Nuclear borderline

Every year, come January, the Indian and Pakistani governments exchange lists of nuclear facilities (along with their coordinates) that each side undertakes not to attack in case of hostilities. Presumably, new power stations and other sensitive nuclear military-related installations are added to the lists as and when these go onstream.

This is a civilised way of dealing with an adversarial fellow nuclear weapons state. It provides some assurance that even in the most volatile situations neither government will slip into actions to make bad situations infinitely worse. It is an aim that will be furthered by the foreign secretaries currently meeting in Islamabad discussing nuclear confidence-building measures (CBMs).
That vulnerable nuclear power stations provide attractive military targets are a fact of life and an issue I have plumbed in my writings. It was a problem that troubled the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Warsaw Pact member-states during the Cold War for which the protagonists found no solution such as the one India and Pakistan have devised. Bennett Ramberg, a sometime official in the George W. Bush administration had, far back as the 1970s, first voiced the danger of nuclear power plants proving high-value targets in the first wave of Soviet attacks were the Cold War to turn hot.
In the subcontinental context, the worrisome question is this: Notwithstanding any agreement with India prohibiting such strikes, will the Pakistan Army be able to resist the temptation of hitting or, more importantly, holding hostage proliferating Indian nuclear power stations per Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ill-thought-out plan to produce 40,000 MW of nuclear energy by 2050? Indeed, considering the disproportionate payoffs that could accrue to Pakistan, not so much from taking them out as holding these power plants hostage to “good behaviour” on the battlefield, meaning, India not exploiting such advantage as has been obtained by its conventional forces, it may be reasonable to assume General Headquarters Rawalpindi may not forsake this stratagem in war. In any case, it will be prudent for Indian war planners take such a contingency seriously.
The antidote to such a ruse de guerre is to build a string of nuclear power plants at sites along the border with Pakistan so as to neutralise the remotest chance of the Pakistan Nuclear Command Authority ordering such strikes in the first place. The reasons why Pakistan will shrink from attacking nuclear power plants on the border are obvious enough. There is no way of guaranteeing that radioactivity from damaged nuclear power stations will not drift across to affect the Pakistani heartland of the Punjab. Paradoxically, the greater the number of reactors on the border the better the chance these will not be hit. Pakistan will also be deterred from launching missile salvos at reactors in the Indian hinterland, because that would be opting for “total war” it cannot survive, and in which the Chinese-built nuclear complexes at Chashma and Khushab, and the civilian nuclear power plant in Karachi, would be counter-targeted. Moreover, such reactors may also preempt conventional hostilities for fear of hitting them. The policy of N-plants on the border conjoined to the certainty of nuclear response to Indian reactors being struck by terrorists or missiles will, moreover, incentivise the Pakistan Army and its Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence to keep close tabs on the terrorist outfits they have nurtured lest in their zeal these zealots mount an attack and start an affray that will end up costing Pakistan dearer than anything Pakistani strikes can inflict on India.
The Nuclear Power Corporation Ltd. has already scouted a number of sites in Indian Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat to host high-yield nuclear power plants. It will not be difficult to tweak the plans a bit to ensure that most of these reactors are relocated in the border zone. This strategy will turn potential nuclear hostages for Pakistan into counter-hostages against Pakistan within this country and actually ensure a zone of peace along the border, even where conventional hostilities are concerned. Nuclear issues require careful thought and calibrated policies, not blind reliance on diplomatic understandings that may not withstand the real-world test of military planners in war being tempted by juicy targets. As history shows, preparing for the worst usually prevents the worst from happening — a lesson India seems terminally incapable of learning.
In the nuclear context though, it is not clear what additional CBMs Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir might discuss. But former Indian diplomats Raja Menon and Lalit Mansingh, involved in the officially-sponsored Track-II dialogue, have revealed the possibility of the mutual withdrawal of the early generation short-range ballistic missiles with the two countries — Prithvi-I, Abdali, and Ghaznavi, from frontline service. The trouble with formalising reciprocal actions using diplomatic means is that it ends up according Pakistan parity with India in the nuclear realm that Islamabad has been striving for many years to embed as the negotiating template. And, this talking point sets a precedent. As part of second-stage CBMs, with Pakistan insisting on parity, it will complicate agreeing on mutually acceptable nuclear force-sizes and weapons quality levels, considering that the Indian strategic deterrent is primarily keyed to the China threat, and Pakistan’s fears are India-centric.
It would have been advisable if, as I have advocated in my 2002 book Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy, India had unilaterally withdrawn the nuclearised Prithvi-I batteries many years ago from deployed status on its western border, in order to dilute Pakistan’s mistrust and inspiring confidence. This symbolically and politically potent gesture would have reassured the Pakistan Army and people without India, in any way, conceding an equal nuclear status for Pakistan. Moreover, it would have been a safe thing to do because all potential targets within Pakistan can be reached by the longer-range Agni missiles fired from hinterland launch points.
Positioning the Prithvi-I, and that too the liquid-fuelled variety, at the forward edge of the battlefield — whichever genius thought that up — was always a risky idea and an obvious tripwire that neither the military situation on the ground nor the political correlation of forces really warranted. That the Indian government at all ordered such forward missile deployment indicates faulty instincts and inadequate nuclear military knowledge.

The author is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi