The Future of Nuclear Peace in South Asia
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington, DC: Michael Krepon, author of Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise and Revival of Arms Control, was the special guest on a November 17 online program hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While discussions on nuclear weapons control frequently spotlight only the United States, Russia and China, moderator Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, focused on nuclear-armed competitors India and Pakistan, which, along with China, are “pioneering more complex deterrent relationships, thus far without an arms control safety net,” Dalton noted.
“Michael’s book reminds us that deterrents alone do not yield durable stability and prevent conflict,” he said. “You have to have arms control as the other side of the coin of deterrents to actually deliver on the peace and stability that nuclear weapons promise…and without arms control nuclear dangers increase.”
Krepon, writer and co-founder of the Stimson Center, contended that nuclear peace starts with not using nuclear weapons on the battlefield – “no mushroom clouds.” But it also has many components such as communication between nuclear-armed rivals, mutual respect for national security and the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of other states, he said. “Nuclear peace means not playing with fire particularly in sensitive places…and involves not just deterrents but measures of reassurance, because deterrence is about sharpening swords, and clarifying threat and arms control is about reducing threats.”
An idea Krepon puts forth in Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace is the creation of an informal governmental forum consisting of seven nuclear-armed states devoted to norm strengthening and lengthening. “The forum would be an effort to reduce nuclear engine,” he explained. “I suggest starting with a norm-building approach, but it is not a substitute for a strategic stability dialogue.”
On the question of exactly what nuclear weapons deter in South Asia, Debak Das, a Stanton Nuclear Postdoctoral Fellow, argued that “from a security perspective, we see nuclear weapons in some ways having worked to Pakistan’s advantage in terms of having deterred potential conventional action against it.” Specifically, Pakistan’s store of nuclear weapons may have prevented India from carrying out conventional attacks against Pakistan after the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, he claimed.
Additionally, “if you are trying to reinforce deterrents, the belief of credible use has to be there,” Das said. “Why possess these weapons if you mean not to use them or they are not aimed at getting some form of security against someone?”
Das pointed out that in the past there had been some successful confidence-building measures between Pakistan and India regarding nuclear weapons controls, such as the exchange of lists of nuclear installations and the agreement on reducing risks of accidents relating to nuclear weapons. “These agreements are insanely difficult to negotiate, but once they have been negotiated, they do tend to endure just perhaps because of the bureaucratic nature of both countries,” he said.
Several norm-building measures that have been successful in the past between nuclear-armed rivals, Das said, include not testing nuclear weapons, not using them in battlefield warfare and not even threatening to use them. But regarding non-proliferation, “at least with India and Pakistan as proliferators, that ship has sailed,” he lamented. “If you have the peaceful transfer of nuclear technology, under the guidelines set up by the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, that seems fine.”
Beenish Pervaiz, a PhD candidate in political science at Brown University, focused her remarks on the revival of arms control in South Asia and the challenges and opportunities to consider in addressing arms control and proliferation.
“I find it interesting that India and Pakistan are the only two nuclear rivals who to a large extent share a common language, have similar cultures and yet we find it the hardest to understand each other’s nuclear politics,” she pointed out. “When you think about cooperation or norm-building in the future, we both want to establish a secure and stable neighborhood in southern Asia. We both want to be seen as responsible nuclear states that follow global norms.”
Fostering strategic stability in South Asia is important in order that countries can focus more on economic development and the social well-being of the citizens, Pervaiz said. “These common goals could help serve as a basis for a possible future framework of cooperation.”
With respect to non-proliferation, Pervaiz criticized the United States for its “selective non-proliferation policies,” citing the US-India nuclear deal, as well as US support to grant India the NSG (nuclear supplier group) waiver. These two actions are considered “discriminating policies that stall any real progress on this issue,” she argued.
Answering the question of why countries need nuclear weapons and whether it was just for deterrence purposes, Pervaiz emphasized that for Pakistan it is “the idea of survival.” Because of Pakistan’s “conventional [weapons] inferiority…nuclear weapons offer us the ultimate sense of security.”
In South Asia, “nuclear threats are used for domestic politics purposes as well to gain some sort of political advantage,” Pervaiz said. “We need a narrative change and the only way that can happen is…to start a conversation about these policies in the mass public community. The grassroots need to be empowered in starting a conversation about these very, very hard topics.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
