South Asia remains one of the most troubled regions of the world - not least because it has had an enduring obsession with religion-driven and territorial forms of nationalism and set its 'national security' priorities in an extremely skewed manner, that is to say, way above the priorities accorded to meeting its people's minimum needs for survival and to providing them a minimum of public services in food supply, water, health and education. Both regional or bilateral conflicts and internal strife have kept the threat to the security of the South Asian states at high levels - and led to galloping military expenditures. Military budgets now greatly exceed spending on the social sector in the region's nations. They are usually higher than double the social sector budget in absolute terms.

This has always been sought to be justified on the ground that the survival and security of 'the nation' comes first; everything else can and will follow provided this precondition or imperative is fulfilled. No cost is too high to pay to attain national security. Even nuclear weapons are worth the expense and the risk - even though building a small nuclear arsenal will assuredly impose a heavy burden upon an already overstretched social sector budget and considerably increase human suffering and social discontent, ultimately undermining comprehensive human security.¹

Underlying this narrow and conservative thinking about national security and, in particular, the role of nuclear weapons in it, is a certain set of assumptions about the state of the world and about military power and international relations. These assumptions are based on premises which are extremely widely held. They are shared at times by some opponents of war-mongering and militarism. This is best understood at three levels: a particular paradigm of international relations, belief in the general efficacy of military force and faith in the utility of nuclear weapons in promoting security through deterrence.

Most strategic planners in South Asia, certainly the official ones, proceed from these premises in constructing their security paradigms and the frameworks within which they wish to promote the national interest. Thus, the dominant Indian security paradigm proceeds by positing Pakistan and China as the country's principal adversaries, against whom it must develop a 'credible' posture - by achieving strategic parity or supremacy and, if necessary, by allying with other powerful states. Similarly, Pakistan military planners see India as a long-time strategic rival, whom Pakistan must match no matter at what cost.

Into this both India and Pakistan planners throw specific threats from internal adversaries and other small regional states and draw up a self-referential calculus of what they must do to defend themselves against all such threats and eventually gain greater 'security', prestige, power and influence.

All three premises underlying the dominant national security paradigm are questionable, if not downright specious. Consider the most commonly held international relations paradigm, called political realism, which is the hallmark of South Asian security planners who take pride in being 'unsentimental' and 'hard-nosed', even amoral - unlike the proponents of reconciliation and peace. This has a number of premises or postulates.²

Political realism holds that the global system consists of a number of nation-states in competition with one another. The system is anarchic because of the absence of an acknowledged world authority or government. The world order is a system in which states are the primary actors. They are unitary and rational. Each state can and must pursue its own national interest and security objectives, above all its territorial survival. In order to do this successfully, a state must accumulate power.

Given the uneven distribution of power, there can be only a few Great Powers - regional or global. The way relatively weaker states can cope with the stronger ones is through the diplomatic game of establishing alliances with other states. 'Competitive power politics' or 'realpolitik' must aim at, above all, two things - maintain and enhance strong military power and play the diplomatic game of shifting alliances as skilfully as possible. The balance of power is the organising principle which should guide the behaviour of the 'national security establishments'.

There are numerous flaws at the heart of political realism, including a mistaken understanding of state, power and the global system. Realism understands the state as a 'national territorial totality', a cartographic notion of the space it occupies. This effectively eliminates the distinction between the state and society. It separates the state from the people or citizens and puts it above them. It also distorts and oversimplifies the nature of the global system, reducing it to interactions between states and their representatives alone.

In reality, the global system comprises markets, transnational corporations, international financial institutions, banks, religious organisations, the media, criminal mafias, insurgency groups and social collectivities like classes and popular movements.

Political realism's assumption that the state is a unitary and rational actor is equally untenable. In the actual world, state decisions are determined by the interplay of domestic and international forces. Nor do states always act rationally or in socially 'neutral' ways. Their decision-makers are influenced by particular interests and often act irrationally, out of parochial motives, to 'save face' or enhance 'credibility'. Their decisions become particularly irrational in periods of crisis and war. Even otherwise, they are hostage to the interplay of a variety of domestic forces arising from state-society, intra-state, and intra-government tensions.

Nor is there any such thing as an 'objective national interest'. Most of the time, what is 'national' or what is called 'interest' depends on who is doing the defining, and how and why they are doing so. All states have a distinct social and class character. At the very least, they have powerfully institutionalised social biases. Actions and policies pursued by one group (usually the policy elite) often hurt other groups. Sometimes, its own self interest is hurt as well.

