“There is no more ironclad law in international relations than this: nuclear weapon states do not fight wars with one another.” Hagerty’s claim that the proliferation of nuclear weapons stabilizes hostile dyads and introduces caution among strategic elites has held up in South Asia. However, while both India and Pakistan have avoided nuclear war thus far, they have engaged in several conventional military operations against each other since publicly declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities in the summer of 1998.
Due to the incidence of conventional conflict, the South Asian nuclear dyad is considered a textbook case of the stability-instability paradox, where the logic holds that “nuclear weapons create incentives for conventional conflicts in peripheral areas, as long as either side does not breach certain shared thresholds” that would lead to nuclear escalation. Many contend that the prevalence of small scale conventional conflict in South Asia, such as the aerial engagements in 2019 following the Pulwama bombing, can be explained by the high levels of strategic stability in the region, whereby both India and Pakistan share the expectation that the escalation of conventional conflict to nuclear war will pose unacceptably high costs and therefore, seek to avoid it altogether.
It was only after the nuclear tests of May 1998 by both India and Pakistan that South Asia became overtly nuclear, prompting a change in Pakistan’s nuclear posture to asymmetric escalation. The asymmetric escalation posture seeks to reinforce the credibility of rapid first use in response to conventional aggression, effectively turning nuclear weapons from strategic deterrents to usable warfighting instruments. The need for Pakistan to adopt an overtly aggressive nuclear posture arose owing to India’s conventional military superiority, and Pakistan’s dissatisfaction with the territorial status quo. The posture allows Pakistan to bolster the credibility of its nuclear deterrent and its second-strike capability.
Due to the incidence of conventional conflict, the South Asian nuclear dyad is considered a textbook case of the stability-instability paradox, where the logic holds that “nuclear weapons create incentives for conventional conflicts in peripheral areas, as long as either side does not breach certain shared thresholds” that would lead to nuclear escalation.
While Pakistan’s publicly stated nuclear doctrine is that of “credible minimum deterrence,” in practice Pakistan’s more aggressive posturing has sought to limit India’s range of strategic options for conventional warfare by threatening nuclear retaliation. In contrast, India has adopted a “no first use” nuclear doctrine, committing itself to refraining from a first strike. Its assured retaliation posture seeks to deter nuclear attack and coercion. An assured retaliation posture however, is often incapable of deterring conventional attacks, and leaves nuclear states that adopt it vulnerable to conventional conflict because of the perceived high-level stability induced by mutual nuclearization – the exact circumstances described by the stability-instability paradox.
Ballistic missiles at the ready
Mutual nuclearization arguably introduced a high degree of strategic stability in South Asia, where strategic elites in both India and Pakistan share a consensus that the costs of nuclear war are unacceptably high. The incidence of conventional conflict such as the Kargil War of 1999, the 2002 standoff and the 2019 post-Pulwama escalation can be explained thus by the logic of the stability-instability paradox. Many compare South Asia’s strategic landscape to Cold War Europe, as the fear of nuclear warfare and the stability of the nuclear deterrent has prevented escalation, while permitting occasional low level conventional conflict.
Rather, it is instability in the strategic dimension, rather than stability, that defines the South Asian strategic environment. In such circumstances, destabilizing behavior carries the risk of escalation all the way to nuclear warfare.
However, the stability-instability paradox ends up giving rise to permissive circumstances for conventional conflict that incentivizes greater brinksmanship, which ultimately runs the risk of escalation towards nuclear war. The strategic landscape in South Asia represents therefore, an inversion of the logic of the stability-instability paradox – where the incidence of conventional conflict can be explained via an instability-instability logic instead. A high degree of strategic stability and a low likelihood of escalation towards nuclear war would reduce the ability of conventionally weaker Pakistan’s ability to deter a conventional attack from India.
