of revenge. Can anyone really believe the

opposite? And would not the same be true for Pakistani responses,

regardless of how little “weaponizing” had been done, if India or

anyone else today launched a nuclear attack against a Pakistani

city? Similarly, if Pakistan were threatened with a total

conventional defeat, with the elimination of its entire

independence and raison d'etre, would not any Islamabad regime

see itself in a position of “use them or lose them”? And the

same, of course, in the somewhat unimaginable situation of India

suffering a total conventional military defeat and being “pushed

into the sea.”

The Western world has at times waxed enthusiastically about

various battlefield applications of nuclear weapons, applications

about which we would all be wise to be skeptical. The evidence is

clear that neither India nor Pakistan have weaponized in the

sense of planning for, or becoming enthusiastic about, such uses

of nuclear weapons. So far, all well and good.

But there are also the more basic applications of nuclear

weapons that we have just listed, uses that are not so silly or

ill-advised, namely deterring someone else's use of such weapons

by the threat of a matching response, and deterring someone

else's dream of a total victory in a conventional attack. For

these basic purposes, much less advance training and preparation

of delivery systems are needed. For these purposes, India and

Pakistan have almost surely already “weaponized,” by any
meaningful sense of the term.

In short, nuclear weapons already exist, with the

weaponizing distinction being logically meaningless, for the two

most standard situations of nuclear deterrence: the prevention of

a use of such weapons by an adversary and the prevention of a

total conventional defeat. For these purposes, it would suffice

if a very small team of air force and nuclear program officials

had coordinated on the location of the bombs in the basement,

with the “basement” always being within easy reach of an

airfield. Our model might be the small number of U.S. Army Air

Force officers in 1945 who were privy to the Manhattan Project,

the few on the island of Tinian who actually knew that a B-29 was

taking off with an atomic bomb on board.

Outsiders sometimes speculate about whether such a

contingency-team conspiracy, with its rudimentary basic training

and coordinating and planning, could be carried off in an open

society like India without anyone knowing about it. Given how

rumors fly, one might have expected the press to detect such

preparations by now if they were occurring (one might almost have

expected the press to invent such preparations, whether or not

they were occurring). The absence of reports of even this very

small degree of “weaponizing” might thus be viewed by some as a

reassurance of some strong restraints at work in New Delhi and

Islamabad.

Yet it might be all too easy to erode any such reassurance,

on several lines of argument. A great deal of time has passed

since India crossed the line with a detonation in 1974. From 1974

to 1992 is equivalent to the period from 1945 to 1963, a span in

which the U.S. nuclear program expanded fantastically. Can one

really believe that the Indians who exploded a PNE in 1974 have

avoided all the relevant speculation and planning over the

ensuing years, giving no thought to how many such explosive

warheads they could assemble if they had to, how the design could

be simplified or improved, where the components are to be kept

stored, near what delivery systems, etc.? If one imputed even a

modicum of patriotism to such officials and military officers,

moreover, would we not regard it as their elementary duty to

their country to have mulled over how India would orchestrate its

nuclear retaliation for anyone else's nuclear attack?

Some Gains And Costs In Hypocrisy.

The current situation could thus be much better, and it

could be worse. The statements on each side may amount to

hypocritical euphemisms, but they are useful nonetheless, when

they serve as substitutes for nuclear detonations (or substitutes

for those more honest and explicit statements of weapons

intentions which drive an adversary to move still further along).

The issue has often been raised on whether the United States
should continue to go along with such obfuscation and hypocrisy,

as when the President has to certify to Congress that Pakistan

does not yet have a bomb. If truth and honesty are the only

considerations, such certifications have become very difficult,

for all the reasons noted. If moderating the arms race, and

reducing the likelihood or intensity of war in South Asia are

also important, however, it might well make sense to go along

with the posturing here.

As a signal between the sides, the South Asian hypocrisy

indeed may play one more positive role. India's claim that its

projects to date have been “peaceful” and “not a weapon,” matched

by Pakistani statements of a similar stripe, at the very least

amount to a no-first-use pledge (even if neither side was aware

of this logic at the outset). If I assert that my explosives are

not bombs, at the minimum this keeps me from threatening to use

such explosives in any war. All a no-first-use pledge really is,

of course, is the avoidance of threats of such first-use, the

avoidance of the verbal posturings that make more believable an

escalation from conventional war to nuclear war. (This hardly

amounts to an assurance of no use at all, however. To repeat,

would India not use its PNEs as bombs if someone else had used

nuclear weapons first against India? Would Pakistan not use its

peaceful nuclear program to get even, if anyone so attacked

Pakistan?)

