The revised US nuclear posture announced by President Donald Trump on Friday, 2 February, seeks to re-introduce Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) to ostensibly enhance the American deterrence profile against major nuclear weapon powers (read: Russia and China).
The Trump administration plans to lower the yield of some SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) warheads to a low-yield, akin to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs. They also plan bring back the submarine-launched cruise missile – the nuclear-tipped Tomahawk – to operational deployment.
Since the end of the Cold War in December 1991, when the Soviet Union became ‘former’ and imploded, the global nuclear framework has undergone a significant change from the original five (USA, USSR, UK, France and China). New nuclear powers have emerged, both overt and covert, and the current nuclear order includes India, Pakistan, North Korea and an opaque Israel.
Pakistan is a distinctive case study in the global nuclear order and has used the apocalyptic capability to further its investment in terror. In other words, Pakistan may be credited with introducing the concept of NWET – Nuclear Weapon-Enabled Terror.
China played a major part in enabling Pakistan’s nuclear weapon and missile program, and at the time, North Korea was part of this clandestine transfer of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) technology and material.
Consequently, Rawalpindi, the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Pakistan Army, is the operative player in the management and use of the nuclear weapon. An elaborate ‘charade’ has been created to suggest that the nuclear command and control vests with the elected civilian political leadership, but as former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif learnt to their dismay, this was make-believe for the benefit of the US-led Western interlocutors.
These signals and movement of assets were detected by the US and the May 1990 Indo-Pak nuclear crisis was deemed to have been averted by the visit of a special US emissary, Robert Gates, who later became US Defence Secretary.
In the intervening quarter-century, Pakistan has added another strand to its distinctive nuclear profile – it is the only country to pursue both the uranium and plutonium path to acquire fissile material.
As a result, most estimates aver that at this pace of production (again enabled by Chinese assistance), the Pakistani nuclear arsenal will grow to 350-400 nuclear warheads by 2022 . This will make Rawalpindi the dubious custodian of the world’s fourth-largest arsenal, after the US, Russia and China.
Indian resolve and restraint prevailed and the then-US president Bill Clinton chastised Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Army for trying to ‘use nuclear weapons’ to change borders.
Yet Pakistan has created a perception that India’s conventional military superiority can only be met by Rawalpindi’s investment in tactical nuclear weapons, and this formulation alas, has not been as firmly rejected by the major powers as being invalid and dangerous for regional and global stability.
The TNW has become the centrepiece of this untenable but assiduously pursued strategy of Rawalpindi, and Trump’s decision to bring back this sub-strategic capability in its arsenal could have a very damaging impact on the South Asian nuclear scenario.
The nuclear weapon must be quarantined in the silo of its originally envisaged ‘core’ mission – to deter a similar capacity of the current/potential adversary.
President Trump has flicked the latch of the Pandora’s box, and the negative fallout may well be in South Asia.
(The writer is a leading expert on strategic affairs. He is currently Director, Society for Policy Studies. He can be reached @theUdayB. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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