Under Fair Use from <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58170-2002Jan16.html">The Washington Post</a>:
<center><b><font size="+1">For India, Deterrence May Not Prevent War</font></center></b>
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 17, 2002; Page A01
NEW DELHI, Jan. 16 -- After India and Pakistan startled the world by testing nuclear devices in 1998, the leaders of both nations insisted that their mutual possession of nuclear weaponry would deter them from going to war in the same way it ultimately did for the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Now, that thinking appears to have vaporized in India. Senior officials have said they are actively considering sending troops across the border should Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, fail to follow through on his pledge to crack down on Muslim extremists that India accuses of terrorism. Over the past month, India has deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, along with heavy artillery and short-range ballistic missile batteries, along its border with Pakistan.
Although Pakistan has warned that any Indian military action would bring a forceful response, India's leaders appear undaunted. They say a conventional conflict between the two nations would not necessarily spiral into a nuclear exchange, suggesting that the Cold War deterrence theory applies differently to South Asia in the 21st century than it did to the superpowers of the 20th century.
That attitude has alarmed diplomats and nuclear weapons specialists, who worry that the rival nations, which have fought three wars since becoming independent in 1947, are playing a dangerous game that could quickly escalate out of control. Nuclear strikes on South Asia's most populous cities would kill tens of millions of people. And unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, which had up to 30 minutes to react to a suspected nuclear missile launch before impact, India and Pakistan would have less than eight minutes, given their proximity.
<u>Nevertheless, an Indian official said military planners are confident that a war between the two nations could be limited to a short, nonnuclear fight.</u> "We would not resort to nuclear weapons," the official said. "And we do not envision striking [Pakistan] in a way that would lead them to use their nuclear weapons."
Officials and analysts said that if India chose to go to war, it almost certainly would not mount a broad attack on Pakistani positions along the countries' 1,800-mile border. Instead, they said, India would focus its strikes on guerrilla training camps and military facilities that it believes are used by extremists.
"There is scope for a limited war," said India's army chief, Gen. Sunderajan Padmanabhan.
The aim of such a war would not be to capture and hold territory, but to convince the Pakistani government that support for terrorist organizations can have dire consequences, Indian analysts said.
<u>These analysts said Indian commanders believe that selective strikes across the border likely would trigger a strong response from Pakistan, but not a nuclear volley.</u>
"There is a growing feeling that we will not be deterred by the nuclear shield of Pakistan," said Commodore Uday Bhaskar, deputy director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, a research organization affiliated with the Indian military. "India's way of looking at this is that we're not threatening Pakistan's core interests, so they would have no incentive to launch their nuclear weapons."
India has pledged not to use its nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Although Pakistan has not made the same commitment, Pakistani officials have said they do not envision a war morphing into a nuclear confrontation.
"It's something that I think one should not even consider," said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, Pakistan's chief government spokesman. "Pakistan and India are responsible nations."
Western military analysts estimate that India has 50 to 100 nuclear warheads, while Pakistan has 30 to 45. Both nations possess short-range missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
For Pakistan, nuclear weapons have helped to make up for a significant disadvantage in conventional forces. India has more than 1.3 million active-duty soldiers compared with more than 600,000 in Pakistan. India also has more than a 2 to 1 advantage in combat aircraft as well as significantly more tanks, artillery and ships.
Indian military leaders have said they do not fear Pakistan's nuclear arsenal because they believe that India, given its geographic size, could weather a first strike from Pakistani missiles, which do not have the range to hit India's southern and eastern cities. They also contend that India would survive a first strike with enough of its warheads intact to mount a retaliatory attack that would hit all of Pakistan's major cities, which are within range of India's missiles.
"We could take a strike, survive and then hit back," Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said in a recent interview with the Hindustan Times. "Pakistan would be finished."
As a consequence, Bhaskar said, Pakistan would not use its nuclear weapons unless an Indian military strike was so severe that Pakistan's survival as a nation was threatened. "It would be like committing suicide," he said.
<u>Analysts said Indian commanders also have been emboldened to engage in a conventional war by a 1999 invasion by Pakistani-backed guerrillas in the Kargil mountains, along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistani-controlled portions.</u> In that conflict -- the largest clash between any two nuclear powers and the first major bout of fighting between the countries since the 1998 nuclear tests -- analysts said Pakistan reasoned that it could engage in battles along the border and that India would not mount a large-scale retaliation because of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
"The last two and a half years have given [New] Delhi time to reflect upon the lessons of Kargil," said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. "India has realized that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are useless for anything other than blackmail."
Now, he said, <u>Indian leaders have decided that "they will not be blackmailed."</u>
Despite the bellicose talk in New Delhi, analysts said, the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons has tempered India's military plans. Instead of raising the prospect of a full-scale conventional war, with ground forces rumbling into Pakistan, officials here have described the military action under consideration as "targeted" and "limited."
"Nuclear weapons have pushed the level of conflict down in South Asia," said Stephen P. Cohen, a specialist on the subcontinent at the Brookings Institution. "Both sides are exploring the fuzzy lines between a very low-intensity conflict and a conventional war."
The two nations are intimately familiar with low-grade war. For the past several years, Indian and Pakistani troops have traded small-arms and artillery fire across the Line of Control. In recent months, the level of fighting has escalated dramatically, with each side reporting double-digit casualties every few days.
"They've had years of sub-conventional conflict," said a Western diplomat in New Delhi. "To an extent, they know how to fight a limited war."
Even so, nuclear weapons specialists said they are concerned by reports that both countries have made their nuclear-capable ballistic missiles ready for prompt use. Western intelligence agencies also have noticed an above-average level of activity at nuclear installations in both countries, but analysts said that could be the result of efforts to redeploy and safeguard weapons, which are believed to be stored unassembled during peacetime.
"The danger is not that either side intends to use nuclear weapons, but that a miscalculation could occur that leads to their release," said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We may be in a situation where nuclear warheads are being assembled and moved. That raises the possibility of an accident. If that happened, would the country that experienced the accident know what happened? Might they interpret it as a strike and retaliate?"
Officials in both countries dismiss chances of an accidental launch, saying they have taken multiple safety precautions. But several nuclear experts said they are not convinced those measures will work.
"India has not fought a full-scale war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan before," said Praful Bidwai, co-author of a book titled "South Asia on a Short Fuse."
"Given the history of these two nations, any conflict can easily get out of control," he said. "People who think we don't need to worry about nuclear weapons are living in denial."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