But the case against such euphemisms and ambiguities has

also now been articulated well by a number of Israeli scholars

for their own country's situation, arguing that clear thinking

and public debate about national strategy are made too difficult

when such veils are maintained.6

 Perhaps, as part of not

“weaponizing,” neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis are thus

thinking through enough of what they would do with nuclear

weapons if they were ever to come to use them. Perhaps not enough

thought is being given to the contingencies that may arise in the

future, and to what the proper responses would be. Perhaps

politicians are also too free, in this kind of ambiguous

situation, to do what they find expedient--to influencing

election outcomes for instance--without referring to the real

preferences and needs of the electorate at large.

Fears of Preemptive Counterforce Strikes.

Many of our concerns about nuclear proliferation in this

region have stemmed from fears of preemption, from the

possibility that one country would attempt to eliminate the

nuclear capacities of the other in some daring “counterforce”

attack. Ever since the first discovery of the Pakistani uranium

enrichment facility at Kahuta (located bizarrely close to the

Indian frontier), or certainly at least since the Israeli attack

on the Iraqi reactors at Ossirak, there has been speculation

about the possibilities of such an Indian attack on the Pakistani

facilities.
How real have such risks been? In a way, these risks are

inherent in any relationship of nuclear deterrence. Such

deterrence depends on each side being able to inflict

countervalue retaliation on the population centers of its

adversary. But such deterrence would then lapse whenever a

counterforce first-strike can be executed so expertly that it

would preclude all of the countervalue second-strike.

Yet, to repeat, if the scenarios of such an Indian strike

are to be taken so seriously, why was there not more concern

about such a Chinese attack on the Indian facilities? China did

not race to attack the Indian facilities, and the Indians did not

race to expand their nuclear force in a seeming fear of such a

Chinese attack. If the Indian protestations of peaceful intent

since 1974 can be taken seriously, they are at least supported in

that there was no urgent and rapid move to a full-fledged

strategic nuclear force in the wake of India's first detonation.

The Chinese-Indian experience is encouraging, suggesting

that the power of world opinion, or more realistically the

presence of other nuclear powers in the world, precludes the

“nth” nuclear weapons state from preemptively attacking an

erstwhile “nth plus one.” China was kept from ever cashing in on

its nuclear monopoly viz-a-viz India by an obvious factor: it did

not have a nuclear monopoly against the rest of the world,

especially against the United States and the Soviet Union.

Yet the Israeli attack on Iraq amounts to evidence in a more

worrisome direction, suggesting (even if we do not take Menachem

Begin's explanations of that Israeli air attack entirely at face

value) that we can not totally discount such preemptive

counterforce moves.

As another sign that such thoughts are never totally out of

mind, the reaction of the residents of Rawalpindi and Islamabad

was virtually unanimous when the ammunition dump exploded early

in 1988--that this must be an Indian or Israeli attack on Kahuta.

As noted earlier, the high point of such fears and tensions and

apprehensions may now be behind us. Yet the years since the

Ossirak attack of 1981 have seen repeated rumors of Indian plans

for such an attack, or of Israeli plans for such an attack, or of

Israeli proposals to the Indians that there be some sort of joint

attack. All of them unconfirmable, the rumors include allegations

that the Israelis have been offering the Indian government

intelligence data on the nature and status of the Kahuta

facility, and have been urging that the Indian Air Force attack

“before it is too late.”

There are rumors also that some files were somehow stolen

from Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's office, and then later

recovered, with one of the files being labelled “Kahuta attack.”

Given the inherent nature of staff preparations and contingency

planning in any of the militaries around the world, it would be
amazing if no such attack has ever been analyzed or contemplated

in New Delhi, for the patriotic duty of any staff officer is to

consider all the options. The development of contingency plans

and options thus hardly proves that such an operation was being

considered seriously, anymore than the hundreds of other “war

plans” that get designed around the world.

Why indeed did the Pakistanis locate their facility so close

to the Indian border, barely some 40 miles away, a matter of

minutes or seconds of flying time for a fighter-bomber, and an

easy mark for aerial reconnaissance? One hears suggestions that

the intent was to keep the facility further away from the Middle

East and from the prospects of Israeli (or other) air attack from

this direction. One also hears speculation that the intent was to

keep the facility close to the capital and hence under more

reliable central government control, less exposed to the

fissiparous tendencies that might infect the Sind or Baluchi or

Northwest Frontier regions. This would introduce the issues of

domestic command and control, a most serious problem with any

nuclear proliferation into such an unstable region, a problem

which we shall have to discuss more extensively and worrisomely

below.

