February 18, 2015
War and Peace in the Asian Theatre:
Pakistan, India, China and the United States
Zia Mian
Director, Project on Peace and Security in South Asia
Program on Science & Global Security, Princeton University
War and Peace in the Asian Theatre:
Pakistan, India, China and the United States
Zia Mian
Director, Project on Peace and Security in South Asia
Program on Science & Global Security, Princeton University
Minutes of the 19th Meeting of the 73rd Year
Presiding Officer: Owen Leach
Invocation lead by: Joe Johnson
Preceding week’s minutes read by: Bruno Walmsley
Guests and visitors
Member Guest
Marge D’Amico Toby Tuckman
Harvey Rothberg Jack Smiley
Larry Parsons Everett Klein
Scott McVay wife Hella McVay
Today’s attendance: 95
Next meeting: Wednesday, February 25, in the Convocation Room, Friend Center, corner of Olden and William Streets
Next week’s topic: “Public Art in American Communities” / Mark Wethli, Professor of Art, Bowdoin College
The meeting was gaveled to order at 10:15 AM by President Owen Leach. Scott McVay introduced the speaker.
________
Today’s lecture was entitled: “War and Peace in the Asian Theatre: Pakistan, India, China, and the United States”
Zia Mian PhD is Director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security
The Program on Science and Global Security, based at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has for more than three decades carried out research and policy analysis and education and training in nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. For its first twenty-five years, it was part of the Princeton University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies (CEES) in the Princeton Engineering School. It joined the Woodrow Wilson School in 2001.
Dr. Mian’s Project on Peace and Security in South Asia was set up in 1997 to provide independent technical and policy analysis to inform the South Asian nuclear debate and develop policy proposals that could contribute to easing and ending the nuclear confrontation there.
Dr. Mian’s research and teaching focuses on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policy, especially in Pakistan and India, and on issues of nuclear disarmament and peace. Previously, he has taught at Yale University and Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and worked at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge (Mass.), and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad.
He is co-editor of Science & Global Security, an international journal of technical analysis for arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation policy.
His books include:
--Bridging Partition: People's Initiative for Peace between India and Pakistan
Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari, with K. Bhasin, A.H. Nayyar, and M. Tahseen, eds., Orient Longman (New Delhi), 2010.
--Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia by Eqbal Ahmad
Zia Mian, Dohra Ahmad and Iftikhar Ahmad, eds. Oxford University Press (Karachi, 2004).
--Out of the Nuclear Shadow
Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari eds., Zed Press (London), Lokayan and Rainbow Press (New Delhi, 2001). Revised and updated second edition, Oxford University Press (Karachi, 2003).
--Making Enemies, Creating Conflict - Pakistan's Crises of State and Society
Zia Mian and Iftikhar Ahmad, eds., Mashal Press (Lahore, 1997).
--Pakistan's Atomic Bomb and the Search For Security
Zia Mian, ed., Gautam Publishers (Lahore, 1995).
The Presentation
Dr. Mian’s topic was inspired by a set of circumstances that he finds “deeply troubling.” They overlap with both the work his program does on the dangers of nuclear weapons, and his own biography as a person born in Pakistan.
President Obama recently visited India, and was the first U.S. president officially to attend the annual Republic Day parade in Delhi, where to showcase India’s military might, weapons systems roll by the reviewing stand, Soviet-style, while dignitaries receive the salutes of the passing forces. The fact that the president of the United States was, for the first time, taking the salutes of the Indian armed forces, including weapons systems that are nuclear capable, marked a profound moment in the history of South Asia.
In Pakistan there was grave concern about what this meant, and the chief of Pakistan’s army rushed to Beijing for meetings with China’s military and political leadership, after which Pakistan’s foreign minister announced that the president of China would travel to Pakistan, to attend the first Republic Day Parade held in there almost ten years, and he would take the salute. The president of China hasn’t visited Pakistan for almost nine years. The fact that this was the first response to the presence of a U.S. president at India’s military display is emblematic of the cultural process ongoing in Asia: a four-cornered military complex that involves the familiar and worrisome enmity between India and Pakistan (longtime military rivals who have fought four wars, and who have in the most recent several conflicts and disputes threatened the use of nuclear weapons), plus the U.S.–China economic and now military competition.
