War Deterring, Not War Fighting
28 Jun, 1998 · 119
Lt. Gen. A. M. Vohra (Retd.) believes that there will be no escalation of defence expenditures on either side of the Indo-Pak border on nuclear weapons
Addressing the National Geographic society on 11 June ’98 , President Clinton admitted that, "Both India and
Pakistan
have security concerns that are legitimate", but added that "Nuclear tests by
India
and
Pakistan
are a threat to stability…A miscalculation between two adversaries with nuclear weapons could be catastrophic. The tests are all the more unfortunate because they divert precious resources from countries with limited potential".
India
and
Pakistan
have minimised their defence expenditure. As a percentage of their GDP,
India
has brought it down from 3.37% in 1988 to 2.45% in 1997. In the same period,
Pakistan
has brought it down from 7.47% to 5.13%. The defence budgets for 1998/99, presented after the nuclear tests, have remained within the same range.
India
or
Pakistan
establishing large nuclear arsenals or acquiring even their minimum deterrent requirements within a short period. The claim that the covert nuclear status of the two has, in effect, been operating as a non-weaponized deterrent for some years now, is sustainable. With both countries having tested in May, deterrence has become more tangible. There is, therefore, no urgency to acquire any imagined number of devices, fine tune means of delivery or a command and control system. No large-scale expenditure on this account is therefore going to take place.
USA
and the
USSR
conceived of nuclear war fighting, and accumulated arsenals in tens of thousands. With the change in concept from war fighting to deterrence, a reduction in their arsenals commenced. The post-START II figure agreed upon is 3000 to 3500 deployed devices with each country. Against this figure, the numbers visualised by Indian strategist K. Sundarji (former chief of the Indian Army) is 135. Without going into the details of how this figure has been arrived at, it needs to be noted that the Indian requirement is far below that of the other nuclear weapon powers.
India
and
Pakistan
is much less than it was between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries until the 1980s. In 1981, General Alexander Haig stated that a demonstration strike was part of NATO’s contingency plan. Within the framework of mutual assured destruction (MAD), the
Western Alliance
considered selective warning or demonstrative strikes. However Harold Brown, a former
US
Secretary for Defense, maintained that an initial use of nuclear weapons could escalate into a full-scale thermonuclear war. This view was reinforced by the famous November 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev statement that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
India
and
Pakistan
have declared their nuclear weapon status in this ambience: the size of their arsenals and the role of nuclear weapons will be guided by considerations of war deterring, not war fighting. A miscalculation can, therefore, be ruled out.
Defence expenditure
To take the last point first, the observation about resources is relevant. However, it needs to be noted that for some years now, both
There is no prospect of either
War deterring, not war fighting
In the days of the Cold War the
The possibility of a nuclear exchange between
The concept of MAD has prevailed and deterring nuclear wars is the accepted purpose of nuclear weapons.
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