Rather, it is instability in the strategic dimension, rather than stability, that defines the South Asian strategic environment. In such circumstances, destabilizing behavior carries the risk of escalation all the way to nuclear warfare. Brinksmanship in this dynamic does not originate from short-circuited decision making, but rather from a deliberate strategic calculation, whereby a conventionally weaker state seeks to engage in aggressive and revisionist behavior, secure in the knowledge that it will be able to deter conventional attack and attract international attention and a consequently superior diplomatic settlement than it could have managed on its own.
The turn of the century
Since the Kargil War of 1999, a textbook example of a conventional conflict between nuclear adversaries bound by the stability-instability paradox, India and Pakistan’s strategic environment has witnessed considerable evolution. In the wake of Operation Parakram and the 2001-2002 crisis, Indian military strategists realized that their “mobilization strategy had been completely flawed” and that Indian political leaders had “held the military back from going after Pakistan.” It had taken the Indian military several weeks to mobilize on the border from their peacetime deployments in the interior of the country, whereas a majority of Pakistan’s military bases were in close proximity to the international border. The crisis was later defused owing to American diplomacy and Indian decision makers decided not to pursue a conventional war with Pakistan, having lost the element of surprise, and fearing large losses in a conventional war. In response to the perceived failure to mobilize in 2002 however, Indian strategists formulated a military doctrine named Cold Start, designed to optimize India’s ability to launch a limited but rapid territorial assault on Pakistan and punish Pakistan for aggression without crossing the thresholds of nuclear war.
The implementation of Cold Start has upended the conventional strategic dynamics of the Indo-Pakistan adversarial dyad. India’s ability to mount rapid incursions into Pakistani territory seeks to not only exacerbate the regional security dilemma, but also makes rapid escalation from Pakistan, which faces the existential threat of having its territory captured, all but inevitable. This has ultimately lowered the threshold for nuclear conflict in the region.
The skeptical argument was based around the assumption that future conventional conflict between India and Pakistan would not conform to the logic of the stability-instability paradox, and would give rise to brinksmanship and the specter of an escalatory spiral towards nuclear war.
Given Pakistan’s asymmetric escalation nuclear posture, many suggested that a Cold Start guided incursion into Pakistani territory would incentivize Pakistan to preemptively cross the nuclear Rubicon, more so if the Indian military is able to endanger Pakistan’s nuclear command and control infrastructure or strategic arsenal. The skeptical argument was based around the assumption that future conventional conflict between India and Pakistan would not conform to the logic of the stability-instability paradox, and would give rise to brinksmanship and the specter of an escalatory spiral towards nuclear war.
The strategic landscape in South Asia has been punctuated by serious misperceptions over each country’s thresholds for nuclear war. While escalation has luckily been avoided thus far, India and Pakistan’s strategic calculi have relied on imperfect information about the adversary’s ‘red-lines.’ During the Kargil War, India refrained from crossing the Line of Control into Pakistani territory. Unsure about Pakistan’s nuclear intentions, India feared that territorial incursion would constitute Pakistan’s red line and lead to nuclear retaliation. In the escalation following the 2019 Pulwama attack, the Indian Air Force made incursions into Pakistani territory, seeking to bomb a ‘terrorist training facility’ in Balakot. The aerial engagement that followed seemed to confirm that perhaps the stability-instability paradox had proven to be far more durable than skeptics had presumed. Neither side’s actions, despite the rather obvious threat of miscalculations in the midst of misperception, had crossed the other side’s thresholds for a retaliatory nuclear strike. Or maybe it was entirely by chance that the two states avoided a nuclear war.
South Asia’s rapidly changing economic and political landscape has led to an evolution in both countries’ salient priorities. Sustained economic growth has become India’s primary national concern, and has replaced security issues and ‘tough on Pakistan’ policies as the dominant standard by which the government’s success is gauged.