The reason this is particularly troubling is that we are widely believed to be in a period of hegemonic transition, that is, a fundamental shifting of the world balance power away from the West, and towards the East—some would say, going back to the east after half a millennium—with the rise of China, and the rise of India. We are not prepared intellectually or politically to grasp the complexities of what that transition will actually look like, because we haven’t seen anything like it in at least 500 years.
What connects these two things—a president’s visit, and this structural shift—was expressed by Princeton professor emeritus Robert Gilpin in his book War and Change in World Politics (1981). Hegemonic transitions, in which one world power that sets the world structure is replaced by another world power that resets that structure, have always taken place through great wars. Gilpin speculated at the time that in the twentieth century might constitute an exception, because nuclear weapons for the first time threatened global annihilation, and this fact might keep the next power shift one step short of all-out war. But this was only a hope, not something that comes out of the analysis of history.
We are at the 100th anniversary of the World War I. In Europe it is called The Great War, but it was not merely a European conflict. Fifty to sixty million people were involved in the fighting; 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed, and another 20 million injured. What made it a world war was the fact that the European powers were the political and economic center of gravity of the world order, through their colonial possessions and their ability to trade and shape the decisions of millions of people around the world.
Dr. Mian cited Christopher Clarks’ book’s Sleepwalkers, which recounts the drift into that catastrophic war.
What drove the European powers into war on such and immense and unprecedented scale, which ended several empires, was a combination of politics, economics, great-power status, ambition to be great powers, and accidents--things that no one anticipated. The Great War began with suicide bombers. The people in Sarajevo who killed the Austrian archduke were suicide bombers who believed in radical violence, in the violence of the deed. They operated against a backdrop of governments tied to each other by alliance structures and other geopolitical circumstances. And these suicide bombers were supported by government intelligence services. Things ran out of control. These were short-term shocks to the international system, which should not have led to a bloodbath. But they were unexpected, and triggered unanticipated decisions by individual players that added up to a world war.
So where are we today?
How does the story relate to us? In our own century, the analogy to Sarajevo and the path to great-power war is the violent jihadists in Pakistan.
There are militant groups in Pakistan supported by the Pakistani intelligence service. There are militant groups in Pakistan supported by the Indian intelligence services. (There are even militant groups in Pakistan supported by the U.S. Their members go across the border from Pakistan into Iran.) One can do a thought exercise, after looking at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, a bloodbath that lasted for days. At that time the Indian government showed enormous restraint. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, sought international support to bring pressure on Pakistan to restrain its support for its homegrown radicals; the world understood what India was experiencing and supported India’s cause. What if were to happen again now, under India’s new prime minister from the political party that has just won power, the ultra-hardline, Hindu-nationalist BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], which has always believed in going to war against Pakistan?
The BJP was one of the supporters of a forerunner organization, whose acolyte assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, for betraying India by—in the killer’s mind—allowing the creation of Pakistan out of India’s territory. We now have a party in power in Delhi that for the first time in a generation has a massive popular majority that is historically anti-Chinese. The BJP is committed to a massive military buildup, and an almost belligerent version of Indian nationalism. The BJP has always believed that in the Cold War, India should have made an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union. When the BJP first came to power, the first decision it took was to order the testing of India’s nuclear weapons.
History of the U.S.–India relationship
In part, that position was in response to the fact that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a socialist. The BJP, for its part, was antic-communist, and anti-socialist. What we expect from this present leadership in India is not the kind of restraint that we saw from India over the previous ten years during the crises that India and Pakistan have had. And now the BJP wants to build on the opening that the U.S. has made to India over the last decade and build a strategic alliance between India and the United states to counter the rise of China and help establish India as a great power.
The United States always wanted India to be its partner in South Asia, starting with its independence in 1947. The Indian leadership was not interested. Prime Minister Nehru made a famous visit to Washington and met with Congress, and the U.S. tried to woo India by promising aid. Nehru, a product of the best British colonial education, was enormously disdainful of the United States, and basically made the case that India did not free itself from British rule to become somebody else’s client—in effect, “we want no part of your Cold War.” Nonalignment: we will not take sides in any alliance structures.
So the United States, needful of an ally in South Asia, turned to Pakistan, and the Pakistani army was more than happy to oblige. Starting in the 1950s and through the 1960s, Pakistan became, in its own words, “the most allied ally” of the United States. In exchange, the Pakistanis got vast amounts of military and economic aid. A whole generation of Pakistani officers were trained in U.S. military academies. The entire structure of the Pakistani armed forces was moved away from the old British colonial-army structure and toward the American system. The Pakistan army got a liking for modern weapons and for American ways of doing things, including American ideas of nuclear warfighting.
U.S. Cold War Nuclear Doctrine for South Asia
This is a dark part of American nuclear history. In the Cold War, under President Eisenhower, the presumption was that there would be war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., involving large-scale battlefield use of nuclear weapons in multiple theaters around the world, not just in Europe. The U.S. went to its allies and in many cases put nuclear weapons into those countries. (The U.S. had nuclear weapons in fifty-two countries. In some cases those countries didn’t even know the U.S. had nuclear weapons there.)
The U.S. assured Pakistan that in the event of global war—they assumed that the Soviet Union would come south, toward the Arabian Sea and the Middle East—the U.S. would defend Pakistan, and the presumption was that this would include the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Nuclear war would be fought in Pakistan, and the U.S. would defend their territory. This is what was taught in Pakistan’s military curriculum, starting in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, however, India’s prime minster, Nehru, had his own ideas, and by dint of hard work and violating a number of agreements, India acquired its own nuclear weapons. Through America’s Atoms for Peace program, India was able to get access to nuclear technology for “civilian purposes.” Then in 1974, India took the plutonium created in their reactor and used it to test its first nuclear weapon. This was a clear violation. The United States put sanctions on India and got other countries to create a supplier’s network that banned nuclear trade India. This is the origin of the current nonproliferation treaty regime. India declined to sign (as did Israel).
America Turns Pakistan to India
Under the administration of George W. Bush in the mid 2000s, India reached a deal with the United States in which it was decided that the U.S. would not only cooperate with India’s civil nuclear program but would also support the development of ballistic-missile defense based in India, and would supply dual-use high technology (with both civilian and military applications). America would support India’s space program. All this was called the Joint Steps in Strategic Partnership.
Now we have people in Washington, largely Republicans, who are making the case that the U.S. should actively develop India’s nuclear weapons capability to match that of China. As the U.S. has thought about how to deal with the rise of China, it has embraced India as a strategic partner and sees the need to build up India’s military capability so that India can be a useful partner in deterring and containing the rise of China.
Pakistan Turns from the U.S. to China
The Pakistanis have viewed this growing relationship and are terrified at what the future may look like. An India that has China-level military capability would dwarf anything Pakistan could field. The Pakistanis have increasingly turned to the Chinese, with which they have (as with India) a long history. (Recall that Pakistan diplomacy helped pave the way for Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China.)
The reason Pakistan developed such close ties with China date to the 1965 India–Pakistan war. Pakistan started that war by sending troops into Indian Kashmir, on the presumption that because Pakistan had a military cooperation agreement with the United States, the U.S. would come to their aid and the result would be assured. A colossal mistake: The U.S. had been willing only to defend Pakistan against the Soviet Union. So not only did the U.S. not come to Pakistan’s aid against India, it cut off the supply of war materiel ammunition for the very weapons the U.S. had supplied to Pakistan.
The humiliating failure of this war turned Pakistan to China, which in turn saw their overture against the backdrop of their own 1962 China–India war. In consequence, Pakistan has relied heavily on help from China, including an early gift of 50 kg of weapons-grade enriched uranium to start Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, and other help starting a space program.
The Situation Today
So we have: China supplying skills and technology to Pakistan; America supplying skills and technology to India, accelerating in both countries a great-power-sponsored arms raced with each other; radical Islamist militants trying to trigger a war between Pakistan and India; and the U.S. and China struggling to deal with the problem of hegemonic transition—managing the rise of China in the world order.
All four countries have nuclear weapons:
The Consequences for Tomorrow
Pakistan is developing tactical nuclear missiles (range 60 km) which, because they must be moved close the prospective front to be effective against an incursion by Indian armor, require that launch authority be delegated to battlefield commanders rather than retained at the national level under central control. The danger of tactical use is growing, and if that happens, it is a virtual certainty that “limited tactical nuclear war” which quickly spread to cities. In fact, the current expressed Indian position that if Pakistan uses nuclear weapons, it will retaliate massively against Pakistan cities.
