[sacw] Pakistan-India : No-first-use Vs No-war-pact, or both?

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asians Against Nukes Post
21 October 2000
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The Friday Times (Pakistan)
20 October 2000

NO-FIRST-USE VS NO-WAR-PACT, OR BOTH?

Ejaz Haider argues that by linking Pakistan's suggestion of a no-war pact
to India's offer of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, the two states can
break the logjam and begin to reduce the threat of war between them

For many years, Pakistan has asked India to sign a no-war pact (NWP).
India has refused the offer. Instead, it has offered Pakistan an agreement
on no-first-use (NFU) of nuclear weapons, which means the two countries
should pledge not to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict between them.
Pakistan has refused. What is going on, and is there a way out?

NWP and India's refusal:General Zia ul Haq was the first Pakistani ruler to
offer a no-war-pact (NWP) to India in the early 1980s. Pakistan has since
repeated the offer several times. The most recent NWP offer was made by
General Pervez Musharraf first in July and then at the United Nations
General Assembly session in September this year. Interestingly, India,
which originally refused such a pact, was willing in 1999 to discuss it as
part of the Lahore bus diplomacy. However, Pakistan has never spelled out
what such a pact would mean, including crucially what it means by 'war'.

This subtle avoidance to define the term 'war' is not without reason. The
crude military logic behind Pakistan's NWP offer is that it hopes to
continue engaging India militarily in Kashmir. A no-war pact, it feels,
would ensure that India could not retaliate directly by attacking Pakistan.
India rejects the offer for the same reason. New Delhi is not prepared to
lose the option it has to use its conventional military superiority over
Pakistan. It hopes that should circumstances change through a combination
of its diplomacy, Pakistan's further isolation and a tacit approval by a
wary and weary international community, it may be able to use force against
Pakistan to relieve the pressure on its forces in Indian-held Kashmir.

NFU and Pakistan's refusal:In 1994, India proposed to Pakistan that neither
should use nuclear weapons first in a conflict with each other. Pakistan
dismissed this offer, claiming it had no nuclear weapons so could not talk
about the circumstances in which they could or could not be used. This,
despite the fact that it had a fully developed nuclear-weapon capability.
In May 1998, after both countries tested nuclear weapons, India repeated
its offer. Its 1999 Draft Nuclear Doctrine declared that "India will not be
the first to initiate a nuclear strike." However, Pakistan refused to even
discuss the matter, with its foreign minister claiming that India's NFU
policy was "only a facade to justify a second strike capability and
large-scale acquisition and deployment of nuclear weapons."

India's offer, and a reason often given for Pakistan's rejection, of an
agreement on NFU is also based on the former having more numerous
conventional forces than Pakistan's. India's conventional strength allows
it the option to expand the zone of conflict in any war and prolong it to
the point where Pakistan can no longer cope with the cost and stress of the
war effort given its more limited resources. This means that for India the
NFU would mean a chance to fight and win another conventional war against
Pakistan. For Pakistan, an agreement restricting first use of nuclear
weapons is seen as leaving it vulnerable to defeat.

Clearly, the real motives in both the cases - Pakistan's NWP and India's
NFU offers - are aggressive. Pakistan wants an NWP to shield itself from
the consequences of any low intensity engagement of India, especially in
Kashmir, which ties down large numbers of Indian troops and strains its
military resources, while India wants an NFU to be able to retaliate
directly against Pakistan, when circumstances permit, and escalate the
violence to all-out war. The logic of reprisal at work here by both states
could, however, lead inexorably to a nuclear war.

Three questions arise. The first relates to the significance of NFU. Does
it offer an operationally tenable position? Second, can a linkage be sought
between NFU and the NWP to allay fears on both sides? Three, is it possible
to use such a linkage both as a product of, and contributing to, a
paradigmatic shift in India-Pakistan relations?

During the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
perceived itself to be conventionally weaker than the Warsaw Pact forces
and it developed a doctrine based on first-use of nuclear weapons. For its
part, the Warsaw Pact practiced the doctrine of NFU. However, nobody in
NATO believed that the Warsaw Pact would in fact follow this doctrine.
Recent research suggests these doubts were well founded. A French expert,
Therese Delpech writes: "military records of the Warsaw Pact that fell into
German hands demonstrated beyond doubt that Russian operational plans
called for the use of nuclear and chemical weapons in West Germany at the
onset of hostilities, even if NATO forces were using only conventional
weapons - this at a time when the Russian official doctrine was no first
use. The result of the discovery is to suggest that no-first-use pledge
constitutes a declaratory policy without military significance."