Even worse, political realism can explain very little of the great events that have shaped and reshaped the Modern Age, especially the past century, including the emergence of national liberation movements, decolonisation, collapse of apartheid, the growing importance of public opinion in international relations and the generalised (albeit often faltering) trend towards democratisation in many parts of the world and in global institutions. Realism's obsession with a very limited notion of power as military strength totally ignores the effect of other forms of power and of countervailing forces in diminishing the importance of military force in the conduct of world and national affairs.

Yet, realists, who dominate the South Asian, in particular the Indian, strategic community, are true worshippers of military force and invest in it almost magical properties. Most of them are drawn from a handful of professions - soldiers, diplomats, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists (or rather, the czars of scientific establishments), policy-oriented academics and journalists.

They consistently overestimate both the efficacy or utility of military power and the salience of the social security-insecurity paradox: the more obsessively you invest in military security alone, the more social insecurity you produce both because you divert resources away from socially worthy uses and because to sustain that obsession, you create repressive laws and forms of censoring and regimenting people. All these create social tension, dissonance and fear and ultimately, greater insecurity.

India's official security paradigm has not only ignored these paradoxes and contradictions. Over the decades, it has paid scant attention to the spontaneous knee-jerk response to itself on Pakistan's part, which has been seeking to acquire enough military power to neutralise India's strategic superiority or advantage.

This has now assumed the status of a virtual principle in Pakistan's strategic planning. The result is a competitive arms race which creates a new rising spiral of asymmetries and the adversaries' attempts to overcome them by acquiring yet more military power or capabilities, to the collective detriment of the security of all concerned.

The entire 56 year-long history of the India-Pakistan hot-cold war is a story of the search for strategic superiority by India, through the acquisition and maintenance of greater military power, capabilities and new weapons systems, matched by Pakistan's own efforts to counter this search through strategic alliances with the United States and China and by procuring yet more advanced weapons systems.

This pattern of arms racing has imposed heavy costs upon both countries through greater defence expenditure, the bloating of the military's strength and importance and its growing weight in society and politics and through the suppression of the momentum for more civilian control and greater democratisation, accompanied by greater resort to repression and use of armed force.

Thus, over the past six years, India has doubled its military spending in absolute terms, without gaining real security or decisive superiority over Pakistan. Pakistan now bleeds its government budget in favour of the military to a much greater extent than a decade ago, without gaining security or even sustainable parity with India.

Worse, locked as they are in unrelenting mutual hostility, both states have ignored (or played down in their strategic planning) the real, internal, threat they face. This threat arises from religious or communal politics, ethnic conflict and separatism, growing sub-state terrorism, violence in reaction to state repression and growing militarisation of social life. Sometimes, their leaders, including military leaders, acknowledge the gravity of the threat.³ But they do little about it: the acknowledgement does not translate into a change of policy or priorities.

Political realism-driven and military force-obsessed 'national security' paradigm in India has proved the surest recipe for regression in society, distortions in politics, and paradoxically, for greater insecurity. It is only when the New Delhi policy establishment attempts a shift away from that paradigm, as it has done in India's relations with China recently, that it has achieved greater security and stability in mutual relations, with a greater potential for increased cooperation, especially economic cooperation, and a considerably higher degree of mutual comfort.

The contradictions, paradoxes and antinomies of the dominant national security paradigm are numerous and varied. They assume grotesque proportions when the core-notion of security involves dependence on nuclear weapons, specifically the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Nuclear deterrence might appear attractive as a commonsense-consistent idea: if you can threaten your adversary with an 'unacceptable damage' in case he attacks you, you can deter or prevent him from attacking you and thus, become secure yourself. In reality, deterrence is only a rationalisation for the existence, maintenance and perpetuation of nuclear arsenals.⁴

Nuclear weapons did not create the reality of deterrence. It was deterrence that was created, or rather, invented, to cope with the reality of nuclear weapons! Nuclear deterrence is an ideological outgrowth of nuclear armaments, their ex post strategic rationalisation.

There are generic problems with deterrence of any sort. To rely on deterrence is to seek peace or stability by threatening, i.e. generating fear and hostility in the opponent. This heightens mutual tensions. It is not an attempt to bring about greater peace through cooperation or reduction of mutual threats, but through the very opposite route. That is why efforts at deterring so often break down.

