Pakistan was born out of a bloody partition of India. This violent genesis engendered a framework of political relationship with India based on animosity that morphed into an existential threat after Pakistan itself was partitioned, with by now well-documented Indian strategy, in a humiliating in-house civil rebellion and military war with India within 25 years.

Within this period, the two neighbours had fought three conventional wars that left deep scars on Pakistan’s psyche nurtured by a departure from democratic aspirations led by military’s usurpation of political power in the unsure state’s early years.

Pakistan did not win any of these wars. Not militarily, not politically. This compounded a sense of national humiliation that paradoxically was an opportunity to define the country’s future.

Pakistan’s historic response: nuclearisation over economic and social development, a decision that changed Pakistan fatally. And with benefit of hindsight, not arguably a good decision although encouraging an impartial debate on this is one of the last few remaining taboos of Pakistan’s politics.

The development of Pakistan’s military nuclear programme was, thus, underwritten by a spectacular failure of political evolution and inability to carve out a national mission statement, envisioning a normative framework that would have required an emphasis on development of the country as an economic and political powerhouse, instead of an exclusive focus on military prowess as the primary arbiter of identity. The cementing agent of this folly was, thus, a sense of insecurity rather a measure of self-confidence.

It is important to remember that the ambition of the military nuclear programme was dictated by a politicised military and militant political class in equal measure. It was the godfather of Pakistan’s awami politics and the country’s first democratically elected head of government, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who is credited as the father of the nuclear programme, even by the military, which eventually hanged him.

Despite their mutual animosity, Pakistan’s military and political leaders have never really differed on the status of the nuclear programme as the bedrock of national identity. In the 10 elections held in the country, PPP of the Bhuttos and PML-N of the Sharifs have come to power eight times. Both have fought bitter fights to dilute the military’s defining influence over politics and yet this battle has never really focused on the nuclear programme. Both parties have actively helped the military strengthen it even during long stretches of economic slumps.

The only public departure of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine was by President Asif Zardari who told an Indian TV channel that Islamabad would be amenable to reconsidering its official policy of first nuclear strike doctrine. The military’s swift public rebuke of Zardari -- and the point where, according to WikiLeaks, efforts began to de-seat him as the ceremonial commander-in-chief of the armed forces -- and the ever unchanging doctrine merely serves to demonstrate the other unalterable truth about Pakistan’s nuclear programme: it is owned, managed, and implemented by the military as a state organ, not the elected governments.

The military’s stranglehold of national politics is based on a historic suspicion of India as the eternal enemy and the nuclear programme is the insurance policy that theoretically neutralises Pakistan’s conventional military disparity with a larger, more powerful imagined mortal enemy. This doctrine, however, also stitches the nuclear programme’s immutability to the state’s power structure where economic development and sovereignty of political classes to exercise the flexibility needed to consider alternative ways to strengthen Pakistan is compromised.

The country’s nuclear programme, therefore, while theoretically strengthening the state militarily, also paradoxically weakens it politically and economically. The inability of a national consensus on even revisiting the rationale of an understandable but expensive military nuclear programme is at the root cause of a politically unstable Pakistan.

We forget that Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa abandoned active military nuclear programmes to emerge as political and economic power houses. North Korea and Israel did not -- are they stable countries? Except for these two, and Pakistan, all other military nuclear powers are politically stable because they were first economic power houses.

Pakistan can be a sustainable military nuclear power only if it is simultaneously an economic and political powerhouse, not at the cost of the latter.