NEW DELHI: Does the war on Iraq validate the strategic doctrine of deterrence, which holds that weapons of mass destruction can reliably prevent or deter an adversary from attacking a country?

Does deterrence based on such weapons offer the best route to security through a mutual “balance of terror”?

One month since the war on Iraq started on March 20, a number of governments and conservative analysts in different countries have drawn that conclusion, upholding the main premise that ruled strategic thinking during the Cold War.

For instance, the North Korean foreign ministry in an April 19 statement said: “The Iraqi war teaches a lesson — that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force only.” That is why it is pursuing its nuclear programme, it argues.

Dr Abdul Quadir Khan, the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, was even more explicit. In an April 20 interview with a local Pakistani daily from Muscat, Khan boasted that without its nuclear bombs, Pakistan “would have become another Palestine or Bosnia or Kashmir”.

Many ‘experts’ in the third-rung, self-confessed or de facto nuclear weapons-states like India, Pakistan and Israel too have underscored the same ‘lesson’ from Iraq. However, the conclusion may be seriously mistaken. It certainly does not logically follow from the events in Iraq.

Even after five weeks, there is no clinching, convincing evidence that Iraq has or had weapons of mass destruction. The British-US troops who invaded it and searched several suspected sites have found none of the chemical or biological weapons which their governments had accused Iraq of having hidden.

As for suspected nuclear weapons — which need large-sized, complex and therefore impossible-to-hide facilities and infrastructure — the UN International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that Iraq has none.

Its rudimentary nuclear weapons programme was destroyed soon after the Gulf War of 1991. If it was revived, it would be nearly impossible to conceal it.

So far, there has been only one report, in ‘The New York Times’ on April 21-22, quoting an unnamed Iraqi scientist “who claims to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons programme for more than a decade,” as having told “an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began”.

There is huge military disproportion or asymmetry between states. Given the hierarchy of military capabilities, the weaker states cannot really deter their superpower-class adversaries even if they possess weapons of mass destruction, especially chemical or biological weapons — often called “the poor man’s nuclear weapons” because they are far less lethal.

Thus, even if Iraq had some crude chemical or biological arms, with limited potential to cause destruction, they would not have reliably deterred the United States.

For deterrence to work, an adversary must know that you can inflict “unacceptable damage” upon him. In practice, damage to enemy soldiers from primitive chemical or biological weapons — which have low stability and destructive power — can be contained by special equipment.

The mere possession of weapons of mass destruction cannot deter anyone. A state must have the capability to deliver them to targets in the adversary’s territory. Iraq certainly lacked the delivery capability. Much of its air force was destroyed before this war. It did not control its own airspace after the US-sponsored ‘no-fly zones’ came into existence in the 1990s.

Iraq had about 100 to 120 Al-Samoud-II missiles, over half of which were destroyed by UNMOVIC before the war. These are primitive rockets without a guidance system. They only had a range of 150 to 180 kilometres. They could scarcely hit a target in Iraq’s neighbourhood, leave alone in mainland United States thousands of kilometres away.

In respect of delivery capability, Iraq is not very different form India, Pakistan or North Korea. None of these have missiles that really threaten China, or Russia and France, not to speak of the United States. Even China has only about a dozen intercontinental missiles that can reach the United States. But their accuracy is open to doubt.

The third-rung states’ programmes on weapons of mass destruction are also vulnerable to attacks even with conventional weapons. Protecting nuclear bombs can be more difficult than making them.

The United States, it has just been disclosed, has ‘contingency plans’ to bomb a power plant at the centre of North Korea’s nuclear programme. This report was carried in an Australian newspaper and confirmed by the country’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

In 2001 and 2002, there were reports that the United States had drawn up plans to take Pakistan’s nuclear weapons into its custody because of apprehensions that they could fall into the hands of fundamentalists or their sympathizers.

Aggressive states have also used violent methods to ‘take out’ potential ‘threats’ from weapons of mass destruction. In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear power reactor under construction in Iraq — without provocation or evidence that it could serve a military purpose.

Even when adversaries have proven weapons-of-mass-destruction deterrents, that does not necessarily give security. Thus, during the Cold War, the so-called “deterrence equation” between the United States and the Soviet Union broke down hundreds of times even as nuclear weapons were on hair-trigger alert.

For deterrence to be stable, and guarantee security, its theorists must assume that there will be no strategic misperception, miscalculation or accidents — not 90 per cent of the time, but 100 per cent of the time.

These conditions do not obtain in the real world. Deterrence through weapons of mass destruction is a flimsy and unsound doctrine on which to base security. Real security can come only when weapons of mass destruction are fully abolished.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.