Given this danger, Pakistan is well aware that the U.S. would prefer that it did not have nuclear weapons at all, and is concerned that the U.S. might someday attempt to take these weapons away. There are signs, Dr. Mien said, that U.S. contingency plans have been developed for just such an eventuality.
So we have a massive dilemma (recalling Europe in 1914) where everybody is tied to everybody else, in which Pakistan would turn to China for protection against India and/or the U.S. Today, modern climate models have been combined with nuclear detonation models, and scientists have calculated the consequences of an India–Pakistan nuclear exchange in which only half of their respective arsenals is expended. The incineration of dozens of cities and the resulting long-burning fires would produce so much smoke that it would lower the earth’s atmospheric temperature by 7 to 8 degrees for several years, and by 4 to 5 degrees for perhaps one or two decades. This is colder than the little ice age of 14th century. Along with darkness, most of the ozone layer would be destroyed, subjecting the earth to unprecedented levels of UV radiation and a catastrophic failure of agriculture worldwide. Rice production in China, wheat production in Canada and the United States, and worldwide natural ecological processes, would fail. All this from only half the weapons possessed by India and Pakistan used only against each other.
China, India, and Pakistan have nearly three billion people, nearly half the people in the world. Concern for military budgets has taken precedence over their well being. Pakistan and India have to rely on international-development aid to buy food for its people, so heavily are their resources committed to military buildup.
The priority in all four countries has become war preparation:
India’s and Pakistan’s politicians say, at least in public, that they recognize the danger, but take no steps to reversing their arms races. The other nation is supposed to blink first.
China proclaims that an outdated Cold War-era mentality has no place in the new era and avers its love for peace, yet China has the fastest-growling defense budget in the world.
President Obama has said that the United States imagines a world where nations do not covet the land or resources of others, in which the rules established out of the horrors of war can help us resolve conflicts peacefully and help us prevent the kinds of wars that our forefathers fought. Yet the U.S. military budget plus that of its allies constitutes more than half of the military spending in the whole world. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. has launched the largest modernization of U.S. nuclear forces in the last 50 years. The goal is to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to build new generations of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, nuclear capable bombers, and warheads to be carried by all of these.
We face a century of enormous risk, with enormous consequences. We need to figure out a path forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Jared T. Kieling
Invocation lead by: Joe Johnson
Preceding week’s minutes read by: Bruno Walmsley
Guests and visitors
Member Guest
Marge D’Amico Toby Tuckman
Harvey Rothberg Jack Smiley
Larry Parsons Everett Klein
Scott McVay wife Hella McVay
Today’s attendance: 95
Next meeting: Wednesday, February 25, in the Convocation Room, Friend Center, corner of Olden and William Streets
Next week’s topic: “Public Art in American Communities” / Mark Wethli, Professor of Art, Bowdoin College
The meeting was gaveled to order at 10:15 AM by President Owen Leach. Scott McVay introduced the speaker.
________
Today’s lecture was entitled: “War and Peace in the Asian Theatre: Pakistan, India, China, and the United States”
Zia Mian PhD is Director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security
The Program on Science and Global Security, based at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has for more than three decades carried out research and policy analysis and education and training in nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. For its first twenty-five years, it was part of the Princeton University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies (CEES) in the Princeton Engineering School. It joined the Woodrow Wilson School in 2001.
Dr. Mian’s Project on Peace and Security in South Asia was set up in 1997 to provide independent technical and policy analysis to inform the South Asian nuclear debate and develop policy proposals that could contribute to easing and ending the nuclear confrontation there.
Dr. Mian’s research and teaching focuses on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policy, especially in Pakistan and India, and on issues of nuclear disarmament and peace. Previously, he has taught at Yale University and Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and worked at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge (Mass.), and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad.
He is co-editor of Science & Global Security, an international journal of technical analysis for arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation policy.
His books include:
--Bridging Partition: People's Initiative for Peace between India and Pakistan
Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari, with K. Bhasin, A.H. Nayyar, and M. Tahseen, eds., Orient Longman (New Delhi), 2010.
--Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia by Eqbal Ahmad
Zia Mian, Dohra Ahmad and Iftikhar Ahmad, eds. Oxford University Press (Karachi, 2004).