This experience has led many analysts to doubt the value of NFU. However,
what was true of the US-Soviet experience cannot be said to inevitably
apply to all cases and under all circumstances. NFU could in fact be made
to serve a higher than merely declaratory posture if it is built into the
design of a country's nuclear forces and backed by verifiable guarantees.

The Chinese example is important here. China has long had an NFU policy. Li
Bin, a Chinese expert, argues that one can identify a serious NFU
commitment through a number of factors, most notably (1) the size of the
nuclear force; (2) the composition of that force; (3) the number of
warheads on each missile; and (4) the accuracy of nuclear weapons. China's
ICBM force would seem to fit these requirements. It consists of 20 missiles
or so and is configured in a no-first use mode. Each missile has only one
nuclear warhead; the warheads are stored separately from the missiles; the
missiles are kept un-fuelled, and they are not very accurate (according to
some estimates they could fall as far as 3,500 meters from the actual
target). It is not a force set up for a preemptive strike or first-use or
even for launch-on-warning or launch-under-attack. China has chosen a force
which may take hours if not days to get ready for launch. It is interesting
to note that this nuclear force is meant to deter the US, which has nearly
10,000 nuclear weapons, highly accurate missiles, and a policy of first use.

The example of China makes clear that Pakistan can in fact take India's NFU
offer seriously. Neither India nor Pakistan has deployed arsenals. That can
be an added advantage, giving each more confidence that the other will
follow a no-first use policy. A pre-condition for deployment is further
testing of weapons and mating them with delivery vehicles. Agreement to not
undertake such tests and mating would add further confidence. It would also
prevent the two countries from getting into a plethora of command and
control problems, besides the dangers of accidental detonation and
unauthorised use that deployed nuclear weapons carry.

Pakistan could approach India with the suggestion that it is prepared to
take the NFU offer seriously if India can back it up with verifiable
guarantees. The verifiable guarantees can be insisted upon to ensure that
the concept has indeed been operationalised and is not merely a declaratory
posture. Moreover, Pakistan should link this offer to an agreement to work
on an incremental approach towards an NWP. The linkage between NFU and an
NWP would mean that if India were to commit conventional aggression against
Pakistan then the latter would not be bound by the NFU guarantees. The
linkage would ensure that breakdown of one commitment could legitimately be
construed to mean the corresponding breakdown of the other commitment.

But that still leaves the problem of India's conventional superiority. A
good model can be the CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) Treaty signed
between NATO and the Soviet Union. The treaty defined a geographical area
within Europe and limited the number of major offensive weapons in that
area. These weapons included MBTs (Main Battle Tanks), armoured combat
vehicles, combat aircraft and attack helicopters on both sides It set up a
detailed and elaborate system of accounting for these weapons and weapon
systems, their locations, their removal and destruction and an extensive
and intrusive inspection mechanism to verify that the two sides were
abiding by the treaty provisions. A similar solution is open to India and
Pakistan.

In sum, if India wants Pakistan to take its NFU seriously, it could (a)
give verifiable guarantees that it would not augment the size,
sophistication and readiness of its nuclear arsenal, (b) agree to
conventional force reductions and altered force disposition through
redeployment, and (c) accept a linkage of the package with Pakistan's NWP
offer.

For its part, if Pakistan is sincere in its NWP offer with India, then it
must now clearly and publicly define what it means by such a pact. To
minimally address Indian concerns it must commit that such a pact would
restrict more than direct conflict between respective armed forces. To be
meaningful and useful, an NWP must ban not only all-out war, but also any
actions that could incite and worsen conflict and lead to the possibility
of war. Most critically, an NWP should include a verifiable ban on support
for any insurgencies, including through providing men and material,
military training, bases, and free passage to insurgents. In the context of
Kashmir, making such a commitment and agreeing to verification of such
measures would be fully in keeping with Pakistan's stated position that it
provides only moral and diplomatic support to the freedom struggle in
Kashmir.

Without these kinds of linkages, the proposals of NWP and NFU offer nothing
except a dangerous willingness to play diplomatic games while South Asia
lurches towards the possibility of deployed nuclear arsenals and the
prospect of war. It is through a combination of NFU, conventional force
reductions, movement on political issues, and an NWP that confidence can be
built and the conditions created for peace between India and Pakistan. The
two countries' military capabilities, their commitment to their respective
viewpoints on contentious issues and their proneness to use these
capabilities to try to coerce each other to make concessions are the main
stumbling blocks on the road to tackling any one issue alone or divorced
from the complete set of problems. Therefore any effort at peacemaking that
tends to lose sight of the complete picture is likely to remain a
nonstarter.

The author wishes to thank Dr Zia Mian for reading and commenting on the
draft of this article and helping in refining the argument regarding the
linkage between the NFU and the NWP