As noted, the worst may indeed be over, as the prospect of a

“splendid first strike” eliminating every possible Pakistani

nuclear weapon becomes more difficult with each year that the

Pakistanis have been enriching uranium. Perhaps this was already

indicated by Prime Minister Gandhi's sudden 1985 offer to the

Pakistanis of an agreement to ban attacks on the nuclear

facilities of either country. Was this the definitive signal that

India had shelved any such plans and speculations, and was now

seeking to relieve any unnecessary tensions and apprehensions on

the Pakistani side?

The Vulnerability of Nuclear Power Plants.

Yet there was another kind of reason for India to offer such

an agreement, beyond assuring Pakistan that an Indian preemptive

attack was no longer being contemplated. The large reactors

constructed around India for the purposes of producing electrical

power may themselves be very vulnerable to a conventional air

attack, amid estimates that such an air raid could indeed produce

a countervalue disaster fully comparable to an outright nuclear

attack; while there would be no nuclear explosion and fireball,

the radioactivity released could dwarf what was expected at

Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, killing large numbers of people,

destroying food production, forcing mass evacuations and panics.

Some European analysts contemplating the same possibilities

for the nuclear reactors installed in Eastern and Western Europe

indeed minted the phrase “nuclear deterrence without nuclear

weapons,” arguing that the reactors in place in any particular

country achieved some of the same deterrent strategic impact as
an actual deployment of nuclear weapons.7

If any of this was real, it meant that India, in the very

process of committing itself to nuclear power production, had

already produced “nuclear weapons for Pakistan,” offering some of

the same second-strike options that we have been tracing to the

Pakistani acquisition of enriched uranium; Pakistan might not

even need its own atomic bombs, on this line of argument, since

it could effectively destroy Bombay by attacking the reactor at

Trombay, etc.

The 1971 war with Pakistan already saw Indian air defense

resources deployed to protect Indian nuclear facilities against

the inherent threat of a Pakistani air attack. There was no

Pakistani feint recorded against such targets, but the mere fact

of the reactors' vulnerability tied down some Indian resources

regardless of Pakistani moves.

Since India has much more of a nuclear power grid than

Pakistan, this creates a somewhat asymmetrical deterrence

mechanism in favor of the Pakistanis. As noted, the

meteorological fact that the winds normally blow from west to

east would also cause residual destruction to reach India after

any nuclear attack on Pakistan, or even after a conventional

attack on Kahuta or other Pakistani nuclear facilities.

In any event, all of this amounted to a powerful argument

for the Indian government not to attack Kahuta, for fear of the

Pakistani retaliation that would be directed against Indian

reactors. A policy of mutual restraint would indeed have made

sense here for both the South Asian states, regardless of whether

the tentative verbal 1985 agreement between Prime Minister Rajiv

Gandhi and President Zia had ever been spelled out in detail and

signed. The wording of such an Indo-Pakistan ban on attacks on

reactors was apparently very close to a final agreement even

before Zia's death, with the actual formalization being held back

by India because of the many reports of Pakistani assistance to

Sikh terrorists, reports which made the proclamation of such an

agreement politically inopportune. The occasion of Prime Minister

Benacir Bhutto's first meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, at the

Islamabad SAARC summit conference of December 1988, was then used

to proclaim the agreement.

While domestic support for Indian nuclear activities,

peaceful or otherwise, is overwhelming, a rudimentary antinuclear

movement also had been developing among intellectuals in the

country, a movement opposed to nuclear electrical power on

grounds of safety and ecological damage, and opposed to any

deliberate or inadvertent acquisitions of nuclear weapons. Such

sentiments were somewhat reinforced, of course, by the events at

Chernobyl, all the more since some of the new power reactors to

be installed in India were to be imported from the Soviet Union

(albeit of a design very different from Chernobyl). Yet the

pro-nuclear feeling among the Indian electorate is still much
stronger than the antinuclear, with Indian state governments

actually competing to be the next to be assigned such a power

reactor. Electricity is still in short supply in South Asia, and

many Indians have regarded the ecological outcries about Three

Mile Island and Chernobyl as false alarms, as someone “crying

wolf,” against the background of the opportunity costs when

poverty is prolonged by electrification being postponed.

Worries About Command and Control.

It is easy to outline the inherent drawbacks of nuclear

proliferation, simply by noting the conflicting demands of

assured retaliatory capability and of responsible and reliable

command and control. This is a dilemma which must inherently

beset Pakistan, but which also has to be a problem for India.

