Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Similarly, it is still quite difficult to evaluate the parameters in the China-India-Pakistan trianglethat began to take shape at the end of the last decade.India set off its first peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974. After that, it set off a series of explosionsof a number of warheads that could be delivered to targets on the territory of Pakistan and China.In 1995, India’s Rao government was going to carry out a series of nuclear tests, but changed itsmind under pressure from the international community. 89 India’s nuclear explosions in 1998 werefilliped by Pakistan’s testing of its Ghauri medium-range missile, which has a range of 1,500 km;this missile could hit 26 Indian large cities and the major part of nuclear facilities in India. SergeiOborotov writes that “Ghauri with a nuclear warhead evoked the long-forgotten feeling of vulnerabilityto Pakistan among Indians.” 90 Later, Brajesh Mishra, national security advisor to India’sPrime Minister Vajpayee, recalled: “We had to show a credible deterrent capability not only to theoutside world, but to our own people.” 91In the late 1980s, India was already sure that Pakistan had nuclear weapons, and thought thatPakistan had acquired those weapons with the active assistance of China and the connivance ofthe United States. 92 At that time, with Rajiv Gandhi’s government in power, India accelerated theimplementation of its military nuclear and missile programs; at the same time, Rajiv Gandhi presentedhis gradual global nuclear disarmament plan to the UN. 93Today, the only perceivable way to study the problem of securing strategic stability in the polygonalnuclear configurations is the consistent contemplation of the dyad relationship, with ananalysis of their perception by the other nuclear actors in the hexagon (or the heptagon). The followingstep is a contemplation of the relations within the triangle with a subsequent transition tothe quadrangle and to succeeding structures.We may assume with a high degree of confidence that every time a state’s leaders, political elitesand military commanders begin to digest the main strategic stability principles related to understandingthe entirety of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons—including the degree towhich it is possible to control military actions when the use of nuclear warheads is implied—thatthey do so from the outset.The case of India and Pakistan showed that the experience of two nuclear superpowers who atsome point had gotten over a series of extremely dangerous crises that could have resulted in theuse of nuclear weapons, was difficult to learn. (In general, most politicians are not able to learnfrom others’ experiences and mistakes.)The 1999 Kargil conflict convincingly proved the inconsistency of the theoretical and rather hypotheticalassumptions of those who believed that possession of nuclear weapons by two antagonistsincreases their temperance in using military force long before they reach nuclear threshold. Overthe course of the Kargil conflict, India had to use up to ten divisions of its ground forces supportedby strike aircraft. It had to deal with about 1,000 mujahedeen who found their way from theterritory of Pakistan to the Kargil sector in the northern part of the Indian states of Jammu andKashmir. The invaders included representatives of Pakistan’s regular armed forces. Indian troopshad to fight with Mujahedeen troops in extreme mountain conditions, where artillery, armoredvehicles and even aviation, as a rule, did not provide any decisive advantage.46Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions
In the course of the conflict, all the armed forces of the two sides were on the alert. The fighting inthe region lasted for more than two and a half months and. As Vladimir Sotnikov rightly notes, itwas actually a “large military confrontation between the two long-standing geopolitical adversaries.”94In 2001 and the first half of 2002, India and Pakistan repeatedly approached the nuclear threshold.In that respect, the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 was a verystrong impetus. It happened notwithstanding the fact that both countries were at that time part ofthe antiterrorist coalition led by the United States. In a number of instances, both sides urged theuse of nuclear weapons.A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could have ramifications even beyond the deathsof millions of people in South Asia, which would be a very serious shock to all mankind, includingRussia. With a high degree of probability, this would result in heavy radiological fallout onthe territory of Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, with severe after-effects onpeople’s lives, the environment, and agriculture.The evaluation of the possible ecological and climatic consequences of a use of nuclear weaponsby India and Pakistan against each other should be based on the assumption that, as prominentRussian expert Alexander Ginsburg notes, they would be considerably different from large-scaleatmospheric changes and subsequent ecological disasters, which had been studied in the 1980s aspart of the analysis of the nuclear-winter phenomenon. These differences result from the mountainousterrain and high density of the population in the region of possible use of nuclear weaponsby both sides. Meanwhile, the aggregate yield of the nuclear warheads possessed by both sidesis relatively low, compared to that of the former USSR and the United States historically, and thatof the Russian Federation and the United States today. According to the estimates of Ginsburg,the aggregate TNT-equivalent yield would be about 1 megaton. As the author concludes, despitethe peculiarities of the situation in the region, “it may be convincingly assumed that local andregional atmospheric and environmental effects may be much more detrimental to the life of thepopulation and the demographic situation in the region than the direct damage caused by nuclearexplosions.”No experts doubt that in the past 10 to 12 years, Iran has established a technological basis forcreating both civilian and military missiles. Many experts have long ago noticed that the seriesof medium-range missile tests conducted by Iran could make military and strategic sense only ifsuch missiles were equipped with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), primarily with nuclearwarheads.There is no sense in equipping ballistic missiles of that class with conventional warheads—the ratiobetween the cost of a destroyed target and the cost of the missile itself would be very low. Theavailability of such missiles without nuclear warheads in the military arsenal would have zero effectfrom a political point of view, and would hardly strengthen the country’s status. And it shouldbe once again emphasized that in many instances, status can play a decisive role in the acquisitionof nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles by a particular country.Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 47
Page 1: Ensuring StrategicStability in the
Page 5 and 6: This paper was commissioned by the
Page 7 and 8: Chapter 13:Challenges of Limiting A
Page 9 and 10: Kokoshin, who has spent decades hel
Page 11 and 12: Ensuring that there is no such gap
Page 13 and 14: The course toward creation of the i
Page 15 and 16: The author is grateful to the follo
Page 17 and 18: In the current context, many call i
Page 19 and 20: associated with the missile defense
Page 24 and 25: ut cause serious concern and anxiet
Page 26 and 27: Chapter 2: On the Principles and Pa
Page 28 and 29: differ considerably from test-launc
Page 30 and 31: Strategic stability threats also in
Page 32 and 33: Chapter 3: The Challenges of Ensuri
Page 34 and 35: counter-assault requires a highly e
Page 36 and 37: Chapter 5: The Goal of Preventing E
Page 38 and 39: (MWS), space surveillance systems (
Page 40 and 41: Chapter 7: Nuclear Deterrence as a
Page 42 and 43: Chapter 8: A Set of Measures for En
Page 44 and 45: Some smart representatives of the U
Page 46 and 47: primarily resulted in the capabilit
Page 48 and 49: Mobility, in combination with the u
Page 50 and 51: Chapter 10: Challenges of Non-Proli
Page 54 and 55: A much more realistic scenario impl
Page 56 and 57: combat readiness of all three compo
Page 58 and 59: volume of China’s GDP, dynamics o
Page 60 and 61: From time to time, the UK faces str
Page 62 and 63: Chapter 14: The Role of Imbalances
Page 64 and 65: located far away from densely popul
Page 66 and 67: List of AbbreviationsACV: armored c
Page 68 and 69: End Notes1. Critics claim that the
Page 70 and 71: different methods of scientific res
Page 72 and 73: idea known to Brezhnev, but it was
Page 74 and 75: 98. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientis
Page 76 and 77: 70Ensuring Strategic Stability in t
Page 78: Belfer Center for Science and Inter

Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?