Disarmament Scenarios

No First Use

No Backtracking on No First Use by India

by Swadesh M Rana
Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, New Delhi

Unless deliberately intended as a signal to China, India is not likely to abandon a No First Use of any of its nuclear weapons currently envisaged to be in three digits as sufficient for a credible minimum deterrent. As for now, this is the dominant strain in the policy debate sparked by to reports that Pakistan has more nuclear weapons than its officially claimed 60.

“The country may have to revisit its “No First Use” (NFU) policy in the light of reports from some credible US sources that Pakistan may have an arsenal of 90 nuclear weapons and may be building up further stocks,” General Deepak Kapoor, the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army was quoted as saying on September 2, 2009. He was commenting on a report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) that the Pakistani arsenal could be as large as 70-90 warheads.

Around the same time, the US Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) highlighted the qualitative and quantitative changes in Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and intentions. "Pakistan is likely supplementing or replacing its current uranium-based nuclear weapon arsenal with plutonium-based weapons which will be more destructive and deliverable,” said a press report by ISIS in May 2009. The FAS and ISIS estimates became public along with a report of the US Congressional Research Services that Pakistan is adding to the list of circumstances under which it would be willing to use nuclear weapons against India.

In the ensuing strategic debate in India, few remembered a public expression of interest by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari in adopting a No First Use policy towards India. In a statement that surprised strategic analysts both in Pakistan and India, Zardari had said in video televised media event in November 2008 that Pakistan would “most definitely” not be the first to use atomic weapons in a possible conflict. Kamal Matinuddin, a Lieutenant General privy to Pakistan’s nuclear programme prior to his not so far back retirement, swiftly reacted to the President’s “off-the-cuff” remarks to label them as "not fully informed or completely aware of the stated Pakistan's nuclear doctrine”. Though it continues to remain undeclared, a known tenet of Pakistan’s strategic doctrine is to offset India’s superiority in conventional arms and manpower with its nuclear capability and a first strike option even in the face of a conventional conflict with India.

Almost a year after that open disagreement between an un-uniformed and elected President and a recently out of uniform general of the army, the public exchange has re-emerged in one of the growing list of reasons to divest President Zardari of his role as the supreme commander of the armed forces. Citing a survey by the Washington-based International Republican Institute (IRI), a Pakistani newspapers reported on Oct 31, 2009 that only about 2 in 10 Pakistani’s have a favorable opinion about President Zardari while close to 9 out of 10 hold the institution of the Pakistan Army in the highest esteem.

The latest uncertainty over the real or potential decision-makers in Pakistan notwithstanding, General Kapoor’s remarks on revisiting India’s commitment to NFU were promptly addressed by a key architect of the Indian Strategic Doctrine formulated in 1999 and officially adopted in 2003. “When NFU was formulated there were no assumptions on the size of the Pakistani arsenal. The doctrine stands by itself irrespective of the size of the potential enemy’s arsenal. There is a second component of the nuclear doctrine: the credible minimum deterrent… that may call for some adjustments if the potential enemy’s arsenal were to increase,” wrote K Subrahmanyam in the Indian Express on 8 September. Headded. “Even that is not a necessity from the point of view of deterrence, but a question of influencing the perception of the adversary.”

Subrahmanyam suggests that the best short-term counter measures to respond to an increase in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons now will be to improve India’s surveillance and warning capabilities, the mobility of its land-based missiles, and survivability of its airborne retaliatory force. India has already reformulated its NFU commitment in 2002 to let it be known that it would retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of an attack by chemical or biological weapons. The reformulation followed the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 and preceded the adoption of India’ Strategic Doctrine.

“The NFU is like a tweed coat that does not get dated,” comments an insider with a longstanding grasp of India’s nuclear policy and postures. The coat may not be dated but the accompanying accessories may require an update to complete the ensemble, according to one of four former strategic force commanders to hold that office since it was instituted in 2004 to operationalize the Indian Strategic Doctrine.

Relatively new in India’s multilayer process of doctrine formulation, threat perception, military preparedness and theatre operations, the strategic force commanders see the survivability of India’s nuclear deterrent to a first strike as a cardinal pre-requisite of collateral demands of NFU. A 60% probability of survival is not sufficient. A Standard Operating Procedure to retaliate on warning or attack may not work when there is not enough time for instant communication between the custodian and the controller of the nuclear arsenal. War-gaming scenarios may carry an unacceptable margin of error in timing and targeting in actual operations.

In principle, country specific war-gaming would ensure greater invulnerability and higher survivability of India’s nuclear deterrent. Realistic scenarios with a narrower margin of error, nonetheless, are more attainable in preparing for a first strike by Pakistan which is not committed to a No First Use and can be reached for a retaliatory strike in less than 10 minutes.

