India may be rethinking nuclear first strikes

India may be reinterpreting its nuclear weapons doctrine, circumstantial evidence suggests, with potentially significant ramifications for the already tenuous nuclear balance in South Asia.

New assessments suggest India is considering allowing for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Pakistan’s arsenal in the event of a war. This would not formally change India’s nuclear doctrine, which bars it from launching a first strike, but would loosen its interpretation to deem pre-emptive strikes as defensive.

It would also change India’s likely targets, in the event of a war, to make a nuclear exchange more winnable and, therefore, more thinkable. Analysts’ assessments, based on recent statements by senior officials, are necessarily speculative. States with nuclear weapons often leave ambiguity in their doctrines to prevent adversaries from exploiting gaps in their proscriptions and to preserve flexibility. But signs of a strategic adjustment are mounting.

This comes against a backdrop of long-simmering tensions between India and Pakistan — including over state-sponsored terrorism and the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir — which have already led to several wars, the most recent in 1999.

The new interpretation would be a significant shift in India’s posture that could have far-reaching implications in the region, even if war never comes. Pakistan could feel compelled to expand its arsenal to better survive a pre-emptive strike, in turn setting off an Indian buildup. This would be more than an arms race, said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

“It’s very scary because all the ‘first-strike instability’ stuff is real,” Narang said, referring to a dynamic in which two nuclear adversaries both perceive a strong incentive to use their warheads first in a war. This is thought to make nuclear conflict more likely.

Hints of a high-level debate over the nuclear doctrine mounted with a recent memoir by Shivshankar Menon, the national security adviser from 2011-14. “There is a potential gray area as to when India would use nuclear weapons first” against a nuclear-armed adversary, Menon wrote.

India, he added, “might find it useful to strike first” against an adversary that appeared poised to launch or that “had declared it would certainly use its weapons” — most likely a veiled reference to Pakistan.

Narang presented the quotations, along with his interpretation, in Washington recently, during a major nuclear policy conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There is increasing evidence that India will not allow Pakistan to go first,” he told a gathering of international government officials and policy experts.
Menon’s book, he said, “clearly carves out an exception for pre-emptive Indian first use in the very scenario that is most likely to occur in South Asia.”

Should India sustain a nuclear attack, its doctrine calls for a major retaliation, most likely by targeting its adversary’s cities. When this policy was announced in 2003, it fit the threat posed by Pakistan’s arsenal of long-range, city-destroying weapons.

Since then, Pakistan has developed smaller warheads designed for battlefield use. These were meant to address Pakistan’s India problem: The Indian military is much larger, virtually ensuring its victory in an all-out war.

Such weapons could be used against invading Indian troops, halting a war before it could be lost. This would exploit a gap in India’s doctrine: It is hard to imagine that India would escalate to total nuclear war, as its doctrine commands, over a small battlefield strike on Pakistani soil.

This created a Pakistan problem for India: Its chief adversary had made low-level nuclear war thinkable, even potentially winnable. Since then, there have been growing hints of debate over modifying the Indian doctrine.

Another reason analysts suspect change: India’s doctrine initially served to persuade the US to drop economic sanctions it had imposed over nuclear tests. Given President Donald Trump’s softer stance on proliferation, that impetus may no longer apply.

Menon, in his book, seemed to settle on an answer to India’s quandary: “Pakistani tactical nuclear weapon use would effectively free India to undertake a comprehensive first strike against Pakistan,” he wrote.

The word “comprehensive” refers to a nuclear attack against an adversary’s arsenal, rather than its cities. It is meant to instigate and quickly win a nuclear exchange, leaving the other side disarmed. Taken with a policy of pre-emption, these two shifts would seem to address India’s Pakistan problem, in theory persuading Pakistani leaders that a limited nuclear war would be too dangerous to pursue.

For India, Narang said, “you can really see the seductive logic” to such an approach. This would be “really the only pathway you have if you’re going to have a credible nuclear deterrence.” Shashank Joshi, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said he suspected Menon was signaling something subtler: a warning that India’s strategy could adapt in wartime, potentially to include first strikes. That distinction may be important to officials, but it could be lost on Pakistani war planners who have to consider all scenarios.

Use it or lose it
Joshi, in a policy brief for the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, tried to project what would happen if India embraced such a policy, or if Pakistan concluded that it had.

First would come the arms race. The fear of a first strike, Joshi wrote, “incentivises Pakistan to undertake a massive nuclear buildup, in order to dispel any possibility of India disarming it entirely.” India, whatever its strategy, would feel compelled to keep pace.

Second comes the tightening of nuclear tripwires, Joshi warned, as “this reciprocal fear of first use could pull each side in the direction of placing nuclear forces on hair-trigger alert.”

Finally, in any major armed crisis, the logic of a first strike would pull both sides toward nuclear escalation. “If Pakistan thinks India will move quickly, Pakistan has an incentive to go even quicker, and to escalate straight to the use of the longer-range weapons,” Joshi wrote. This thinking would apply to India as well, creating a situation in which the nuclear arsenal becomes, as analysts dryly put it, “use it or lose it.”

The most optimistic scenario would lock South Asia in a state of mutually assured destruction, like that of the Cold War, in which armed conflict would so reliably escalate to nuclear devastation that both sides would deem war unthinkable.

This would be of global concern. A 2008 study found that, although India and Pakistan have relatively small arsenals, a full nuclear exchange would push a layer of hot, black smoke into the atmosphere.

This would produce what some researchers call without hyperbole “a decade without summer.” As crops failed worldwide, the resulting global famine would kill a billion people.

“Maybe it is this Reaganesque strategy,” Narang said, comparing India’s potential strategic shift to President Ronald Reagan’s arms race with the Soviet Union. “But Pakistan has a much bigger security problem than the Soviet Union did. And that can blow back real quick.”