The nuclear weapons capabilities immensely contributed in India-Pakistan strategic doctrines and military postures. Instead of revolutionalizing warfare between belligerent neighbors, the nuclear weapons have necessitated strategic restraint between them without thwarting sub-conventional conflicts. Indeed, nuclear weapons have profound impact on the strategic stability, escalation control, nuclear confidence building measures and peace process between India and Pakistan.

The view of Pakistan’s National Command Authority

The NCA — the principal decision-making body on nuclear issues — at its meeting presided over by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday, “took note of the growing conventional and strategic weapons’ development in the region”, according to a press statement issued by the ISPR.

Besides expressing its resolve to do everything, short of entering an arms race, for keeping national security intact, the NCA “re-emphasised Pakistan’s desire for establishing the Strategic Restraint Regime in South Asia”.

Concern voiced over N-weapons build-up by India
The need for a sustained dialogue with India for resolution of outstanding disputes was also underscored.

The proposal for Strategic Restraint Regime has been on the table since Oct 1998, but India, which is opposed to a regional mechanism, has always avoided discussions on it.

Experts believe that regional stability, in the absence of such an overarching strategic architecture, has been tenuous.

The NCA was of the view that development of conventional and nuclear weapons by India had “adverse ramifications for peace and security” in the region.

Pakistan has been concerned over India developing nuclear submarine INS Arihant, which is reportedly close to commissioning. This will take India closer to completing its nuclear triad. A number of other Arihant-class strategic submarines and nuclear-powered attack submarines are also being developed. Reports about India building a secret Nuclear City in southern Karnataka state for producing thermonuclear weapons have also been seen as worrisome and so has been its expanding missile programme.

India, it is believed, has used the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s waiver to exponentially increase its fissile material stocks, upsetting the region’s strategic stability.

Recent reports by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies have confirmed that India is the world’s biggest arms importer, accounting for 14 per cent of global arms imports and which are more than those of China and Pakistan combined.

India has been the top importer since 2013 and the shopping frenzy aimed at boosting its conventional capabilities is continuing.

The western indifference to the Indian activities

Pakistan regrets that the West has been ignoring India’s activities because of its commercial interests and for the sake of containing China, but has kept pressure on Pakistan describing its nuclear programme as the fastest growing.

“The developments exacerbate Pakistan’s security dilemma, compelling it to make desirable improvements to achieve a balance and minimal developments in its conventional and strategic force posture,” an official explained on the background, saying the world’s focus has been on Pakistan’s reaction instead of Indian provocations.

Why the nuclear restraint strategy

The national requirement for strategic restraint for any country is derived from its political judgment given its location and the prevailing strategic environment. The cutting edge lies in the military domain and the contours of the quantum of strategic restraint depend on the military capabilities of the country concerned and the threats it faces both current and foreseen. While the military potential has its own impact on objectives and developments, it is largely in the diplomatic field in which efforts are launched and sustained in bilateral and multilateral engagement to reach the political objectives that define strategic restraint, and to deal with situations in which calls for such restraint go unheeded.

Few facts should be clear to any objective observer in the context of South Asia:- First of all, Pakistan as the smaller country with a correspondingly smaller economy, defence budget and armed forces has vested interests in better relations  with India that include strategic restraint. This would allow Pakistan to devote a larger amount of its limited resources to nation building and the welfare of its people.

Secondly, any such policy and objective requires positive response from India.

Thirdly, Pakistan has already experienced to its cost regarding its division into two countries at the hands of a military  intervention by India in 1971.

Fourthly ,the international   community  has the ability to act in a manner act  which facilitates strategic restraint in  South Asia or in a manner which leads to its destabilisation.

Fifthly, the empirical approach of India has been to keep Pakistan off balance and to destabilise it through a number of actions.

Pakistan’s initiative but a dismaying Indian response

As soon as both countries became overtly nuclear, Pakistan offered to India its Strategic Restraint Regime (SRR) proposal, with its three interlocking elements of nuclear restraint, conventional balance and dispute settlement. The SRR has remained on the table since then and, most recently, has been reoffered to India in the current Nuclear and Conventional CBMs talks that began in 2004.

India has consistently rejected Pakistan’s SRR. Nor have the Western countries since 1998 demonstrated any interest in, or support for, this regime.