It would take a very different war-gaming exercise to plan a retaliatory strike against China with its commitment to No First Use. China is looming large in the military planner’s rethink of India’s NFU. There is a risk of miscalculation by India in implementing its Launch on Warning procedure emanating from the Chinese views on signaling as expostulated by Zhao Xijun, China’s Strategic Army Commander from 1996 to 2003. Often cited in different excerpts, one is this one:

“Shake the enemy psychologically, make the enemy’s war volition waver, weaken the enemy commander’s operational determination, disturb the enemy psyche and public psyche, and achieve [the objective of] 'conquering without fighting.”

Disturbing enough by itself, such an openly acknowledged tactic of dealing with an adversary gets rather intimidating when placed in the context of the growing number of caveats introduced by China to its voluntarily assumed obligation to NFU which is unverifiable until violated.

In the absence of an officially documented listing and chronology of their context either by China or by India, open literature provides a reasonable sampling of at least four situations in which China may discard its NFU commitment with or without prior warning:

As a response to a conventional attack on or a threat to attack China’s major strategic assets including its nuclear facilities.
To deter an external military intervention in Taiwan in negation of China’s avowed policy of reunifying it with the motherland.
To avoid an imminent defeat of China’s People Liberation Army during a conventional armed conflict including any over Taiwan.
To go beyond the self-imposed constraints of NFU for dealing with a more complex, more dangerous strategic environment.

While Indian strategic thinkers and military planners may draw some cold comfort from the remoteness of a possibility of their getting caught in a Taiwan related scenario, there is an ominous opacity about the other situations in which China is ready to disavow NFU. The unthinkable has been thought through in this context with a closer look at likely targets for a retaliatory nuclear strike to inflict unacceptable damage after absorbing a first strike by China if it departs from its NFU.

The Three Gorges Dam is an obvious target that was much in the news in the earlier debates in Formosa in the eighties over deterring China from annexing Taiwan by force. Expected to annually generate 84 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity that may be equivalent of what can be produced by 15 to 18 nuclear plants, the Three Gorges Dam figures both in Chinese calculations of by-passing its NFU to protect its strategic assets and its adversaries war-gaming exercises to deter China from doing so. As the world's largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam in central China's Hubei province is designed to harness the world's third longest waterway, the Yangtze River. Home to roughly a third of the nation's 1.3 billion people, the Yangtze River valley produces 40 percent of the nation’s grain, 70 percent of its rice, and 40 percent of China’s total industrial output.

“In the face of war, the Three Gorges dam would place the military and politicians in a dilemma” says Yang Lang in “Yangtze! Yangtze”. “If the water is left in the reservoir, a disaster of massive proportions could occur were an enemy to successfully bomb the dam. If, however, the water is let out of the reservoir, to mobilize for a possible attack, there would be serious economic consequences and the possibility that no attack would take place.” With a catastrophic disruption in traffic by roads, railways, navigation routes, and electricity black outs, severe problems in troop mobility and supply lines would be inevitable in the Hubei province, eastern China and Western Hunan. At a maximum level of 574 ft above level when in the reservoir, the water would cause a havoc whether let out in case of an imminent attack or left therein to burst forth under attack.

Thinking through the unthinkable is as much a part of war scenarios as thinking about strategies of winning a war without fighting it is for doctrines of nuclear deterrence. In strategic terms, India’s NFU is essentially an expression of its deterrent capability to inflict unacceptable damage on the first striker. With Pakistan holding on to its first strike option, and China putting caveats on its NFU, India is presently locked in an adversarial relationship with two nuclear adversaries not in an adversarial relation with each other. All the three are caught up in a self supporting spiral of escalation with re-formulation of doctrines to ensure the survivability of their strategic assets including nuclear arsenals, country specific war scenarios to reduce the margin of error in a first strike or a retaliatory strike and public posturing to signal their determination not to blink when stared at.

Ironically this is happening at a time when the more than a decade old global stalemate over nuclear disarmament is showing some promise of a breakthrough with the April 2009 Joint Statement in Prague by President Dmitriy Medvedev and President Barack Obama. India, Pakistan and China are all members of the Global Zero dedicated to the elimination of all nuclear weapons starting with deep reductions in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Why would India wish to revisit NFU now when there is a renewed interest “to manage down the salience of nuclear weapons to defense and at the same time to manage down the number of nuclear weapons," to quote the mission statement of the High Level UK Parliamentary Group on Multilateral Disarmament established on 29 October 2009 to advocate support for the Prague statement?

If de-glamorizing nuclear weapons becomes a step towards de-legtimizing them, this is the time for India to look for a larger number of voluntary declarations on NFU. This is no time to revoke the NFU unless intended as a signal to China, only to make the debate more transparent.