The contradiction inherent in deterrence - of tying war avoidance to war preparation, and of seeking security through promotion of hostility - is not necessarily fatal in the case of conventional weapons and warfare. But it is guaranteed to be fatal with nuclear weapons. Their use spells catastrophe, colossal destruction and mass murder.

There is a fundamental difference between conventional and nuclear deterrence. In the case of conventional weapons, even if peace breaks down, they can be used to protect oneself or one's country. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, can never actually be used to directly protect a country or achieve security. One can only hope that possessing nuclear weapons will frighten a rival (which possesses them too) into not using his nuclear arsenal against one. In essence, this is only a hope.

Of course, nuclear weapons may temporarily deter because of their frightening character, but they can never deter certainly, confidently or enduringly. Those who believe that we must always live with nuclear weapons (on the mistaken belief that we can never technologically disinvent them and therefore must live with them) are even prepared to claim that nuclear weapons can deter permanently. Deterrence attributes both peril and hope to nuclear weapons. The peril is real, the hope an illusion.

Every single state - and India and Pakistan are no exception - that claims to base its security upon the efficacy of nuclear deterrence i.e. not the use of its nuclear weapons, but the mere threat of their use, has a doctrine for actually using them. All nuclear doctrines of all nuclear weapons-states are about the circumstances, conditions, etc., in which these horror weapons will be used - to inflict 'unacceptable damage' by killing tens of thousands of non-combatant civilians in the adversary nation. Thus, both India and Pakistan may talk of averting the actual use of nuclear weapons, but both are building command structures and alternative chains of authority on the assumption that they will have to use nuclear weapons.

In truth, one can never fully control the conditions in which deterrence is supposed to operate successfully. That is why to subscribe to nuclear deterrence as a doctrine or belief system and to pin one's hopes for security on it, is nothing but an irrational act of faith.

In both theory and practice, nuclear deterrence is fundamentally unstable and degenerative in character. There is, first, the security-insecurity paradox, where one state searches for security by making its adversary insecure and by generating hostility through threatening the other side with greater insecurity and a greater physical and material damage.

Nuclear deterrence demands perfect knowledge of, and a faultless degree of, predictability about an opponent's behaviour, as well as his strategic capabilities and doctrines. This is a demand for repeated, regular, institutionalised predictability and symmetry in the whole chain of moves and counter-moves which are possible. In practice, this is not achievable. States have vastly different notions of what level of damage is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Their perceptions of each other's capabilities vary greatly. So the so-called 'deterrent equation' either becomes unworkable, or it can break down.

The India-Pakistan case is replete with examples of how strategic perceptions and assessments differ widely. Many Indian policy-makers, for instance, greatly discounted Pakistan's widely reported nuclear capability from the late 1980s all the way until May 28, 1998. Some had convinced themselves within a week of the Indian tests of May 11 and 13, that Pakistan could not possibly have the Bomb: or else, it would have exploded one by then. Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani's warning on May 18, referring to changed 'geo-strategic' circumstances after India crossed the threshold but Pakistan did not, was a clear instance of this.

The trajectory of India-Pakistan hostility and the story of their wars is suffused with lack of transparency, misperceptions and miscalculation about each other's strategic doctrines and intentions. Nuclear deterrence assumes that there will be no strategic miscalculation, not most of the time, but at all times, that generals and admirals will never panic or overreact even under grave provocation or when the imminence of a grave crisis becomes self-evident. This is a wholly unrealistic assumption.

Again, take the assumption about broadly symmetrical perceptions of 'unacceptable damage' implicit in nuclear deterrence. The killing of tens of thousands of its citizens may constitute 'unacceptable damage' for one state. But even the razing of half a dozen cities may not be unacceptable to its adversary's policy-makers, some of them may imagine that their nation can 'absorb' such devastating strikes and still 'survive' - whatever that means!

For nuclear deterrence to be effective, it must be credible. If the possession of nuclear weapons is to deter the adversary, the possibility of their use must seem real. The opponent will not be deterred if he believes that the adversary will never use his nuclear weapons. Thus, both the capability and the will of the deterring country must be beyond doubt. The 'enemy' should be certain that his opponent will use nuclear weapons if pushed to the brink.

This creates powerful pressure for the generation and sustenance of both an enduring politics of nuclear-related hostility, including nuclear brinkmanship and 'brandishing of the nuclear sword' and of arms racing between nuclear equipped opponents. This itself spells great uncertainty and instability.

