January 17, 2003	Friday	Ziqa'ad 13, 1423

NEW DELHI: India and Pakistan have further hardened their hostile nuclear postures, taking steps toward lowering the threshold of a devastating nuclear confrontation while the international community is preoccupied with the crises in Iraq and the Korean peninsula.

On Jan 4, India announced the establishment of a Nuclear Command Authority, which will control the proverbial ‘red button’ and order the use of nuclear weapons in an emergency. New Delhi has also set up a Strategic Forces Command to manage India’s nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable missiles.

Pakistan had set up its nuclear command-and-control apparatus in February 2001. Last week, it clarified this would be headed not by a civilian prime minister, but by the president, Gen Pervez Musharraf.

Since then, both states have taken steps to test and ready a variety of ballistic missiles for induction into their armed forces.

Pakistan announced on Jan. 9 that the medium-range Hatf-V- Ghauri missile has been handed over to the army for induction. The very next day, India tested the new Pakistan-specific Agni-I, with a range of about 800 kilometres.

India is expected to deploy Agni-I within a year. It has already deployed the nuclear-capable short-range (150 to 250 km) Prithvi missile, at some distance from the Pakistan border. India plans to test a 3,500 km-range missile Agni-III this year and then move toward the intercontinental-range class—a programme that will target China.

Along with these armed preparations come significant changes in India’s nuclear doctrine. Its latest version dilutes the ‘no first use’ commitment India had originally made to signal nuclear restraint.

India now says it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons not just in retaliation to a nuclear attack, but also to a chemical or biological attack on its territory or its forces “anywhere”. In rewriting this doctrine, India is emulating the US ‘National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction’, released last month.

More important, the Indian government is under pressure from the 15-member National Security Advisory Board, the third such body set up after the May 1998 nuclear tests, to abandon ‘no first use’ altogether.

Its classified report, submitted to the National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra on Dec. 20, recommends: “India may consider withdrawing from this commitment as the other nuclear weapons states have not accepted this policy.”

The board also asks India to lift its voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing and resume test explosions should the United States do so, as it might.

Defence Minister George Fernandes has for the moment reaffirmed the ‘no first use’ commitment. But many military personnel prefer its revision.

Some believe it will not mean much given that there is no strategic distance worth the name between the South Asian rivals — missile flight-time between some of their major cities is just three to eight minutes.

India-Pakistan tensions have run high since the December 2001 attack on India’s Parliament, which New Delhi attributed to Pakistan-sponsored terrorists. The holding of relatively fair elections in Jammu and Kashmir late last year has not helped matters.

Indeed, a senior US official on a visit to South Asia last week described India-Pakistan tensions as more dangerous than during the scariest period of the Cold War.

State Department policy planning chief Richard Haass tersely told New Delhi to mend its fences with Islamabad. “The current situation is distinctly abnormal—even by the standards of adversaries. Today, the India-Pakistani relationship is less developed than that between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War,” he said.

HE ADDED: “Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union — who were not neighbours like India and Pakistan, but two countries on opposite sides of the globe — recognised that maintaining considerable interaction was in their mutual interest.”

“In the absence of the most basic contacts and the most minimal lines of communication, tension between India and Pakistan constantly risks sparking a broader conflict with potentially cataclysmic consequences — for India, for Pakistan, for the region, and, if I might say, for the United States,” he said.

Even if such a cataclysmic conflict never materialises, “the omnipresent spectre of it has huge tangible costs”, said Haass.

These costs are becoming increasingly manifest as India and Pakistan make furious preparations on the assumption that nuclear deterrence will give both security. This assumption is especially dubious in South Asia.

Deterrence assumes high levels of rationality and symmetrical perceptions of what constitutes “unacceptable damage”. In reality, such perceptions vary greatly.

For the United States, losing 3,000 civilians in the Sep. 11 attacks was “unacceptable”. Some Indian policymakers believe that India can lose a few cities and still survive in some “acceptable” way.

For deterrence to work, adversaries must have perfect assessments of each other’s capabilities. This does not hold in India and Pakistan, whose history is full of strategic misperception and miscalculation.

The danger that the two would get drawn into uncontrollable rivalry in the event of a conventional conflict will increase considerably if they move toward putting their nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. Yet that is precisely what they seem to be doing.

India’s strategic planners are making a transition from their doctrine of “limited, conventional war” — which was waged at Kargil in 1999 — to a higher-level conflict in which their nuclear arsenals are on a state of readiness and alert.

A senior defence official is quoted as saying: “Theoretically, a limited conventional war is still possible. But Pakistan’s continued support to infiltrators in Kashmir on the one hand and its nuclear blackmail on the other means that we have to be very clear in our response.”

“While we still do not envisage a nuclear exchange, we do not want to be found wanting in such an event,” he pointed out.

The gap between testing and manufacture of nuclear weapons, and their deployment, threat of use, and possible use, is rapidly closing in South Asia, with potentially disastrous global consequences.—Dawn/Inter Press News Service.