Blunting the edge of deterrence

Source: By Abhijit Iyer-Mitra: The Pioneer There seems to be a trend in the last few months, with many newspapers calling for India to give up its nuclear arms. Much of this nonsensical gobbledygook, however, comes about because India itself suffers from serious doctrinal confusion despite a deep understanding of the psychology of deterrence. India understands only too well that nuclear weapons deter nuclear strikes, a catastrophic military collapse, and prevent nuclear blackmail. They do not deter terrorists, guerrilla warriors, short border wars and the like. Take, for example, obnoxious statements like this: The normative taboo against this most indiscriminately inhumane weapon ever invented is so comprehensive and powerful that under no conceivable circumstances will its use against a nonnuclear state compensate for the political costs. This explains why nuclear powers have accepted defeat at the hands of non-nuclear states rather than escalate armed conflict to the nuclear level. This is exactly the kind of falsehood that the anti-nuclear lobby has been spreading and this is exactly the kind of statement that must not be allowed to go unchallenged. The only reason that nuclear weapons were not used in Afghanistan or Vietnam had little to do with taboo. It was because these were small stakes games compared to the larger security architecture of deterrence between the erstwhile USSR and the US. But leave aside for the moment the anti-nuclear lobbys faulty logic and let us address the core of why people are able to lob such obviously flawed theories at us with no pushback. This goes back to Indias severe credibility deficit with people rightly assuming that it is a benign playful Labrador puppy rather than a vicious Rottweiler that nuclear armed states need to be. Ever since India released the draft nuclear doctrine in August 1999, it has been subjected to vicious criticism from in and out. Largely, the document reflected the knee-jerk recalcitrance and overdefensiveness of a country heavily censured and sanctioned, following the tests of 1998. The whole document was denuded of authority just three months later by External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh claiming, It is thus not a policy document of the Government of India. This vacuum took four years to fill. In 2003, a Press release was issued by the Cabinet office, which has since been confirmed by former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran to be the official doctrine. Yet within the space of a decade, even this document seems arcane, needing a revisit of three critical issues. The first is the desperate need for nuclear autarchy that is for the command chain to be simplified and be made directly by the Prime Minister. As of now the mandatory inclusion of an advisory chain, which may or may not be able to attain quorum at the time of deciding the attack, vastly complicates both the legality of an emergency launch order as well as the Armed Forces ability to execute such orders without being threatened by the consequenc es of legal nebulousness later on. The pitfalls here are obvious. The 2003 document insists that any strike order decided by the Prime Minister be launched through the National Security Advisor. Again, at a moment of crisis there maybe doubts about the NSA having survived a decapitation strike, since he is an executive but not in the chain of command, meaning his survivability may not be guaranteed. Should indeed he not be available for whatever reason this again brings up operational issues will a ground commander accept orders that have not been issued by the due authorities?

The command chain then has to be direct from the Prime Minister (who must not have to mandatorily consult others) to the operational commander, without any intermediaries. Our pointless obsession with collegiate decisionmaking and our hopeless love of bureaucracy, while providing critical checks and balances, in this particular case, severely erodes national security simply because the nuclear bomb, unlike any weapon before it, is an exceptional case. Recognising this, every other nuclear state, including democracies far more liberal, inclusive and advanced than us, have accepted nuclear autarchy as fait accompli. The second critical issue is the concept of leadership credibility. On being asked the specifics of the French deterrent, then President Francois Mitterrand retorted: I am the deterrent. The credibility of the deterrent is linked inherently to its leaderships resolve to press the button. Hence the reported remarks of P rime Minister Manmohan Singh to the effect that, nuclear weapons are unusable reflect exceptionally bad advice, irrespective of their accuracy, and the lack of nuclear education of the chain of command. In one sentence, therefore, the leadership can completely destroy the force of dissuasion that the arsenal represents. Lastly, a curious schism emerges, where civilians think that the extremely ill-advised use of the word massive response actually forms the meat of the 2003 document. This is dangerous on several counts since Pakistans sense of security derives from its confidence in escalation dominance. If massive response becomes the standard option, then Pakistan has no interest in carefully calibrating and moderating its first strike, believing that even a signalling strike could draw massive retaliation. In a sense, therefore, this phrasing encourages Pakistan to go in for a massive decapitation strike at the first shot, while taking away any security that escalation dominance conferred on them. This then forces on India the need for a pre-emptive first strike, precisely because of the deeply destabilising effect that massive retaliation carries. This first strike then by its very nature, either has to be massive or has to be a gradually escalated response forcing the deployment of battlefield and tactical nuclear weapons, in effect forcing the cyclic logic of either reconsidering massive retaliation or to go in more sensibly for a flexible response. Optimally what this would require is first t he phasing out of the term massive retaliation if in fact the preservation of population centres is a priority, as should be for any democracy. Second, it involves diluting our no-first-use policy, to allow for precisely this kind of action. South Asia then is far from being representative of an instability-stability paradox. Instead, it is representative of a case where strategic stability is fundamentally dependant on tactical instability effectively a stability-instability symbiosis.