Pakistan however, continues to be plagued by political instability, as power oscillates between the country’s elected feudal politicians and its unelected military elites. The conduct of Pakistan’s foreign policy continues to be an opaque affair, controlled primarily by its military and intelligence bureaucracy and defined by a perpetual sense of insecurity in the face of India’s conventional military superiority. India’s rapid economic growth and the fact that economic prosperity bolsters India’s conventional military superiority has contributed to a growing sense of unease among Pakistan’s strategic elites. Pakistan’s precarious economic position, with the near imminent threat of sovereign default and an acute shortage of foreign exchange reserves, further limits its ability to bolster its conventional military capabilities and equipment.
Pakistan’s military leadership fears that with its superior conventional military capabilities, India possesses the ability to weaken the deterrent effect of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and might have gained the ability to identify and target Pakistan’s strategic assets. Enhanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment - that Western countries are willing to sell to India but not to Pakistan, and Western technology and defense firms’ willingness to invest in India over Pakistan – could potentially give India the capability to reach and destroy Pakistani strategic assets using precision strike munitions and strike aircraft. While Pakistan has acquired second-strike capability and continues to work on enhancing the capabilities of its delivery systems triad, the domineering strength of India’s conventional military remains a worrying sign for military strategists and planners.
Pakistan’s military leadership fears that with its superior conventional military capabilities, India possesses the ability to weaken the deterrent effect of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and might have gained the ability to identify and target Pakistan’s strategic assets.
Pakistan’s sense of insecurity in the region has been exacerbated by the United States’ growing ties to India, in the form of treaties such as the 2006 civil nuclear technology deal and an increase in the political and economic ties between India and the US. Pakistan’s leaders, both military and civilian, now firmly believe that it is more likely that American diplomatic intervention, much like the humiliation of Kargil in 1999, will privilege Indian interests over Pakistan’s in future regional disputes. While inviting American diplomatic intervention has often formed part of Pakistan’s strategic logic for engaging in brinksmanship in the past, that is unlikely to work in the future.
Pakistan faces real incentives to lower the thresholds for nuclear weapons usage against India as a consequence, possibly resorting to the usage of tactical nuclear weapons in the face of battlefield defeat, rather than a scenario in which Pakistan chooses to deploy strategic warheads only when it faces an existential threat. Pakistan’s current nuclear posture therefore, demands a relatively large nuclear arsenal, comprising both strategic and tactical warheads, intended for graduated deployment against a variety of targets.
The impact of these changes in the strategic landscape is amplified by Pakistan’s deliberate choice of nuclear posture: Pakistan’s asymmetrical escalation posture and the organizational constraints it creates stand to be a potential source of undoing for the logic of the stability-instability paradox.
The delegative nature of the command-and-control structure required by the asymmetrical escalation posture means that the usage of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is governed by positive control procedures, not negative control. These dictate that the weapons can be authorized for usage and deployed without extensive authorization phases. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are designed with complex electric locks known as PALs (Permissive Action Links) that seek to prevent unauthorized or accidental use, but the Pakistani military pre-delegates authority to end users in the chain of command to facilitate the deployment of nuclear weapons should the central command and control infrastructure be compromised during a military crisis. Therefore, on the always/never dilemma, where leaders want a high assurance that weapons will always work when directed and similar assurance that the weapons will never be used in the absence of authorized directions, Pakistan’s military heavily favors the always side in operationalizing its asymmetric escalation posture through what it labels ‘full spectrum deterrence.’
The changing dimensions of the strategic landscape of South Asia demonstrate that while the logic of the stability-instability paradox has been resilient thus far, the risk that this logic will unravel the next time a crisis unfolds or there is conventional military conflict in the region have increased substantially. Not only have India and Pakistan’s strategic assessments shifted significantly since the last crisis, both countries have hardened their military and nuclear postures, even as the events of 2019 proved that both states have gotten better at reading the adversary’s nuclear red-lines. Reining in the mounting strategic instability in the region will require a mix of regional cooperation, dialogue on the Kashmir issue, confidence building measures and great power diplomacy to lower the risk of nuclear war.