Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 84. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xix, 178 pp. (Figures, tables.), US$125.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-13-877879-5.
This book gives an overview of the conceptual logic presumed to underlie Pakistan’s military nuclear doctrines, though it has less to say about a possible logic of deployment and practice. It has little to say about how the nuclear program is embedded in the dominant Pakistan army.
Zafar Khan based this book on his PhD dissertation at the University of Hull, UK. If this book is to add to the substantial writing on this subject by H. Nizamani (2000 and onward), B. Chakma (2009), Z.I. Cheema (2010), H.F. Khan (2012), M.V. Ramana (2013), P. Hoodbhoy (2013) and others, then Zafar Khan has to penetrate the nuke-speak and logic of people who populate the agencies and ministries to which he had access. He accomplished this, collegially enough, through numerous strategic studies institutes in Pakistan and he was enabled by the government’s own Strategic Plans Division in Rawalpindi.
Khan provides a short review of the standard Pakistan narrative going back to Bhutto’s 1965 signal remark about a nuclear bomb, “even if we have to eat grass,” and the famed nuclear meeting in Multan, attended by noted physicist Abdus Salam, after the collapse of the Pakistan forces in Bangladesh in 1971. He describes briefly the notorious metallurgist A.Q. Khan’s activities in quietly transferring nuclear technologies to other countries, mentioning how foreign payments for those technologies and services were used to supplement the budgets of the nuclear agencies in Pakistan. What is new is Khan’s account of interviews during 2012–13 (and before) with a number of very well-placed nuclear experts both within and outside government circles.
What is the use-value of nuclear weapons to a divided state like Pakistan? No neighbour has ever really threatened it since 1971, though India and Pakistan have occasionally fought for weeks on their highland borders. Pakistan has basically been a military-guided system since 1947, punctuated occasionally by the outbreak of party-politics and elections. In contrast to India, Pakistan’s nuclear program has usually been supervised by senior military officers.
This book charts a shift in official nuclear posture after the 1998 bomb tests by India and Pakistan from an objective of “minimum deterrence” to “minimum credible deterrence.” These nuclear experts in Pakistan can only guess at how credible their opponents think the deterrence is. Behind these questions lie accountants who have been asking “what amount can we spend which will be just sufficient to deter India, and not a rupee more than necessary?” Pakistan’s public answer has always been “we don’t really know [what the amount is], but we have to build up our costly systems, and watch our opponent like a hawk.” So there are perhaps two senses of “minimum,” one of which is minimum cost.
Pakistan must try to determine whether its assertion of the right to a first strike (which Khan says is now well-established) is having an impact in India. Is the projection of a nuclear force profile the right one for the opponent? As one Pakistani analyst told Khan in a classic understatement, the nuclear posture “is not very static.” How could it be?
This work has a careful tone, as if the text was to be read not just read by a publisher’s editor, but also by someone else with an official eye. It should be essential reading for advanced administrative staff, as it describes in an orderly fashion the structures and flows of command and control. What such trainees might make of the uncertainty at the heart of Pakistan’s language of “strategic ambiguity” Khan does not say. He does however repeat that ambiguity is at the heart of the posture, and that perhaps saves him from examining what a “credible” deterrent really means.
But we the readers long for Khan’s evidence of disagreements among these experts and decision makers, revealing who in Pakistan interprets what ambiguity means, and when do those interpretations really matter. Such disagreements might explain why a small weapons state like Pakistan thinks it nevertheless needs a number of interpretations by closely available officials in agencies and experts in institutes, all focused on the same question: is Pakistan maintaining a minimum deterrence that is credible? And how do we measure credibility?
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the use of the first strike option is a very important subject for Pakistan and all its neighbours, although Iran is not even mentioned here. Pakistan wanted to appear more modern in the 1970s, to resemble other militarizing states, and to enjoy a prestigious counter-balance to its otherwise growing yet unfortunately dysfunctional reputation. It also had the advantage of occupying a location for which more powerful states were prepared to pay heavily over the decades, in order to have a strong ally at that very location, and with the same strategic goals.
Khan makes no reference to nuclear energy and reactors, and none to the technologies which must be assembled and well-operated if weapons are to be built, maintained and continuously upgraded for readiness to delivery. But he also explains that a number of positive agreements have been negotiated which are intended to build confidence between Pakistan and India, such as agreement to forewarn each other of military exercises, not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities, etc. The nuclear establishment would be worried if the top leaders found a less expensive method by which to minimize the risk of a nuclear attack in South Asia. Without this risk-perception it is hard to see why the cost is sustained, unless it is also essential for prestige and self-confidence. But so far no less expensive method, except these limited types of agreement, has appeared.
This interesting book thus unintentionally gives a rather good picture of the slightly sealed-off quality of nuclear strategy thinking in Pakistan. It is left to the reader to fit this secluded enclave into the military organization and wider socio-economic structure.
Robert Anderson
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada