reassurance of possessing a strategic equaliser to India’s conventional military preponderance.
The nuclear relationship between them of course needed to be clarified and remains a work in progress. Towards that goal, Pakistan proposed a Strategic Restraint Regime to India in 1999 to stabilise the strategic equation. This had three elements – measures for nuclear restraint and risk reduction, conventional military balance and resolution of disputes. The interlocking concept did not find acceptance even though some elements remained the subject of sporadic bilateral dialogue at Pakistan’s insistence.
Soon after, the Kargil conflict intervened, bringing the dialogue to a halt. This was followed by the 2001-02 military standoff, triggered by a terrorist attack on India’s Parliament. These developments led to dangerous thinking among India’s strategic community about how to neutralise the strategic balance and engage in limited conventional war below the nuclear threshold. This was to produce a doctrinal transformation and culminate in the ‘Cold Start’ doctrine (the name may have been dropped but not the notion) and plans for its operationalisation.
This doctrinal shift and consequent military posture had significant security implications for Pakistan. The notion of a war-fighting option in a nuclear environment was questioned by Pakistan, which insisted that however ‘limited,’ war between two nuclear states would heighten the risk of nuclear escalation, whether intentional or not. As Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was to later warn, proponents of the “use of conventional force in a nuclear overhang” were charting a dangerous course whose consequences could be both “unintended and uncontrollable”.
Meanwhile, other developments unfolded at the global level to transform great power relations and strategies. These shifts saw the emergence of an implicit ‘contain China’ strategy by the US. Although this never became declared policy and Sino-US relations were marked by cooperation and competition, Pakistan’s security planners perceived the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal of 2005 and NSG waiver as evidence of this contain China strategy.
These actions significantly enhanced India’s ability to expand its strategic arsenal and capabilities and accelerated its quest for ways to overcome the strategic deterrence established after 1998. India was enabled to increase its fissile material stocks qualitatively and quantitatively with Pakistan left to fend for itself. This reshaped Pakistan’s threat perceptions and determined its position on Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty negotiations in the Geneva based Conference on Disarmament.
Meanwhile Pakistan’s nuclear thinking was evolving independently along another track. This was the need to pursue the plutonium route because of the evident limitations of highly enriched uranium in miniaturising nuclear weapons. This led to plans to establish four reactors to produce plutonium, and reprocessing facilities to master the whole nuclear fuel cycle. These plans were however speeded up and plutonium production expanded (with three additional reactors) by the nuclear exceptionalism accorded to India as well as by US diplomatic efforts to conclude an FMCT. Until 2009, Washington had itself blocked negotiations for over a decade. The Obama administration changed this position, opening prospects for serious negotiations.
Pakistan then went on a fast track to build its fissile stocks. In ten years it constructed four plutonium reactors and three reprocessing plants. The plutonium route was thus completed in the decade that Pakistan held up negotiations at Geneva on the grounds that a treaty banning future production and not covering existing stocks would freeze the prevailing asymmetry between Pakistan and India. Pakistan’s nuclear diplomacy, effectively conducted by Ambassador Zamir Akram at Geneva, evolved in tandem with the strategic rationale and technical developments to address an evolving threat.
Meanwhile, India’s proactive doctrine aimed at a rapid deployment war-fighting strategy impelled Pakistan to look for a response. Seeking space for limited conventional military engagement on the assumption that India’s vast conventional asymmetry would prevent Pakistan from threatening to use its strategic capability obliged Pakistan to seek an appropriate ‘solution’ to fill the perceived gaps in the nuclear domain.
While Pakistan’s capability for a tactical response was already under development, the emerging Indian military posture constrained Pakistan to take the decision to develop delivery systems for Full Spectrum Deterrence. By trying to call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and evolving ‘proactive’ doctrines, India’s moves pushed Pakistan to develop Tactical Nuclear Weapons to deter Cold Start and re-establish nuclear stability. In April 2011, the test of the surface-to-surface multi-tube Nasr introduced a new weapon system. Capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads this added “another layer to the country’s deterrence capability”. Lt General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Strategic Plans Division, described Nasr as restoring “the strategic balance by closing the gap at the operational and tactical level”, thus contributing to “preserving peace in South Asia.”
The aim of this was not to induct weapons of use, but “weapons of deterrence” to counterbalance India’s move to bring conventional military offensives to a tactical level. Its purpose is to plug the gaps evident to Indian planners and achieve Full Spectrum Deterrence. But introduction of a battlefield nuclear weapon system has also sparked an inconclusive debate about deterrence stability, with implications for war fighting and command and control.
India’s plans to induct Ballistic Missile Defences (BMD) in the region, even if such systems are as yet unreliable, is also regarded as destabilising by Pakistan. Acquisition of BMD capabilities will accentuate fears that an offensive pre-emptive strike could be undertaken behind this shield. This capability in the context of Cold Start could increase the risk of military adventurism by providing an illusion of impunity from retaliation.
To hedge against this, Pakistan will likely multiply its missile numbers, including cruise missiles, and increase operational readiness to avert the destruction of its strategic assets in a pre-emptive strike. This too has a bearing on the amount of fissile material Pakistan would want to acquire.
These are the principal factors driving Pakistan’s fissile material requirements. The purpose is not to match the quantities or stockpiles that India has – which it can enhance if it wants to by diverting indigenous production for weapons use because of the nuclear fuel supply guaranteed by the US and similar agreements with other nations. Pakistan’s aim is not to engage in relentless production but to attain sufficiency for a spectrum of nuclear weapons, strategic, operational and tactical and to assure a second-strike capability.
As Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts to persuade India to establish a strategic restraint regime have yielded nothing, it has had to evolve a force development strategy at home and an effective negotiating position in Geneva to secure its national security interests.
