S Asia’s changing security landscape

The geopolitical consequences of China’s rise have encouraged other global powers to aid India’s arms build-up

As Pakistan marks the 19^th anniversary of its nuclear tests, there is much reflection on what would have happened had the country not chosen to respond to India’s nuclear tests that were conducted earlier in that same fateful month of May in 1998. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan was facing an existential threat and had to go nuclear. It was caught between a hostile neighbour, punitive economic sanctions and international isolation. And the only logical thing it could do for its survival was to test a nuclear device. Even though India claimed that it had known about its smaller neighbour’s possession of nuclear weapons, many of its thinkers were taken by surprise. By the end of May 1998, India’s analysts were forced to concede that Pakistan’s tests had introduced the kind of mutual deterrence in the relationship between the two neighbours that would keep their conflicts, especially over Kashmir, from boiling over. Neither the threat of crippling international sanctions nor coercive threats by the US could deter Pakistan. National security could not be compromised at any price. On that single issue both the civilian and military leaders of the country were adamant.

Nearly two decades after that watershed moment, Pakistan is facing up to yet another threat in the form of an unprecedented build-up in the nuclear arsenal of India. The move — as recorded by the respected Harvard Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs in its latest research — threatens to drastically alter the strategic environment in South Asia again. Currently, India has the fastest growing nuclear programme in the world. It also has material to make 2,600 nuclear weapons — a development made possible by the civilian nuclear accord that Washington and New Delhi signed. Pakistan has been underscoring the risk of diversion by India to imported nuclear fuel, equipment and technology received pursuant to the civil nuclear accord and the 2008 energy waiver by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Islamabad has appealed to NSG members to consider the risks involved in the transfer of nuclear material to India and its NSG membership bid.

Naturally all this has fuelled strategic anxieties in the region. A total of 14 power reactors were to be placed under IAEA safeguards while the remaining eight nuclear reactors and fast breeder reactors (FBR) programme remains conveniently outside any safeguards. Under this arrangement the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has virtually legitimised vertical proliferation in a state outside the NPT. Such exceptionalism has undermined both the NPT framework and questioned the IAEA’s role as an independent international body mandated to promote peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.

There is a danger that India could direct some of its existing stockpile of fissile material alongside the material kept outside the IAEA safeguards towards its military programme. The Belfer Centre report on India’s nuclear exceptionalism points out that, “outside safeguards, the breeder reactors are … likely to directly contribute to an exponential increase in weapons-grade plutonium production compared to India’s entire production history of this material for the past six decades.”

The geopolitical consequences of checking China’s rise have also encouraged the US and other global powers to aid and abet India’s conventional arms build-up, trumping the stability and nonproliferation implications of such a policy. Under these circumstances, Pakistan is forced to take adequate measures to maintain the strategic stability in South Asia. The country’s nuclear policy should stay the course and ensure the credibility of its nuclear deterrent as well as the robustness of its command and control infrastructure.

It is clear that India is keen to ‘isolate Pakistan’ and invest in fresh and newfangled efforts to fuel discord and torpedo any development work planned. Pakistan should not let down its guard, thwart those efforts and concentrate as much as it can on consolidating national power and forging unity.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2017.

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