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Friday, Dec. 28, 2001

India is pushing ahead with developing a survivable second-strike nuclear capability by putting homemade cruise missiles on diesel-powered submarines. It still appears to be years away from achieving this capability. But if it does, it will regain the strategic edge over Pakistan.

Both nations already have nuclear missile capabilities. But neither has hardened missile silos, and the main nuclear bases of each vast nation are well known to the other.

If full-scale war breaks out between the two giant nations of South Asia, that consideration could tempt hard-line Pakistani army chiefs into considering going nuclear during the hostilities.

The temptation on both sides is correspondingly greater to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike that could plausibly annihilate the entire nuclear strategic offensive capability of the other side and leave its cities defenseless.

Also, Pakistan is run by a direct military government. Therefore its decision- making processes are not subject to the same restraints, constraints and complex, consensual processes that India's are.

Paradoxically, this could increase the danger of a pre-emptive first strike from India as well as from Pakistan. In the terrifying logic of nuclear war theory, the very possibility that Pakistan may be thought more likely to launch first could also increase the nervousness of India's military and political leaders on their own nuclear buttons.

The Chinese Connection

If such a nightmarish exchange occurred, the initial advantage may well be Pakistan's rather than India's. U.S. intelligence experts have concluded that while India's nuclear missiles and their targeting systems were homemade, Pakistan's in large part were supplied by its closest ally, China. Those systems are far more accurate than India's, many U.S. intelligence analysts believe.

However, if the conflict does not go nuclear, India may well have the advantage over Pakistan because of its timing. Under U.S. pressure, Pakistan has deployed its elite northern 11 Corps, based in Peshawar, to capture al-Qaeda terrorists fleeing from the defeat of their Taliban protectors in neighboring Pakistan. So far, they have, in fact, proved extremely ineffective, whether by inability, or design, to do that.

But 11 Corps' deployment on the Afghan border has disrupted Pakistan's deployments for any war with India.

The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi noted in an analysis Wednesday: "Unless the 11 Corps is 'freed,' Pakistan will find it difficult to deploy its Army Reserve South (ARS), one of its key strike corps that will be critical for any India-centric operations. The ARS, in order to move towards the Indian border, will necessarily need back-up from the 11 Corps to face an Indian tank assault that will certainly follow."

Indeed, The Hindu went on to note: "The ARS is now deployed along the west bank of the Indus, away from India's border. From this position, it does not threaten India."

Therefore, if India's leaders decide to attack Pakistan with conventional forces, the current deployment of Pakistan's army will allow them initially to catch Pakistani forces on the wrong foot.

But if India were to try and take advantage of Pakistan's deployment disarray, such a move could carry appalling risks of its own.

Nuclear 'Equalizer'

In all previous wars between the two giant nations, India's overwhelming numerical superiority has eventually proven decisive. But Pakistan never had nuclear weapons of its own before. If India attacked and scored major successes, the temptation would be for Pakistan to "level the playing field" by using its own strategic "equalizer," its nuclear weapons.

In that case, Pakistan could be in an analogous position to the United States and its NATO allies if the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies had launched a conventional military attack across the North German Plain any time in the nearly three decades from the formation of the pact in 1955 to the death of the last hard-line Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in 1984. NATO planners recognized only too well that the Soviet Red Army and its allies had overwhelming conventional superiority.

If NATO did not resort to at least tactical nuclear weapons to stop them, the Soviet forces had the capability to drive across Germany to the North Sea and the English Channel, and to the French border and beyond, in only a week. Therefore, NATO planners recognized that the likelihood their own forces would have to "go nuclear" at an early stage of the conflict was great.

In the more than 56 years since the end of World War II, no full-scale war between mutually nuclear-armed nations has ever been fought. There are no precedents to act as a predictive guide for what might happen. The safest and best option by far would be if this one, like the hypothetical World War III in Europe that was never fought, remains consigned to the Field of Dreams. The world can only pray that this will indeed be the case.

Analysis by Martin Sieff, UPI senior news analyst.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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