Asian Stability

It has been six months since the Clinton Administration started talks with India and Pakistan to head off a dangerous nuclear competition in south Asia and the United States has little to show for these efforts. The prospects are slim that India and Pakistan will embrace the U.S. goal of nuclear 'abolitionism' in south Asia. To reduce nuclear dangers on the subcontinent, the United States needs to pursue a more realistic policy aimed at achieving stability by managing the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan.

The cornerstone of U.S. policy toward the nuclear problem in south Asia has been efforts to convince India and Pakistan to foreswear the production and deployment of nuclear weapons, especially on ballistic missiles, and to adhere to commitments (e.g, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a fissile material cutoff treaty, or FMCT) to make this decision as irreversible as possible. The main premise of this policy is that both India and Pakistan can be convinced that their national security does not require the possession of nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, both countries are likely to reject U.S. entreaties to roll-back their nuclear programs and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapons states. Indian and Pakistani incentives to embrace the goal of zero nuclear weapons are weak and the United States and the West lack sufficient carrots or sticks to change their security calculations. Moreover, even if the United States were successful in securing Indian and Pakistani adherence to the CTBT and the FMCT, both sides are likely to possess the nuclear weapons material, warhead designs and delivery systems to field nuclear forces within the next two to five years.

If left to their own devices, both India and Pakistan are likely to deploy nuclear weapons and adopt doctrines, force structures, and practices that are highly destabilizing. Equally worrisome, fiscal constraints in both countries will limit investment in technologies that could help keep forces from being put on a 'hair trigger', and short missile flight times will compress decision-making time in crises. Combined with tensions over Kashmir and Pakistan's incentives to preempt due to its fear of losing a conventional war, the subcontinent will be ripe for miscalculations that would significantly increase the risk of nuclear war. By breaking the longstanding taboo on the use of nuclear weapons, nuclear war on the subcontinent would deal a devastating blow to the global nonproliferation regime as well as wreak significant havoc.

If this is the most plausible long-term scenario for south Asia, it would behoove the United States to use whatever influence it has to shape a more stable future for the region. Yet, as long as the United States clings to its current policy, it cannot seriously engage India or Pakistan in a dialogue on how to maintain peace and stability as nuclear-weapons states. In so doing, the United States is missing an opportunity to influence Indian and Pakistani nuclear decisions before they are set in concrete.

The United States and the other nuclear weapons states need to urge India and Pakistan to embrace the goal of nuclear stability at the lowest possible level of forces. Both countries will need a road map to reach this final destination. As a first step, the United States should talk to India and Pakistan about how to avoid nuclear doctrines, force structures, employment policies, and operations that would be destabilizing. In addition, the United States should facilitate discussions of arms control and confidence building measures that would foster stability. It would also be useful to discuss assistance the United States could provide to help both countries deploy safe, secure, and survivable nuclear forces. These discussions should be supplemented with incentives to get both countries to do more than listen politely to U.S. pleas. In particular, the current nuclear powers should involve India and Pakistan in serious multilateral discussions on radical cuts in nuclear arms.

Some will object to opening this dialogue. They will argue that any actions that imply acceptance of India's and Pakistan's nuclear status would unravel the global nonproliferation regime and reward irresponsible behavior. These fears are overstated. India and Pakistan were not members of this regime prior to their nuclear testing and indeed it was an open secret that both had covert nuclear capabilities.

Moreover, virtually all countries around the world have a very strong stake in preserving the effectiveness of the NPT, independent of Pakistani and Indian nuclear behavior and the American reaction. Those rogue states considering the nuclear option will be driven primarily by their own national security requirements, and are unlikely to assume that the United States will adopt a 'one size fits all' response to their decisions to go nuclear. Simply put, those who argue that dealing with the reality of a nuclear Pakistan and India will gut the NPT misunderstand both the resiliency of the regime and the factors that drive countries to acquire nuclear weapons.

As the zero nuclear option discussions drag on inconclusively with both India and Pakistan, it is becoming clearer in some quarters that roll-back is an unobtainable goal for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, there are those who remain in a state of denial, preventing Washington from being taken seriously in either Islamabad or Delhi when we talk about the need for stability. These high priests of nonproliferation theology view the Indian and Pakistani decisions to conduct nuclear tests as the moral equivalent of original sin. They are unwilling to countenance any action that would imply forgiveness, but their conviction that India and Pakistan will relinquish their nuclear weapons is wishful thinking. These true believers seem prepared to sacrifice meaningful progress toward reducing the risk of nuclear war in south Asia on the altar of ideological purity. Such zealotry is both strategically and morally indefensible. It is not too late for the United States to deal with the world as it is in south Asia rather than the way we would like it to be.

Dr. Andrew C. Winner is a senior staff member of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Mass.
Richard Sokolsky is a fellow at the RAND Corporation. The views expressed are solely those of the authors.