On the contrary, the Western countries and Russia continue to build up India’s strategic capabilities in both the nuclear and conventional fields. Massive conventional arms sales dominate the bilateral agendas of the major Western powers and Russia vis-à-vis India.

On the nuclear side, the US-India nuclear deal, compounded further by the exemption that undermines the NPT given to India by the NSG, and followed by liberal bilateral nuclear agreements for nuclear technology and uranium supplies, demonstrates that rather than nuclear restraint, nuclear licence is the Western objective for a combination of reasons commercial and geo-strategic.

The NCA reiterated its policy of maintaining Full Spectrum Deterrence for covering the entire spectrum of threat, including Cold Start Doctrine and land-based standoff capability in Andaman and Nicobar Isles.

“Pakistan would continue to contribute meaningfully towards the global efforts to improve nuclear security and nuclear non-proliferation measures,” the statement said.

Pakistan’s warranted reservations over Indian nuclear honeymoon

Pakistan’s assertion that the upcoming summit in Washington was the final episode of the series started by President Obama is being implied as a signal that it is no more interested in any similar initiative in future and instead wants International Atomic Energy Agency to play the leading role in nuclear security commitments. The supplies of uranium from NSG countries free up India’s own limited uranium reserves for weapons production.

Furthermore, the overhang of India’s unsafeguarded Pu has been left out of safeguards. The International Panel of Fissile Material (IPFM) in its 2010 publication stated that India’s 6.8 tons of unsafeguarded plutonium was sufficient for 850 nuclear weapons, even if it be totally of reactor grade plutonium. Probably, due to low burn-up, a significant portion would be of weapons-grade plutonium.

However, the nuclear weapons capability of this Indian Pu overhang is never taken into account by Western critics of Pakistan.

One measure of the level of discrimination in the energy field towards Pakistan is the fact that, unlike India, all of Pakistan’s nuclear reactors for power generation are under safeguards, and the GOP has avowed that all future power reactors will also be safeguarded. In the US/NSG-India deal, India has been given the right to keep future reactors out of safeguards.

Pakistan’s policy position

The NCA approved, in principle, the decision to ratify the 2005 amendment to the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.

At the last Nuclear Security Summit, Pakistan had indicated its willingness to consider ratification of the amendment, which provides for security of nuclear facilities and domestic transport. Pakistan is already a signatory to the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, but the amendment has introduced significant changes in it because of which fresh ratification was required.

Pakistan’s proposals in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in the nuclear and missile areas affirm the restraint DNA of Pakistan. The irony is that our friends advocate restraint only when they see Pakistan responding to a strategic environment facilitated and supported by them. They need to develop strategic clarity and realism as well.

To conclude with the way forward. Much depends on India reciprocating Pakistan’s objective and proposals for strategic restraint and much also depends on the international community supporting this objective in an even-handed manner.

The issue of Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons

India and Western analysts oppose Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons, without taking into account the need to close the gap posed by the aggressive Indian Cold Start/Proactive Doctrine aimed at placing India in a coercive position to threaten Pakistan with strikes to seize territory while remaining under the nuclear overhang.

Pakistan is quite transparent that if forced to, in extremis, it can use nuclear weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons, to defend itself. However paradoxically, India and others who hold that Pakistan should publish a nuclear doctrine, criticise this unambiguous Pakistan assertion, implying that it is ‘unfair’ to limit India’s otherwise available options accruing from its conventional superiority.

The Western analysts suggest unconvincingly that it may be disproportionate and against the concept of “just war” to use nuclear weapons against conventional attacks to seize Pakistani territory – as if aggression by conventional forces, a breach of the UN Charter, was permissible and deterring by any means such aggression was impermissible.

Pakistan’s argument

The balance of power or action-reaction theory predicts that the introduction of BMD in India’s arsenal may perhaps oblige Pakistan either to acquire BMD or structure and deploy operational nuclear weapons to solidify its defensive fence. While making its nuclear posture credible, Pakistan would confront an alarming deterrence/management trade-off, what  the political scientist Scott D. Sagan terms the ‘vulnerability/invulnerability paradox’.

In theory, the deployment and operationalization of nuclear weapons capability generates a new conflict dynamic that constructs new strategic environment having ingredients of heightened instability.To refrain from such a vicious cycle of strategic instability in South Asia,the only viable alternative is that both India and Pakistan should sign a strategic restraint pact.