By Jonathan Power
However tense the relationship between India and Pakistan becomes, the government of Manmohan Singh is highly unlikely to initiate or participate in a nuclear war with Pakistan. That would go against the deeply held moral beliefs of the prime minister. Both he and the Congress Party chairman, Sonia Gandhi, have told me privately that they both are utterly repulsed by such an act.
Immediately after the Mumbai atrocities, tough talk towards Pakistan seemed to billow like smoke from the Taj hotel out of quarters of India’s military and foreign affairs establishment—but, to his credit, Singh quickly fanned it away.
On the Pakistani side, President Asif Ali Zardari appears to be in a peace-making mood. Not long before the atrocities in Mumbai, he publicly abandoned his country’s “first use” doctrine, which held that Pakistan could use its nuclear weapons even without an Indian nuclear attack. He has also, like General Pervez Musharraf before him, reached out to India for a deal on the central flash point: the disputed state of Kashmir. Neither this president nor Musharraf (once he was in power) ever showed they were the type to reach for their nuclear guns.
Nevertheless, Singh has had few qualms about supporting the build up of India’s nuclear deterrent—regarding it as an inevitable process given India’s place in the world—and has been a passionate advocate of the new nuclear deal with the United States, which has recently lifted its 30 year-old embargo on nuclear supplies for India.
But does that mean we don’t have to fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?
The current détente among elected leaders, fragile as it may be, certainly helps. But India could get more warlike if Singh and Congress are ousted in the coming elections. The main opposition party, the conservative Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, was in office when India first publicly demonstrated its nuclear capability. As for Islamabad, there is a growing chance that the war in Afghanistan and the American attacks inside the borders of Pakistan could fan the militancy among a growing part of the population—with hysterical consequences. But that is not all.
To look at the record of America’s nuclear deterrent during the Cold War is to realize how precarious a nuclear armory can be. Not to mention, U.S. controls on unauthorized or accidental use are much more sophisticated than those in the sub-continent.
We need only recall briefly the Cuban Missile Crisis to see dangers of two nuclear armed states operating in close proximity and under heightened tensions. In such a situation it doesn’t take much to escalate things. When, in the early-1960s, Soviet commanders in Cuba—acting on their own authority—ordered air defense units to shoot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane, only to have another U-2 stray accidentally over Soviet airspace (a seemingly calculated provocation), it drastically heighted already towering stakes.
Only one misunderstanding, one accident, one lapse of protocol, or one botched confirmation is needed to spark the fuse. India and Pakistan should take note. Playing with nuclear matchsticks is a dangerous game.
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Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).