Fragile strategic stability

In broad terms, nuclear stability refers to all those factors or conditions that work to ensure against the breakdown of nuclear deterrence. Henry A. Kissinger thus defined strategic stability as a condition “that requires maintaining strategic forces of sufficient size and composition that a first strike cannot reduce retaliation to a level acceptable to the aggressor…. We need a sufficient number of weapons to pose a threat to what potential aggressors value under every conceivable circumstance. We should avoid strategic analysis by mirror-imaging.”

Deterrence stability is crucial to war prevention between nuclear adversaries. As pointed out by Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin, “A balance of deterrence – a situation in which the incentives on both sides to initiate war are outweighed by the disincentives – is stable when it is reasonably secure against shocks, alarms and perturbations. That is, it is stable when political events, internal or external to the countries involved, technological change, accidents, false alarms, misunderstandings, crises, limited wars, or changes in the intelligence available to both sides, are unlikely to disturb the incentives sufficiently to make deterrence fail.”

South Asia’s passage to overt nuclearization in May 1998, almost 22 years ago, has led to the formation of “two camps of deterrence theorists…over whether a nuclearized subcontinent will prevent a major conflict or foster escalation.” These two camps might be called deterrence optimists and deterrence pessimists. Deterrence optimists maintain that nuclear weapons by making war catastrophically costly generate incentives for war avoidance between nuclear rivals and therefore create stability between them. Deterrence optimists have put forth the nuclear peace thesis which states that wars between nuclear-armed nation-states will be unlikely to start, and, if they do, the conflicts are likely to be limited because the belligerents will stop fighting short of the intensity needed to bring about the resort to nuclear weapons. Kenneth Waltz’ thinking in his article “more may be better” exemplifies this line of argument.

Deterrence pessimists, on the other hand, argue that notwithstanding their enormous destructive potential, nuclear weapons fail to produce stability because of a range of political, technical and organizational factors. Some of the specific problems that trump stability between nuclear states include risk acceptant or irrational leaders, command-and-control difficulties, and pre-emption incentives for small arsenals.

Michael Ryan Kraig has highlighted the following drivers of nuclear instability between India and Pakistan:

• The dangers created by geographical proximity between India and Pakistan, in contrast to the Cold War, in which the US and Soviets had political-strategic but not territorial proximity to each other;
• The lack of stable boundaries, or at least of stable, tacit agreements on defacto boundaries where disputes about territory still exist;
• The presence of ethno-religious cleavages which are integral to the two state’s founding national identities, in contrast to the more abstract Cold War divisions that were based upon broad political-economic philosophies;
• The existence of violent internal exigencies, which are connected to the above three situational factors and which are also persistently linked to the overarching state-level strategic threats between the two countries;
• The persistent lack of feasible and reliable early warning sensors (due in part to technological barriers and in part to geographic proximity);
• The lack of reliable nuclear safety and warhead access devices (such as Permissive Action Links that ensure only authorized personnel can arm or launch weapons and environmental sensors that will allow detonation only when the warhead is actually at its target); and

• The relative absence of dedicated command and control architectures that allow reliable civilian control during heightened tensions (an absence that is connected to the above factors of nuclear access devices and early warning systems).”

Ever since Modi’s advent to power in India in 2014, New Delhi’s domestic environment has undergone a radical rightward shift. As part of its aggressive pursuit of Hindutva, Modi government has consciously cultivated forces of Hindu extremism and has provided them the space to carry out their violent campaigns against minorities including Muslims, Christians and others. As a consequence, civic space has drastically shrunk and India today has become the most intolerant society.

This domestic trend toward violent extremism has been accompanied by state-sanctioned “hate” campaigns against Pakistan in which Islamabad has been painted as the “poster child” of “Jihadi terrorist” violence in India.

Simultaneously, India has been working on the theory of full-spectrum dominance. India is now developing conventional war-fighting options to dominate all rungs of the escalation ladder including limited nuclear use options.

In this attempt for escalation dominance vis-à-vis Pakistan, India is relying on its strategic partnership with Washington, which is worried about the rise of China. To contain China, the US is propping up India as its regional ally. It is not a coincidence that India and the US are the only two countries that have publicly opposed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). India is the central pillar of the new American strategy of Indo-Pacific aimed at containing China. To promote their overlapping interests in containing China, India and the US have joined hands in the form of Indo-US axis.

In the post-September/11 world, drastic modifications were made in the framework of Indo-US engagement: “a number of sanctions imposed earlier were removed; the door for high-tech cooperation was opened; political support was granted to India’s own war on terrorism; the Kashmir issue was reconsidered with a positive tilt towards India.” Since then, India and US have broadened and deepened the scope of their defence cooperation.

At present, India ranks as the top importer of arms and is among the top-10 military spending countries in the world. Washington’ new policy on the export of American-manufactured aerial system (UAS) will enable New Delhi to purchase large number of armed and surveillance drones from the US. New Delhi’s strategic modernization drive and its huge arms-build up is widening the gap in conventional military capabilities between India and Pakistan and forcing Islamabad to rely more and more on its nuclear option to offset India’s conventional force advantage.

Washington has enthusiastically accepted India as its strategic partner and both are working closely to contain China. Both Washington and New Delhi are opposed to China’s advocacy of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that they see as offering Beijing a historic opportunity to win “hundred years marathon race” against them. As a declining hegemonic power, US is desperately searching for regional allies to shore up its crumbling empire.

Because of its strategic geography, its important demography and its strategic alliance with China, Islamabad cannot easily be coerced or intimidated by India. Pakistan’s fault lines are many and its dire economic situation and political instability wrought by deep polarization top the list. So ultimately India and Pakistan, as nuclear-armed neighbours, would have to revert to a process of dialogue between them to sort out their difficulties. A good starting point would be the revival of the stalled India-Pakistan peace dialogue with a focus on resolving the core issue of Kashmir. The change of regime in Pakistan offers a new opportunity to New Delhi to reconsider its irrational approach to Pakistan and engage in a result-oriented dialogue with Islamabad.

The writer is a political scientist and defence analyst