Ten
Reasons to Doubt Nuclear Deterrence
By Dr Ahmad Faruqui
Dansville, CA
Pakistanis may disagree on
many things but on one issue there is near unanimity
of opinion, and that is the notion that the country’s
nuclear weapons are necessary to keep India at
bay. This notion needs to be re-examined.
The genesis of the nuclear program goes back to
the 1971 war. Pakistan drew the wrong conclusions
from its defeat. The war would have been unthinkable
had General Yahya Khan not connived with certain
politicians in West Pakistan to postpone the National
Assembly session in March. This bad decision brought
about the death of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Once
East Pakistan was plunged into a civil war and
India intervened, the defeat of the beleaguered
Pakistani army garrison was a foregone conclusion.
Yet a similar defeat in the west was not inevitable.
Mr. Bhutto, who had famously committed Pakistanis
to developing nuclear weapons even if they had
to “eat grass” back in 1965, decided
to initiate a nuclear program in 1972. Some felt
his policies were vindicated when India unveiled
a “smiling Buddha” at Pokhran in 1974.
However, that may have been an Indian response
to Bhutto’s decision to go nuclear. It is
also likely that India was responding to China’s
nuclear weapons program while simultaneously fulfilling
a long-held desire by its scientific elite to
demonstrate that they were second to none.
Today, there are at least ten reasons to rethink
Pakistan’s nuclear program. Firstly, the
Kargil crisis provides evidence that the presence
of nuclear weapons emboldens one or both parties
to visualize and sometimes execute limited conventional
war. There is no way to determine precisely the
“red lines” of the other party and
such ambiguity can in fact precipitate a nuclear
war.
Secondly, it is not clear that Pakistan’s
nuclear weaponry prevented India from launching
a pre-emptive war in Kashmir in 2002. Maybe India
was implementing coercive diplomacy and never
intended to go to war. Furthermore, the importance
of American influence on the antagonists cannot
be under-estimated.
Thirdly, Pakistan’s nuclear assets have
become a liability in the post 9/11 world. General
Musharraf cited several reasons why he made a
u-turn on Pakistan’s Afghan policy, one
of which was to protect the country’s nuclear
assets. While one may question the merits of supporting
the Taliban, having to change the policy under
duress in order to protect the nuclear assets
was a reversal of logic since the nuclear assets
were supposed to allow the country to have an
independent foreign policy.
Fourthly, by going nuclear, Pakistan should have
been able to reduce its expenditure on conventional
forces and prevent the future of the country from
being mortgaged by defense spending. There has
been no nuclear dividend since $4 billion are
being spent annually on maintaining a military
force of 600,000 and equipping them with advanced
weaponry.
Fifthly, the perception that a minimum nuclear
deterrent requires a constant amount of funding
is false, since the level of Pakistan’s
minimum deterrent is tied to whatever India’s
regards as its minimum deterrence. That, in turn,
is tied to India’s regional ambitions, which
are tied to China’s regional ambitions.
Thus, Pakistani nuclear expenditures will keep
on accelerating as more advanced ballistic missiles
and warheads continue to be deployed regionally.
The military will require tactical and strategic
missiles that can be fired from land, sea and
air. Over time, it will seek more sophisticated
means of storing, transporting and launching them,
all of them costing billions. Ultimately, the
military that has a first strike capability would
find it necessary to develop a second strike capability
and ultimately a third strike capability.
Sixthly, were a “do or die” situation
to develop for the state of Pakistan, what would
be the military value of using nuclear assets
to keep territory that would become inhabitable
the moment they were used. And what would be the
morality of killing millions of innocent civilians
merely to make a statement about the sanctity
of man-made borders that had fallen into place
just half a century earlier? Seen from this vantage
point, nuclear war emerge s as a psychopathic
nationalized projection of suicide bombing.
Seventhly, nuclear weapons will always be susceptible
to accidental launch. Safeguards and protocols
can never eliminate the risk of failure.
Eighthly, there would always be a risk of terrorists
acquiring the weapons, especially in Pakistan’s
regional environment.
Ninthly, some defense analysts have argued that
nuclear weapons are simply an anodyne, a relatively
painless means to prevent war, and that they would
never be used. Not only is this at odds with historical
practice at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is also
contradicted by the recent statement by France’s
Jacques Chirac in which he signaled a willingness
to use them under “special” circumstances
and earlier statements by leading members of the
Bush administration who see military value in
deploying “tactical mini-nukes.”
And finally, it is often said that poor countries
have a right to nuclear weapons since the rich
countries have them; not letting them have them
is reprehensible and reeks of double standards,
being a kind of nuclear apartheid. Such an argument
is putting forward the specious proposition that
rich countries should not be allowed to have a
monopoly on making monstrously big mistakes.
Nowhere was the military disutility of nuclear
weapons more visible than during the Cold War
during which time, to quote Henry Kissinger, the
US and the USSR behaved “like two heavily
armed blind men feeling their way around a room,
each believing himself in mortal peril from the
other whom he assumes to have perfect vision.”
Each country produced warheads in excess of 10,000.
The US nuclear program represented 29 percent
of its military budget and had even half of that
money been spent on social programs, it would
have permanently eliminated poverty and deprivation
from American society. As for the USSR, none of
its nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic
missiles could save it from collapse.
Sadly, the territorial dimension of national security
continues to be paramount in Pakistan’s
policy making, even under a prime minister who
is a former banker. And from this ill-conceived
premise flows the false deduction that nuclear
weapons are the best method of protecting Pakistan’s
independence. Thus, a poor nation that should
be spending two or three times the amount on development
that it spends on defense spends roughly equal
amounts on these two areas. Pakistan’s priorities
should be on eliminating poverty and illiteracy—which
together drive ethnic, sectarian and urban lawlessness—and
are the real threats to its future survival.
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