If Pakistan had ten atomic bombs, and if it were afraid of

some Indian counterforce attack intended to destroy this

stockpile, it would be wise to disperse the ten bombs, and the

aircraft to carry them, to ten different locations. But Pakistan

has also been beset by regional dissidence, and (even though the

military is predominantly recruited from the Punjab) by threats

of military coups, as one senior general might decide that

another had served too long in the role of national leadership,

or that civilians could not be trusted with power. Having the

nuclear weapons at remote locations would thus increase the

problems of command and control, in that they might fall into the

hands of someone defying the authority in Islamabad. Yet if that

authority were to try to avoid this by keeping all the bombs

close at hand, we would be back to our first problem again.

India continues to deny that it has nuclear weapons, and

somewhat downplays how much fissionable material it could have at

the moment, free of international safeguards, and free of other

materials so that it could be used to make bombs. Outside

estimates are higher than Indian government estimates on how many

bombs worth of plutonium there may be in India. In any event, the

Indian authorities have plans for amassing a sizable quantity of

reprocessed plutonium for use as fuel in breeder reactors. Would

India keep all of this fuel in one place, tempting Pakistan or

China, or anyone else, to attack with conventional or nuclear

weapons in hopes of eliminating the possibility of Indian nuclear

weapons by a single stroke? One hopes that the Indian government

would not be so foolish as to leave everything at one location.

India, with its democratic traditions, has had less reason

to fear having its domestic rivalries played out through the

threats of nuclear civil war. Yet this is also a country where a

Prime Minister was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. If

the Indian authorities decide to disperse their fissionable

materials to more than one or two locations, this would only be

prudential as an insurance against some Pakistani attempt at a

“splendid first strike”; yet it similarly again increases the
chances that some separatist or other form of terrorist activity

might come to control the makings of an atomic bomb.

India maintains tight security around its nuclear

facilities, which is consistent with bomb intentions, but surely

is consistent also with an elementary fear of Pakistani

conventional attack, and with an elementary fear of terrorism.

Indeed one would not expect or want to see lower levels of

security around genuinely peaceful reactors anywhere else in the

world.

Similarly, if the Pakistan Air Force remains under firm

command and control, but fears the power of the Indian Air Force,

might it in some future war or crisis be deployed westward to

bases around the Persian Gulf, as it was once before, in the war

of 1965? Would the most prized possession of such an air force,

its nuclear warheads, thus be deployed to Iran or Jordan or Saudi

Arabia? And what then would be the implications for who

controlled such weapons and determined their future use?

This leads us into all our worries about the “Islamic bomb”

phenomenon,8

 worries which may be very exaggerated but which

nonetheless are inescapable, simply because of the instabilities

and command and control concerns we have already had to note for

Pakistan.

The comments of officials in Islamabad have been fairly

reassuring that no light-hearted sharing of nuclear weapons with

Arab or other Islamic countries would ever be undertaken. Even if

Zulkifar Ali Bhutto wrote of “an Islamic bomb” (and there are now

allegations that this portion of his memoirs is an Indian

fabrication), his stress might rather have been on the Islamic

rather than on the bomb. Perhaps the mere fact that any Islamic

country had achieved such weapons would be a source for joy among

all Islamic countries, without bombs then actually having to be

shared with all such countries.

For what it is worth as reassurance, officials in Pakistan

are able to articulate quite fully the worries of others about

bombs slipping into the hands of various Middle Eastern states,

in a way that shows that such officials at least are not missing

the pitfalls of any such sharing.9 If there are Middle Eastern

states (perhaps Libya or Iraq or Iran) that would like nuclear

weapons, there are surely other Islamic countries that very much

do not want such states to get bombs, and these countries have

made their feelings known to the Pakistanis over the years as

well.

Pakistanis also show some awareness of the costs they would

suffer if nuclear proliferation were to become worldwide--if

dozens and dozens of countries were to duplicate what India and

Pakistan have done. At the least, there is a perception of the

advantages, in terms of lower stimulation to such open-ended

proliferation, of maintaining the more subtle and covert style
that has applied to date.

Optimistic or Pessimistic Conclusions?

How bad, therefore, is the nuclear situation we are

outlining here, if each side now rests at such a short time-lag

from bombs in the basement? After all is said and done, a very

strong case can yet be made that the subcontinent, and the rest

of the world, would be much better off if all of such South Asian

nuclear proliferation could be avoided, for there are simply too

many ways in which such nuclear weapons, once they have come into

existence, can still come into use, despite the plans and best

intentions of each side. And, above all, there is too much

destruction that such weapons can inflict.