Nuclear deterrence is fraught with yet another danger, which is highlighted by Organisation Theory, which offers excellent insights into hazardous technologies. Contemporary Organisation Theory argues that organisations (and it is organisations, not states, that actually control nuclear weapons systems) function within a severely limited form of rationality. They have three characteristics. They show 'interactive complexity', or numerous interrelated but unplanned interactions which are not easily comprehensible. This is because the organisation's various units operate according to routines and standard procedures and rules, not according to individually reasoned decisions.

Complex and large organisations have 'tight coupling' systems that are very time-dependent and have invariant production sequences. The system has little slack or flexibility. Add to these two structural properties the third trait that there will always be conflicting objectives within an organisation and you have a recipe for the 'normality of accidents' which test the 'limits of safety'.

Apart from the all these serious generic problems with nuclear deterrence, there is a special control difficulty with it in the India-Pakistan case. The two are close neighbours, with no strategic distance worth the name between them. There is little warning-time. Early warning systems are virtually useless in their context. Missile flight-time between their big cities is as little as 3-8 minutes. This renders any crisis defusion or correction of grave misperceptions virtually impossible. The only response of their militaries to reports of an imminent attack would be to initiate an attack or launch a retaliatory response on warning.

This problem is hardly remedied by the somewhat woolly and very flexible idea of a 'minimum' deterrent. One's own 'minimum' is contingent on the opponent's capabilities and levels of preparations. So there is no such thing as a 'stable minimum deterrent posture'. This is always a moving, not a fixed, position. This is confirmed by the whole history of the arms race between the U.S. and the former USSR, between the East and the West. For instance, what is India's 'minimum' for China will vary from its 'minimum' for Pakistan.

Nor does the Indian commitment of 'No-First-Use' help in making a nuclear arms race in South Asia more safe or sustainable. India has diluted its own NFU concept from the original formulation in 1998. Its nuclear doctrine now says its NFU pledge does not apply to non-nuclear weapons states which are members of an alliance with a nuclear weapons power. It also reserves the 'right' to use nuclear weapons against an adversary which attacks it with chemical and biological weapons.

Yet, even in the original avatar, India's NFU was not a recipe for a stable deterrent equation. Pakistan's strategists have always viewed it as a confident or arrogant assertion on India's part of its capability to deliver a second strike after absorbing a first strike from Pakistan. This has only strengthened the hawkish argument that Pakistan must have a doctrine for the early use of nuclear weapons, as an 'insurance' against being overrun by India's conventional forces and as a last, desperate means of deterring an Indian strike. There is a deep irrationality here. We are not talking of deterrence anymore but of senseless revenge. But that is another matter.

There are two special nuclear dangers in South Asia. The first is not just that a deterrence equation will break down, but that nuclear weapons can (and have) become tools of foreign policy for both India and Pakistan. Their function would be extended to 'foreign policy support', 'damage-limitation capability', 'escalation control', 'prevention of conventional war' and 'global prestige'.

This has become starkly evident over the past five and a half years: in particular, through the nuclear brinkmanship witnessed during the Kargil conflict of 1999, and during India-Pakistan's 10-month long eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with a million troops following the December, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.

The second danger pertains to the possibility of an accidental or unintended nuclear strike. The military establishments and physical infrastructures in both India and Pakistan are marked by frequent accidents, component failures in military hardware, substandard designs, poor maintenance and unsafe operational practices. This raises disturbing questions about the working of any kind of mutual deterrence equation, indeed the feasibility and viability of an Indian and Pakistani deterrent posture itself.

The subcontinent is notorious for poor engineering capabilities even in areas where the science has been mastered. Substandard manufacturing practices, which lead to the frequent occurrence of defects, are rampant in Indian and Pakistani industries, especially in defence production factories which are shielded from public scrutiny and safety audits. India and Pakistan have among the world's lowest indices in physical infrastructure development. There are over 100 prolonged power failures or brownouts a year in virtually every district of India's capital, one of the world's most polluted cities. The state of the infrastructure, including transport, in Karachi or Lahore is hardly better.

Over the past decade, the Indian Air Force has lost 200 warplanes in largely avoidable accidents. Among the most accident-prone planes flown by the IAF is the MiG-21, known as its 'workhorse'. 'I pray for him every time he takes off,' a MiG-21 test pilot's wife is quoted as saying about her husband. Over 40 percent of IAF accidents are reportedly caused by technical defects which, officials say, are primarily attributable to substandard spares.