--Out of the Nuclear Shadow
Zia Mian and Smitu Kothari eds., Zed Press (London), Lokayan and Rainbow Press (New Delhi, 2001). Revised and updated second edition, Oxford University Press (Karachi, 2003).
--Making Enemies, Creating Conflict - Pakistan's Crises of State and Society
Zia Mian and Iftikhar Ahmad, eds., Mashal Press (Lahore, 1997).
--Pakistan's Atomic Bomb and the Search For Security
Zia Mian, ed., Gautam Publishers (Lahore, 1995).
The Presentation
Dr. Mian’s topic was inspired by a set of circumstances that he finds “deeply troubling.” They overlap with both the work his program does on the dangers of nuclear weapons, and his own biography as a person born in Pakistan.
President Obama recently visited India, and was the first U.S. president officially to attend the annual Republic Day parade in Delhi, where to showcase India’s military might, weapons systems roll by the reviewing stand, Soviet-style, while dignitaries receive the salutes of the passing forces. The fact that the president of the United States was, for the first time, taking the salutes of the Indian armed forces, including weapons systems that are nuclear capable, marked a profound moment in the history of South Asia.
In Pakistan there was grave concern about what this meant, and the chief of Pakistan’s army rushed to Beijing for meetings with China’s military and political leadership, after which Pakistan’s foreign minister announced that the president of China would travel to Pakistan, to attend the first Republic Day Parade held in there almost ten years, and he would take the salute. The president of China hasn’t visited Pakistan for almost nine years. The fact that this was the first response to the presence of a U.S. president at India’s military display is emblematic of the cultural process ongoing in Asia: a four-cornered military complex that involves the familiar and worrisome enmity between India and Pakistan (longtime military rivals who have fought four wars, and who have in the most recent several conflicts and disputes threatened the use of nuclear weapons), plus the U.S.–China economic and now military competition.
The reason this is particularly troubling is that we are widely believed to be in a period of hegemonic transition, that is, a fundamental shifting of the world balance power away from the West, and towards the East—some would say, going back to the east after half a millennium—with the rise of China, and the rise of India. We are not prepared intellectually or politically to grasp the complexities of what that transition will actually look like, because we haven’t seen anything like it in at least 500 years.
What connects these two things—a president’s visit, and this structural shift—was expressed by Princeton professor emeritus Robert Gilpin in his book War and Change in World Politics (1981). Hegemonic transitions, in which one world power that sets the world structure is replaced by another world power that resets that structure, have always taken place through great wars. Gilpin speculated at the time that in the twentieth century might constitute an exception, because nuclear weapons for the first time threatened global annihilation, and this fact might keep the next power shift one step short of all-out war. But this was only a hope, not something that comes out of the analysis of history.
We are at the 100th anniversary of the World War I. In Europe it is called The Great War, but it was not merely a European conflict. Fifty to sixty million people were involved in the fighting; 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed, and another 20 million injured. What made it a world war was the fact that the European powers were the political and economic center of gravity of the world order, through their colonial possessions and their ability to trade and shape the decisions of millions of people around the world.
Dr. Mian cited Christopher Clarks’ book’s Sleepwalkers, which recounts the drift into that catastrophic war.
What drove the European powers into war on such and immense and unprecedented scale, which ended several empires, was a combination of politics, economics, great-power status, ambition to be great powers, and accidents--things that no one anticipated. The Great War began with suicide bombers. The people in Sarajevo who killed the Austrian archduke were suicide bombers who believed in radical violence, in the violence of the deed. They operated against a backdrop of governments tied to each other by alliance structures and other geopolitical circumstances. And these suicide bombers were supported by government intelligence services. Things ran out of control. These were short-term shocks to the international system, which should not have led to a bloodbath. But they were unexpected, and triggered unanticipated decisions by individual players that added up to a world war.
So where are we today?
How does the story relate to us? In our own century, the analogy to Sarajevo and the path to great-power war is the violent jihadists in Pakistan.
There are militant groups in Pakistan supported by the Pakistani intelligence service. There are militant groups in Pakistan supported by the Indian intelligence services. (There are even militant groups in Pakistan supported by the U.S. Their members go across the border from Pakistan into Iran.) One can do a thought exercise, after looking at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, a bloodbath that lasted for days. At that time the Indian government showed enormous restraint. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, sought international support to bring pressure on Pakistan to restrain its support for its homegrown radicals; the world understood what India was experiencing and supported India’s cause. What if were to happen again now, under India’s new prime minister from the political party that has just won power, the ultra-hardline, Hindu-nationalist BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], which has always believed in going to war against Pakistan?