 Defending their own nuclear program, Pakistanis point at

times to the pre-existing Indian program, noting that the number

of bombs that New Delhi might control has to be an order of

magnitude greater than what is possible, under any assumptions,

in Pakistan. Yet all of such discussions of “orders of magnitude”

are misleading, as any analysts of nuclear balances could explain

very easily. The comparison of the numbers of bombs on the two

sides, as has also been true for the confrontation between the

United States and the Soviet Union, has never been as important

as the ratio of one side's bombs to the other side's densely

packed cities, and very small nuclear arsenals can make a

decisive difference by this yardstick. The important shifts in

the situation have thus been two: at some point in the 1970s,

India developed the ability to devastate a number of Pakistani

cities; and at some point in the 1980s, Pakistan developed a

similar ability to destroy Indian cities.

To make another comparison, showing how much we already have

had to worry about in South Asia, the plausible stockpile of

Indian nuclear warheads for a number of years has been greater

than what the U.S. nuclear weapons total was in 1946 and 1947.

And, we must presume the Pakistani nuclear arsenal to be moving

into the same range.

But we are still stuck with some of our paradox of the

start. Most of each side's major political figures continue to

express very low levels of concern about the nuclear developments

on the other side, as if these were far less significant than

another purchase of tanks or fighter planes, or another round of

support for Sikh separatists.

When Americans or other outsiders thus stress their horror

at how the crowded cities of South Asia might suddenly suffer the

fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are described, with

Pakistanis and Indians typically using the very same words, as

“preaching,” as “patronizing” all of South Asia by

underestimating the maturity and rationality of its leaderships.

One hears statements about how much all South Asians are

brothers, amid reminders about how many families straddle the
partition lines of 1947, and with arguments that mutual assured

destruction can work just as well for South Asia as it has worked

for Central Europe, preventing war rather than making it more

horrible, actually perhaps preventing war by making it more

horrible.

Some Policy Implications.

As we compare the nuclear proliferation risks in Iraq and

Iran, or in the Koreas, with the parallel case in South Asia,

several important differences may emerge for U.S. policy. To

begin, India and Pakistan are further along in terms of getting

close to nuclear weapons, indeed in terms of how many bombs they

may already have. But, as noted throughout the review above,

India and Pakistan are also considerably further along in how

they discuss the nuances of mutual nuclear deterrence, and on how

they may limit what they aspire to do with nuclear weapons. Such

discussion in New Delhi and Islamabad is more than any mere

mirroring or copying of the Soviet-American dialogue. For

example, the Pakistani-Indian nuclear competition appears to be

dominated by a regionally strategic, bipolar relationship. 

Despite the often-quoted fears of an “Islamic bomb,” one looks in

vain for Pakistani references to extending deterrence to or

sharing technology with other Islamic states in the region. If

extended deterrence is not a component of Pakistani strategic

thinking, U.S. policy and strategy in the region might be spared

worrying about Pakistan as a regional proliferator of weapons of

mass destruction.

We at least need to hear out the arguments of South Asians.

 Have we outsiders all been missing something about the ways in

which Indians and Pakistanis can understand and trust each other,

on this one particular question of whether nuclear weapons, once

developed, will be used? If we are generous in our

interpretations of candor here, we might yet extract some strands

of optimism from the statements of the South Asians; if they are

truly even partially as unconcerned and reassured as they often

pretend, we could come away more reassured ourselves about

stability in the region.

If we are more skeptical, however, we may yet conclude that

this is just an obtuse posturing by two regimes which each have

cared more about the prestige of having attained nuclear weapons

than about the threat posed thereby against their populations.

ENDNOTES

1. For a reference to such rumors, see Leslie Gelb,

“Pakistan Links Peril U.S.-China Nuclear Pact,” The New York

Times, June 22, 1984.

2. See Neil Joeck, ed., Strategic Consequences of Nuclear

Proliferation in South Asia, London: Frank Cass, 1986.
3. A broader discussion of the merits of these arguments

can be found in Dieter Braun, “Pakistan,” in Harald Von Muller,

ed., A European Non-Proliferation Policy, Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1987, pp. 187-190.

4. Based on interviews in various Indian cities.

5. A comprehensive overview of the trends here can be found

in Leonard S. Spector and Jacqueline Smith, Nuclear Ambitions,

Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1990.

6. For example, Shai Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence,

New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

7. On the general role of peaceful nuclear power plants in

war situations, see Bennett Ramberg, Nuclear Power Plants as

Weapons for the Enemy, Berkeley: University of California Press,

1985.

8. Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney, The Islamic Bomb, New York: Times Books, 1981.

9. Interviews in Islamabad.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William A. Stofft

Commandant

*******

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Acting Director

Dr. Gary L. Guertner

Acting Director of Research

Dr. Thomas L. Wilborn

Author

Dr. George H. Quester

Editor

Mrs. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretary

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

******

Composition

Daniel B. Barnett