by Indrajit Majumdar
Pakistan's creation was based on anti-India grounds. They can never lose that anti-India sentiments cause then they will lose their philosophical-logic/ground of the existence of their nation. It’s in their blood; inherited throughout generation to generation. Their religion and the strong intolerance in it also greatly accompanied it side by side. So, they will keep provoking us as they do and were doing.
Coming on to the nukes, there is a big philosophical deference between both the countries on the use and purpose of it. We in India, see it as the last resource, the last pillar of deterrence. So, the use of it will come when there will be no other way. That is why we focus on strategic nukes.
But typically in Pakistan, they focus on tactical nukes, i.e. it is not meant to end a war but to achieve a certain degree of tactical advantage in an on-going war. It hints us that they are willing to use nukes in a specific troop level or localised battlefield in a specific situation where some benefits are much needed. That is, simply, in a localised level, stimulated by a localised situation, for a local advantage. There can be many hundreds of troop level or so battles in a war occurring simultaneously and so there will be so many situations per day that will occur which will stimulate them to use a nuke to get an advantage, suppose for example, to block the aggressive move-foreword, or maybe to take on the “high in mind” situation of their adversary etc. That also hints us that the army will be in the control of it for its effective use (fighting army understands the tactical situations much better than any others.) so it can be understood that ISI will be in the loop and can be used without the explicit permission from the highest body given the radicalism in their military.
Our perspective is deferent, our revised nuke policy simply states that if there any nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological attack on us ONLY then we MAY use nukes (as a strategic means to deter). Strategic nukes are used against high level strategic targets for example as used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, may be used against mass population, in atmosphere to generate EMP to paralyse electricity etc. etc. unlike Arial bombing, rocket fire, missile firing with conventional warheads etc. which are used for low level strategic targets for example, airbase, arms depot, bridge etc. etc.
So this kind of use of strategic nukes does not need to involve the military in the loop for the decision making. It can be entirely a political decision. Military and RAW can be one of the advisors, but not need to be the decision maker because in that case there is no need to know the particular battlefield situation but the overall average war situation.
There are several other factors on, when a nuke maybe used e.g.
Etc. etc. etc… so many things. Some of these are preventive effect.
With this understanding, It is arguable that most of the times in most of the full-blown wars high times will get chilled down by some of the above listed causes which will prevent the use of a nuke up to a threshold limit of the acceptance of these causes by the military itself in case of Pakistan and its MOD in case of India.
In my opinion, there will be so many international trials for the prevention effort targeted to both sides, humongous level of pressure. Supposedly, in a full-blown Indo-Pak war, Pakistan will want that China help them and India will want Russia to help them that means conflict between Chinese and Russians which these two countries will not want by any cost because they need each other to survive against the NATO aggression. US will play dual role in the name of maintaining balance. This balance maintaining tactics keeps each other healthy enough to stay engaged with each another to avoid a 3rd rival (partner, India) from the eastern bloc against the western world and get a place as near as possible (Pakistan) to the eastern rivals that western ally can move their ground forces from. So, they will avoid any situation where their eastern counterweights get provoked.
So, Russia, China, US and EU all will try to prevent the use of nukes in Indo-Pak war. The rest of it depends on the threshold.
But when will be a next Indo-Pak War? This is much harder to even speculate. But it seems that based on the directions of the two nations, it can be within 10 to 40 years from now but may not essentially be a nuclear one.
Views expressed are of the author and do not reflect the views of IDN