The real risks and costs of having these weapons, both monetary and human, far outweigh their security benefits
The Indian Navy has figured in three recent, global news items. The launch of the indigenously developed aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant,
expected to be operational by 2018, makes India only the fifth country
after the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France to have
such capability. The diesel-electric submarine INS Sindhurakshak
caught fire and exploded, causing the tragic death of 18 crew. In the
early hours of August 10, the reactor on the nuclear powered submarine
INS Arihant (“slayer of enemies”), with underwater ballistic launch capability, went critical.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, launched the 6,000-tonne Arihant in
Visakhapatnam on July 26, 2009. In time, it was said, with a fleet of
five nuclear-powered submarines and three to four aircraft carrier
battle groups, a 35-squadron air force and land-based weapons systems,
India would emerge as a major force in the Indian Ocean, from the Middle
East to Southeast Asia.
The strategic rationale is to acquire and consolidate the three legs of
land, air and sea-based nuclear weapons to underpin the policy of
nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, however, the whole concept of nuclear
deterrence is deeply flawed.
Desensitised
Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and hence uniquely threatening
to our common security. There is a compelling need to challenge and
overcome the reigning complacency on the nuclear risks and dangers, to
sensitise policy communities to the urgency and gravity of nuclear
threats and the availability of non-nuclear alternatives as anchors of
national and international security.
A nuclear catastrophe could destroy us any time. Because we have learnt
to live with nuclear weapons for 68 years, we have become desensitised
to the gravity and immediacy of the threat. The tyranny of complacency
could yet exact a fearful price if we sleepwalk our way into a nuclear
Armageddon. It really is long past time to lift the shroud of the
mushroom cloud from the international body politic.
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 non-nuclear 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.
Nor can they be used for defence against nuclear-armed rivals. The
mutual vulnerability of such rivals to second-strike retaliatory
capability is so robust for the foreseeable future that any escalation
through the nuclear threshold would be mutual national suicide.
Their only purpose and role, therefore, is mutual deterrence. In order
to deter an attack by a more powerful nuclear adversary, a nuclear armed
state must convince its stronger opponent of the ability and will to
use nuclear weapons if attacked. But if the attack does occur,
escalating to nuclear weapons will worsen the scale of military
devastation even for the side initiating nuclear strikes. Because the
stronger party believes this, the existence of nuclear weapons may add
an extra element of caution, but does not guarantee immunity for the
weaker party. If Mumbai or Delhi was hit by another major terrorist
attack which India believed had Pakistan connections, the pressure for
some form of retaliation could overwhelm any caution about Pakistan
having nuclear weapons.
Limited India-Pakistan war
The putative security benefits of nuclear deterrence have to be assessed
against the real risks, costs and constraints, including human and
system errors. Modelling by atmospheric scientists shows that a limited,
regional India-Pakistan nuclear war using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs each
would, in addition to direct blast, heat and radiation deaths, severely
disrupt global food production and markets and cause a nuclear
war-induced famine that kills up to a billion people around the world.
The extra caution induced by the bomb means that the subcontinent’s
nuclearisation raised the threshold of tolerance of Pakistan’s hostile
mischief, like provocations on the Line of Control and cover for
cross-border terrorism. Yet, India did not need to buy deterrence
against China. The best available evidence shows that China’s nuclear
weapons, doctrine, posture and deployment patterns are designed neither
to coerce others nor to fight a nuclear war with the expectation of
winning, but solely to counter any attempt at nuclear blackmail.
The role of nuclear weapons in having preserved the long peace of the
Cold War is debatable. How do we assess the relative weight and potency
of nuclear weapons, west European integration, and west European
democratisation as explanatory variables in that long peace? There is no
evidence that either side had the intention to attack but was deterred
from doing so by the other side’s nuclear weapons. Moscow’s dramatic
territorial expansion across eastern Europe behind Soviet Red Army lines
took place in the years of U.S. atomic monopoly, 1945–49. Conversely,
the Soviet Union imploded after, although not because of, gaining
strategic parity.
Historical evidence
To those who nonetheless profess faith in the essential logic of nuclear
deterrence, a simple question: are you prepared to prove your faith by
supporting the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran in order to
contribute to the peace and stability of the Middle East, which
presently has only one nuclear-armed state?
It is equally contestable that nuclear weapons buy immunity for small
states against attack by the powerful. The biggest elements of caution
in attacking North Korea — if anyone has such intention — lies in
uncertainty about how China would respond, followed by worries about the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s conventional capability to hit
populated parts of South Korea. Pyongyang’s puny arsenal of useable
nuclear weapons is a distant third factor in the deterrence calculus.
Against the contestable claims of utility, there is considerable
historical evidence that we averted a nuclear catastrophe during the
Cold War as much owing to good luck as wise management. The 1962 Cuban
missile crisis is the most graphic example of this. Australia’s most
respected strategic analyst, former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Dibb,
argues that Moscow and Washington also came close to a nuclear war in
1983. Frighteningly, Washington was not even aware of this scare at the
time and any nuclear war then would have used much more destructive
firepower than in 1962.
Compared to the sophistication and reliability of the command and
control systems of the two Cold War rivals, those of some of the
contemporary nuclear-armed states are dangerously frail and brittle.
Nor do nuclear weapons buy defence on the cheap: the Arihant cannot substitute for the loss of the Sindhurakshak.
They can lead to the creation of a national security state with a
premium on governmental secretiveness and reduced public accountability.
In terms of opportunity costs, heavy military expenditure amounts to
stealing from the poor. Nuclear weapons do not help to combat India’s
real threats of Maoist insurgency, terrorism, poverty, illiteracy,
malnutrition and corruption. Across the border especially, there is the
added risk of proliferation to extremist elements through leakage,
theft, state collapse and state capture.
NPT
The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) has kept the nuclear
nightmare at bay for 45 years. The number of countries with nuclear
weapons is still, just, in single digit. There has been substantial
progress in reducing the numbers of nuclear warheads. But the threat is
still acute with a combined stockpile of 17,000 nuclear weapons, 2,000
of them on high alert. The NPT’s three-way bargain between
non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses is under strain. The
Conference on Disarmament cannot agree on a work plan. The Comprehensive
Test-Ban Treaty has not entered into force. Negotiations on a fissile
materials cut-off treaty are no nearer to starting. The export control
regime was damaged by the India–U.S. civil nuclear agreement.
The net result? The world is perched precariously on the edge of the
nuclear precipice. As long as anyone has nuclear weapons, others will
want them; as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be used again
some day by design, accident, miscalculation or rogue launch; any
nuclear exchange anywhere would have catastrophic consequences for the
whole world. We need authoritative road maps to walk us back from the
nuclear cliff to the relative safety of a progressively, less-heavily
nuclearised, and eventually, a denuclearised world.
Our goal should be to make the transition from a world in which nuclear
weapons are seen by some countries as central to maintaining security,
to one where they become increasingly marginal, and eventually entirely
unnecessary. Like chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction,
nuclear weapons too cannot be disinvented. But like them, nuclear
weapons too can be controlled, regulated, restricted and outlawed under
an international regime that ensures strict compliance through effective
and credible inspection, verification and enforcement.
(Ramesh Thakur is director of the Centre for Nuclear
Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Australian National University. The
article is based on a paper presented at the “Arms Control and Strategic
Stability” conference in Beijing, August 8–9.)
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