At a recent seminar to mark Youm-i-Takbeer, Lt Gen (retd) Khalid Kidwai, Adviser to the National Command Authority and a longtime Director of the Strategic Plans Division, was categoricaL that Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine was No First Use. This is more an admission by Pakistan about its own perceptions of the respective Indian and Pakistani conventional capabilities than any reflection of a hung-ho attitude or overly aggressive posture. It also has nothing to do with the fact that the USA had a similar first-use doctrine, and the USSR had made a no-first-use pledge during the Cold War. It is true that Pakistani planners have had more exposure to the USA, and Indian to the USSR, but the nuclear calculus is roughly the same. If one side has a conventional disadvantage, as the USA had in Cold War Central Europe, then it will need to balance it by nuclear weapons. Similarly, if one side has conventional advantage, then it can afford to win conventionally, and refrain from first use, enjoying the kudos of being such a peaceful power. If the other side tries to overcome its conventional disadvantage by nuclearising the conflict, then the ‘victim’ side would join in with gusto. Pakistan has the strategic disadvantage, and if it finds itself losing the conventional portion of a conflict with India; if faced with the prospect of national defeat, there is no telling what decision may have to be made by the political and military leadership of that time.
The decision to nuclearize the conflict will not be made lightly, and will be made in the knowledge that the enemy’s response will probably be nuclear. In this context, General Kidwai’s speaking of the three forces’ nuclear commands becomes somewhat ominous, for that is a concept drawn from nuclear deterrence orthodoxy; the need for the survivability of the nuclear option; the ‘second strike capability’, the ability to launch one nuclear strike, absorb one, and then make a second. Apart from anything else, the solutions found by the USA and the USSR were prohibitively expensive, such as fleets of nuclear submarines or nuclear-armed bombers aloft at all times. Unfortunately, India seems headed down that path, with its acquisition of a nuclear submarine.
Another difficulty is that such an arms race involves a space race, as proper targeting and real-time guidance data cannot come from third-party communication satellites. Pakistan has often argued that India cannot afford a conventional arms race; all the more reason cannot afford a nuclear one.