There is little quality control on spares in the Indian military. Many are bought from dubious arms dealers who are blacklisted. Newspapers have reported 'a major racket' in the purchase of spares, especially for transport planes and helicopters, compromising flight safety and operational readiness. Often, the armed services are unable to obtain basic design data from the manufacturer and hence cannot do enough modification, repairs, or retrofitting. The services lack a developed system for reporting and analysing accidents and failures. They do hold courts of inquiry when major accidents occur, but these are usually manned by non-experts.

Pakistan may be no better in this regard. In fact, it witnessed the subcontinent's worst military mishap in April 1988, when a huge ammunition depot at Ojhri, near Islamabad, blew up, killing over a thousand people and injuring many more. The incident exposed terrible vulnerabilities of the military assets. Its most vital communications links broke down for a prolonged period.

India and Pakistan face basic problems arising from a poor culture of safety. Both are disaster-prone societies, marked by high rates of accidents and mishaps, sloppy precautionary planning, little disaster forecasting, poor emergency procedures, and a grossly undeveloped infrastructure for relief provision. Large numbers of Indians and Pakistanis routinely die in stampedes, train collisions, road accidents, sinking of ferries, and in construction mishaps.

India and Pakistan are among the world's largest recipients of toxic waste, junked ships (from ship-breaking), and unsafe technologies and products. They have among the lowest standards on food safety, environmental quality, occupational safety and public health.

The frequency of industrial accidents in India is estimated to be four times higher than, say, in the U.S. Fatalities in road accidents in India (as a proportion of the number of vehicles on the road) are 10 times higher than in the OECD countries and 13 times higher in Pakistan.

The important point about a generally poor safety culture is simply that if Indian and Pakistani engineers fail to control and reduce the frequency of mishaps in relatively less complex and 'loosely coupled' system such as road traffic, then they cannot inspire much confidence in being able to ensure that highly complex, 'tightly coupled' systems such as nuclear weapons and the command and control structures associated with them can work safely.

India's nuclear power programmes is run by the same agency - the Department of Atomic Energy - that is responsible for making nuclear bombs. This has an appallingly poor safety record. One of its worst accidents involved the collapse of a safety system, no less: the containment dome of a nuclear reactor under construction in 1994. (The dome is supposed to prevent radioactivity releases into the atmosphere in case of a reactor accident.)

Indian and Pakistani missiles and warheads too pose their own safety problems. Many of these were not resolved, and are unlikely to be easily resolved, given the clandestine nature of nuclear and missile programmes, and official anxiety to avoid detection and publicity especially as regards technical details. For instance, the short-range Prithvi missile uses highly corrosive liquid fuel. This is extremely difficult to handle and highly inflammable.

Again, it is far from clear whether India conducted, or was in a position to conduct, 'one-point safety' tests for its nuclear warheads, which the five United Nations-recognised nuclear weapons states have routinely performed over the years. (Pakistan probably lacks the capacity.) In the absence of such tests, the likelihood of an accidental detonation of a nuclear bomb during fabrication, transportation, installation or flight must be presumed to be relatively high.

The conclusion is inevitable: The dominant Indian 'national security' paradigm is based on assumptions that are, at best, tenuous and, at worst (or rather, normally), downright adventurist, unrealisable or false. Such doctrines and strategies cannot possibly provide security, not even stability. They are a recipe for disaster.

(Praful Bidwai is former senior editor of The Times of India. He is a freelance journalist and regular columnist for leading newspapers in India and Pakistan.)

References
1. For a critique of high military expenditures, see various editions of the South Asian Human Development report, by the Mahbub-ul-Haq Centre, Islamabad; and the chapters by Jean Dreze and C. Rammanohar Reddy in M.V. Ramana & C. Rammanohar Reddy (eds.), Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream, (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003).
2. This discussion of Political Realism draws heavily upon Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, 'The Deterrence Delusion', South Asia on a Short Fuse, (New Delhi and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Many Indian generals have candidly said this. General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan also acknowledged the overwhelming importance of internal threats to Pakistan during his December 12 speech while launching Pakistan's first indigenously built submarine. See The Times of India, December 13, 2003.
4. This discussion derives a great deal from Bidwai and Vanaik (op cit), Chapter 8 and the Box 'Ramshackle Deterrence', pp. 192-94.