The BJP was one of the supporters of a forerunner organization, whose acolyte assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, for betraying India by—in the killer’s mind—allowing the creation of Pakistan out of India’s territory. We now have a party in power in Delhi that for the first time in a generation has a massive popular majority that is historically anti-Chinese. The BJP is committed to a massive military buildup, and an almost belligerent version of Indian nationalism. The BJP has always believed that in the Cold War, India should have made an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union. When the BJP first came to power, the first decision it took was to order the testing of India’s nuclear weapons.
History of the U.S.–India relationship
In part, that position was in response to the fact that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a socialist. The BJP, for its part, was antic-communist, and anti-socialist. What we expect from this present leadership in India is not the kind of restraint that we saw from India over the previous ten years during the crises that India and Pakistan have had. And now the BJP wants to build on the opening that the U.S. has made to India over the last decade and build a strategic alliance between India and the United states to counter the rise of China and help establish India as a great power.
The United States always wanted India to be its partner in South Asia, starting with its independence in 1947. The Indian leadership was not interested. Prime Minister Nehru made a famous visit to Washington and met with Congress, and the U.S. tried to woo India by promising aid. Nehru, a product of the best British colonial education, was enormously disdainful of the United States, and basically made the case that India did not free itself from British rule to become somebody else’s client—in effect, “we want no part of your Cold War.” Nonalignment: we will not take sides in any alliance structures.
So the United States, needful of an ally in South Asia, turned to Pakistan, and the Pakistani army was more than happy to oblige. Starting in the 1950s and through the 1960s, Pakistan became, in its own words, “the most allied ally” of the United States. In exchange, the Pakistanis got vast amounts of military and economic aid. A whole generation of Pakistani officers were trained in U.S. military academies. The entire structure of the Pakistani armed forces was moved away from the old British colonial-army structure and toward the American system. The Pakistan army got a liking for modern weapons and for American ways of doing things, including American ideas of nuclear warfighting.
U.S. Cold War Nuclear Doctrine for South Asia
This is a dark part of American nuclear history. In the Cold War, under President Eisenhower, the presumption was that there would be war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., involving large-scale battlefield use of nuclear weapons in multiple theaters around the world, not just in Europe. The U.S. went to its allies and in many cases put nuclear weapons into those countries. (The U.S. had nuclear weapons in fifty-two countries. In some cases those countries didn’t even know the U.S. had nuclear weapons there.)
The U.S. assured Pakistan that in the event of global war—they assumed that the Soviet Union would come south, toward the Arabian Sea and the Middle East—the U.S. would defend Pakistan, and the presumption was that this would include the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Nuclear war would be fought in Pakistan, and the U.S. would defend their territory. This is what was taught in Pakistan’s military curriculum, starting in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, however, India’s prime minster, Nehru, had his own ideas, and by dint of hard work and violating a number of agreements, India acquired its own nuclear weapons. Through America’s Atoms for Peace program, India was able to get access to nuclear technology for “civilian purposes.” Then in 1974, India took the plutonium created in their reactor and used it to test its first nuclear weapon. This was a clear violation. The United States put sanctions on India and got other countries to create a supplier’s network that banned nuclear trade India. This is the origin of the current nonproliferation treaty regime. India declined to sign (as did Israel).
America Turns Pakistan to India
Under the administration of George W. Bush in the mid 2000s, India reached a deal with the United States in which it was decided that the U.S. would not only cooperate with India’s civil nuclear program but would also support the development of ballistic-missile defense based in India, and would supply dual-use high technology (with both civilian and military applications). America would support India’s space program. All this was called the Joint Steps in Strategic Partnership.
Now we have people in Washington, largely Republicans, who are making the case that the U.S. should actively develop India’s nuclear weapons capability to match that of China. As the U.S. has thought about how to deal with the rise of China, it has embraced India as a strategic partner and sees the need to build up India’s military capability so that India can be a useful partner in deterring and containing the rise of China.
