Missiles and fast delivery of nuclear
destructionM V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, May 16, 2002
The Daily Times report of May 10 that Pakistan is
planning to test ballistic missiles “within the next ten days” should be
cause for concern. Given the heightened tensions between India and
Pakistan, with troops facing each other across the border and India
carrying out military exercises, a missile test would be provocative and
only serve to increase tensions. If past history is anything to go by, the
Indian missile establishment will not be left far behind. The result would
be another step towards increasing the possibility of nuclear war, with
the concomitant devastating consequences, in the subcontinent.
To
military planners, missiles have one key characteristic that makes them
attractive as a means of delivering nuclear, or for that matter
conventional, weapons - they are fast. Pakistan’s Shaheen-I missile with a
range of about 700 km travels at a speed of about 2.5 kilometres per
second by the time the rockets that propel it use up all their fuel. Delhi
is just a matter of a few minutes then. Likewise the Prithvi or Agni
missiles could also reach different targets in Pakistan in a similar
period of time.
While this ability to rapidly hit the other country
may be attractive to those interested in launching attacks and killing
people, it leaves no time for decision making by political leaders. Some
may recall the fictional situation in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr.
Strangelove involving a base commander who ordered an air attack on the
Soviet Union without authorization by political leaders. In the movie the
President of the US, after being notified of this unauthorized launch, has
several hours to recall the aircraft. With the advent of missiles, no such
luxury exists.
The case of the US and the Soviet Union is less
demanding than the case of India and Pakistan, which have a common border.
A missile launched from the continental US would have taken about 30
minutes to reach Russia. Further, the US and Russia spent untold billions
of dollars on setting up elaborate early warning systems, comprising
satellites, radars, high-speed reliable communication links and so on, to
detect and follow missile and rocket launches. India and Pakistan cannot
realistically aspire to this kind of infrastructure.
Fortunately
South Asia is not yet at the point where it needs this kind of elaborate
infrastructure, at least as far as public information goes. Neither India
nor Pakistan are believed to have mated their nuclear warheads to
ballistic missiles and kept them ready for quick launch. They have both,
however, announced that they plan to do so. In August 1999, the Indian
National Security Advisory Board released the Draft Nuclear Doctrine,
which called for “rapid punitive response” and “aircraft, mobile
land-missiles and sea-based assets” to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan
has long claimed the ability to deliver nuclear weapons by aircraft and
land-based missiles; in February 2001, the Deputy Chief of Naval Staff
announced that Pakistan was thinking about equipping its submarines with
nuclear missiles.
It is in this context of slow movement towards
deployment of nuclear-armed missiles that the proposed tests must be
viewed. The technical rationale for flight-testing of ballistic missiles
is to check and improve behavioral characteristics of a ballistic missile
system under development and to generate confidence that it will work as
intended. Developing accurate missiles, in particular, requires a large
number of tests. Accuracy, however, is not something to be desired.
Greater accuracy increases confidence on the part of military planners
that they can carry out a pre-emptive or a preventive strike on the
adversary’s weapons and defence infrastructure. Calls for a pre-emptive
strike are likely to come during moments of crises where one country may
fear that the other may launch a first strike. Given the frequency with
which military crises have been occurring in South Asia, especially in the
aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests, this possibility must not be
discounted.
Arguments for a preventive attack usually focus on the
necessity of precluding a shift in the military balance. In The Evolution
of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman records that during the period when
the US had comparative nuclear advantage, there were many calls for a
preventive attack on Soviet nuclear facilities. These reportedly included
a discussion at the level of the National Security Council in 1954 - five
years after the USSR conducted its first nuclear test. The most prominent
public call was from Major General Orvil Anderson who stated: “Give me the
order to do it and I can break up Russia’s five A-bomb nests in a week...
And when I went up to Christ - I think I could explain to Him that I had
saved civilization.” South Asia does not lack in people who think
similarly.
Missile tests also have other consequences. One is
increased public prominence of weapons dexsigners like Abdul Kalam in
India and A. Q. Khan in Pakistan, allowing their organizations to obtain
larger budgets and escalating their influence on defence policy. Such
events also serve as occasions for photo opportunities for political
leaders that wish to be associated publicly with the missile and strong
defence in general. (As the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists lampooned in a
cartoon many years ago, the primary requirement for politicians is that
the missile looks good in parades.)
And finally, each missile test
is a milestone that increases the political costs for future leaders to
reverse course even if they desire it. The process of testing involves not
just scientists and engineers, but also military personnel and the odd
political leader. With each test, pro-nuclear sections within the defence
establishment can renew their pitch that the tested missiles be made
operational and handed over to appropriate military regiments. Through
this process, the armed services would end up building sections with
vested interests in maintaining deployed nuclear weapons arsenals and
finding targets to justify greater numbers. As demonstrated during the
Cold War, the results of this process would be an arms race.
