Pakistan As A Nuclear State

Feroz Hassan Khan

Has the advent of nuclear weapons calmed down anxieties and brought about a level of national confidence in Pakistan to enable the state to meet other challenges?

What role do nuclear weapons play in a nation’s destiny? The 1998 nuclear test ought to have reinforced a simple lesson for security thinkers in South Asia. It should focus national leadership into calming crises and preventing wars.

Yet even after twelve years of demonstrating its nuclear capability, there are continuing strategic anxieties in Pakistan even if there is also increased faith in nuclear weapons as the final arbitrator of the nation’s survivability.

Based on what has so far been known about Pakistan’s nuclear program and policy-making, scholars have understood Pakistan’s development of a nuclear deterrent entirely as a function of its level of insecurity.

Though useful, this explanation is a partial one. Pakistan’s creation of an operational nuclear deterrent is more adequately explained as a response to competing threat analyses and conceptions about national security, which were constructed, articulated, and defended, by various Pakistani politicians, scientists, and military leaders over a four-decade period.

This chapter assesses how Pakistan’s national security evolved as a result of its nuclear policies and the trajectories ahead. It explains why the Pakistani leadership initiated a nuclear bomb program, how it went about making weapons and delivery systems, and what steps it has taken to create a nuclear doctrine, command and control system, signalling strategy, and other elements required for a safe, secure, and robust nuclear deterrent.

Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is the subject of immense curiosity amongst international political and security analysts.

The country is facing crises—both internal and external—that challenge both its nuclear and conventional deterrent and which no other nuclear nation has faced in contemporary history.

Were it not for nuclear weapons, Pakistan’s response to multiple security challenges—especially in the war against terrorism since 2001—would have been significantly more complicated.

Though nuclear weapons allow Pakistan to balance multiple security challenges they do not play any role in deterring and redressing the character of threat which Pakistan faces internally and on its Western borderlands.

Yet in the broader canvas of its security landscape and nation’s history, Pakistan’s survival would have been questionable without the nuclear capability. At least on five occasions since the mid-1980s conventional war with India was averted. This convinced several security analysts on the war-preventing role of nuclear capability.

In 1946 Bernard Brodie had famously pronounced nuclear weapons as ‘Absolute Weapons’, whose possession changed the role of the military from ‘fighting and winning wars to averting them’. This truism has seemingly evaded the security thinking in India—Pakistan’s most enduring threat.

As new security doctrines to fight conventional war under a ’nuclear shadow’ are conceived and contemplated in India, there is correspondingly increased belief in the efficacy of the nuclear deterrent in Pakistan. This disconnect has dangerous implications for strategic stability in the region.

Coercive military mobilisations and deepened crises have occurred on the pretext of terrorism and each was eventually defused through international intervention and/or fear of escalation to the nuclear threshold. Pakistan’s security thinkers fear India’s linking of sub-conventional to conventional war as a deliberate attempt to conflate international terrorism with unresolved regional security issues (Kashmir being at the core of all) and justify conventional war with its long time adversary.

This chapter examines the realistic role of nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s national security.

Security Dilemma and Strategic Options: 1947-1998

Despite mounting security challenges in Pakistan’s first decade, nuclear weapons did not figure in the country’s security calculus.

The first phase:

• began with independence in 1947
• ended with the military coup by General Ayub Khan in 1958.

In that time, no Pakistani leader showed any interest in the atomic bomb. After a brief experiment with non-alignment, Pakistan:

• joined the US-sponsored anti-communist alliance.
• established the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and sent scientists and engineers overseas for nuclear training.

But no effort was made to initiate a nuclear bomb program.

The 2nd part of the 1st phase was when the Army ran the government from 1959 through 1971. Then it was apparent that India was creating the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons.

A few senior scientists and bureaucrats advanced the need to acquire a nuclear capability.

But the military leadership doubted its feasibility and utility and believed that national defence was best met through the modernisation of conventional forces and continued alliance with the West.

The 2nd phase began with the loss of East Pakistan in December 1971.

Pakistan again reverted to civilian rule under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an advocate of nuclear deterrence since the early 1960s.

In January 1972 Bhutto urged the PAEC to begin preparing for a nuclear bomb program. But there was no urgency until India tested its first nuclear explosive device in May 1974.

US influence cancelled France’s sale of a plutonium reprocessing plant to Paksitan, This shifted Pakistan’s resources to a uranium centrifuge program under Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The nuclear program experienced significant challenges during the decade after General Zia-ul-Haq deposed Bhutto (in July 1977) and executed him.

But this was also the period when Pakistan eventually obtained bomb-grade material, assembled its first nuclear explosive device, and fashioned a rudimentary deterrence strategy.

Despite—and in part because of—a barrage of non-proliferation pressures from the West, virtually every senior Pakistani civilian and military official internalised the criticality of nuclear weapons to national security.

These policies were further institutionalised during the next decade under the civilian rule of prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

It was during this period that the nuclear program achieved its highest and lowest points. The crowning achievement came when Pakistan detonated its first nuclear explosive devices and subsequently declared itself a nuclear weapons state just a few weeks after India conducted a series of surprise nuclear tests on 11 and 13 May 1998.

The low watermark came when diffusion of power at the apex of national governance led to loose oversight and poor regulation of the nuclear program, which enabled A. Q. Khan to secretly and illicitly transfer nuclear materials, technology, and know-how to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

During the final phase of Pakistani nuclear policy, which coincides with President Pervez Musharraf’s rule from 1999-2007, the nuclear arms program was placed under tight military control; A. Q. Khan was fired and placed under de facto house arrest; a National Command Authority was established along with a comprehensive command and control system; and Pakistan’s deterrence strategy was refined and proven effective under fire when India refrained from attacking it after Delhi’s comprehensive mobilisation for war in 2002.

Since the return of civilian rule in 2008 the content of Pakistan’s nuclear policy has remained unchanged: Islamabad is more than ever committed to nuclear weaponry as the ultimate guarantor of national security.

Its nuclear policy remains of tight command and control, minimum credible deterrent posture and ambiguity in doctrine of use and force postures for the foreseeable future.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Pakistan’s attachment to nuclear weapons is further reinforced as it faces numerous sources of security threats against which nuclear weapons can only play a limited role.

Pakistan’s nuclear policy is affected by the discriminatory treatment, especially after the US forged a special civilian nuclear deal for India. To add insult to injury, some quarters in Washington engaged in hostile propaganda against its nuclear security.