Pakistan Turns from the U.S. to China
The Pakistanis have viewed this growing relationship and are terrified at what the future may look like. An India that has China-level military capability would dwarf anything Pakistan could field. The Pakistanis have increasingly turned to the Chinese, with which they have (as with India) a long history. (Recall that Pakistan diplomacy helped pave the way for Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China.)
The reason Pakistan developed such close ties with China date to the 1965 India–Pakistan war. Pakistan started that war by sending troops into Indian Kashmir, on the presumption that because Pakistan had a military cooperation agreement with the United States, the U.S. would come to their aid and the result would be assured. A colossal mistake: The U.S. had been willing only to defend Pakistan against the Soviet Union. So not only did the U.S. not come to Pakistan’s aid against India, it cut off the supply of war materiel ammunition for the very weapons the U.S. had supplied to Pakistan.
The humiliating failure of this war turned Pakistan to China, which in turn saw their overture against the backdrop of their own 1962 China–India war. In consequence, Pakistan has relied heavily on help from China, including an early gift of 50 kg of weapons-grade enriched uranium to start Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, and other help starting a space program.
The Situation Today
So we have: China supplying skills and technology to Pakistan; America supplying skills and technology to India, accelerating in both countries a great-power-sponsored arms raced with each other; radical Islamist militants trying to trigger a war between Pakistan and India; and the U.S. and China struggling to deal with the problem of hegemonic transition—managing the rise of China in the world order.
All four countries have nuclear weapons:
- The U.S. has about 5,000
- China has about 250
- India and Pakistan have about 100 each, and both countries are growing their arsenals and delivery systems, such as India’s development of a nuclear-missile capable submarine
The Consequences for Tomorrow
Pakistan is developing tactical nuclear missiles (range 60 km) which, because they must be moved close the prospective front to be effective against an incursion by Indian armor, require that launch authority be delegated to battlefield commanders rather than retained at the national level under central control. The danger of tactical use is growing, and if that happens, it is a virtual certainty that “limited tactical nuclear war” which quickly spread to cities. In fact, the current expressed Indian position that if Pakistan uses nuclear weapons, it will retaliate massively against Pakistan cities.
Given this danger, Pakistan is well aware that the U.S. would prefer that it did not have nuclear weapons at all, and is concerned that the U.S. might someday attempt to take these weapons away. There are signs, Dr. Mien said, that U.S. contingency plans have been developed for just such an eventuality.
So we have a massive dilemma (recalling Europe in 1914) where everybody is tied to everybody else, in which Pakistan would turn to China for protection against India and/or the U.S. Today, modern climate models have been combined with nuclear detonation models, and scientists have calculated the consequences of an India–Pakistan nuclear exchange in which only half of their respective arsenals is expended. The incineration of dozens of cities and the resulting long-burning fires would produce so much smoke that it would lower the earth’s atmospheric temperature by 7 to 8 degrees for several years, and by 4 to 5 degrees for perhaps one or two decades. This is colder than the little ice age of 14th century. Along with darkness, most of the ozone layer would be destroyed, subjecting the earth to unprecedented levels of UV radiation and a catastrophic failure of agriculture worldwide. Rice production in China, wheat production in Canada and the United States, and worldwide natural ecological processes, would fail. All this from only half the weapons possessed by India and Pakistan used only against each other.
China, India, and Pakistan have nearly three billion people, nearly half the people in the world. Concern for military budgets has taken precedence over their well being. Pakistan and India have to rely on international-development aid to buy food for its people, so heavily are their resources committed to military buildup.
The priority in all four countries has become war preparation:
India’s and Pakistan’s politicians say, at least in public, that they recognize the danger, but take no steps to reversing their arms races. The other nation is supposed to blink first.
China proclaims that an outdated Cold War-era mentality has no place in the new era and avers its love for peace, yet China has the fastest-growling defense budget in the world.
President Obama has said that the United States imagines a world where nations do not covet the land or resources of others, in which the rules established out of the horrors of war can help us resolve conflicts peacefully and help us prevent the kinds of wars that our forefathers fought. Yet the U.S. military budget plus that of its allies constitutes more than half of the military spending in the whole world. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. has launched the largest modernization of U.S. nuclear forces in the last 50 years. The goal is to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to build new generations of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, nuclear capable bombers, and warheads to be carried by all of these.
We face a century of enormous risk, with enormous consequences. We need to figure out a path forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Jared T. Kieling