Pakistan’s latest nuclear antics in the form of Full Spectrum Deterrence

Pakistan recently announced what virtually amounted to a complete overhaul of its nuclear doctrine and posture. Lt. General Khalid Kidwai, the primary or at least a critical architect of this change and a former head of the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), called it the Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD). FSD, however, is nothing new. It has existed at least in some form since the early 2010s. FSD, as the Pakistanis note, came into being due to India’s Cold Start Doctrine and Strategy (CSDS), which is geared towards limited conventional offensives that seize small chunks of Pakistani territory in a quest to coerce Rawalpindi from sponsoring terrorism against India and to punish it as well. The other reason for FSD is India’s missile defence capabilities, which New Delhi developed and deployed because India adheres to a No First Use (NFU) of nuclear weapons. Consequently, Pakistan has gone about reducing the threshold of nuclear use and the FSD is the latest manifestation of that effort. India’s CSDS has existed only on paper and has never officially been declared. India has also not reconfigured its capabilities to implement a CSDS, even if it has otherwise been widely debated within the Indian strategic community. Indeed, the Nasr missile developed by Pakistan, which is a multi-tube ballistic Tactical Nuclear Weapon (TNW) equipped to carry low-yield nuclear warheads, was first tested in 2011 followed by tests in May 2012, February 2013, November 2013, September 2014, and July 2017. Its entry into service was in 2013 and remains an integral part of Pakistan’s TNW arsenal intended to “blunt” India’s non-existent CSDS.

Pakistan’s generals see atomic weapons as a cover for prosecuting a terrorist campaign against India as it immunises them from India’s conventional retaliation.

The latest iteration by Kidwai, to some extent, should not come as a surprise, because Rawalpindi sees its nuclear capabilities and their continued expansion not only as instruments of deterrence directed at India’s nominal conventional military superiority vis-à-vis Pakistan, but it also serves two supplementary goals. Firstly, Pakistan’s generals see atomic weapons as a cover for prosecuting a terrorist campaign against India as it immunises them from India’s conventional retaliation. Secondly, they see nuclear weapons as instruments of competition against New Delhi. For these reasons, the Pakistani Army sees FSD as neccesary. Some Indian experts have found the latest shift in Pakistan’s FSD strategy alarming because it includes accumulating capabilities at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. What this means in concrete terms is that Pakistani atomic capabilities will be spread across land-, sea-, and air-based delivery systems. However, FSD only adds marginally to Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent strength by neutralising India’s so-called CSDS or any other conventional military strike options that India may choose to employ. It also does not significantly alter what it has been doing—sponsoring terrorism against India that goes unpunished by India’s conventional retaliation due to the immunity provided by its nuclear arsenal. What has fundamentally changed is from India’s end, as we will see below.

India’s response: Will, capability, and strategy 

India’s fundamental challenge for years has not exclusively been Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal per se, it has also been Pakistan deriving secondary low-cost benefits in the form of terrorism directed at India that its nuclear capabilities bequeathed. India’s nuclear weapons are of no use in deterring Pakistani terrorism, but neither are Pakistani nuclear weapons, as India visibly demonstrated by deploying surgical strikes and the Balakot air strike against Pakistani terrorism, especially under the Modi government. Previous Indian governments—both under the which were neither known nor advertised at the time they were conducted, but they did not significantly alter Pakistani behaviour.

The absence of punitive retaliation by India following each of these instances of terrorism convinced the Pakistanis that India’s leadership lacked the will to retaliate in the face of Pakistani terrorism.

Neither Vajpayee nor the Manmohan Singh governments responded robustly with retaliatory strikes against Pakistani terrorism, especially following the ghastly Pakistani-sponsored terrorist attacks against the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s attacks against key landmarks in Mumbai in November 2008. The absence of punitive retaliation by India following each of these instances of terrorism convinced the Pakistanis that India’s leadership lacked the will to retaliate in the face of Pakistani terrorism. If anything, as Dr. S. Jaishankar, the current Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM), had observed before he assumed office as EAM, Pakistan had effectively “gamed” India and “…it was important not to behave predictably”. New Delhi’s non-response to several Pakistani terror attacks convinced the Pakistanis that they had an effective cost-free strategy of sponsoring terrorism against India under the cover of nuclear weapons. The air strikes conducted by the Indian Air Force (IAF) against the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist camp at Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region demonstrated India’s readiness to escalate with the use of airpower and act unpredictably against the JeM’s suicide terror attack. The JeM’s attack —itself escalatory in nature—against the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy claimed the lives of 40 CRPF personnel in Kashmir’s Pulwama. The cross-LoC surgical strikes by the Indian Army (IA) coupled with the IAF’s Balakot airstrike indicated unpredictable strategic behaviour by India. Indeed, the surgical strikes and the use of tactical airpower have served as substitutes for the CSDS. Pakistan’s TNWs are only capable of neutralising the latter, but not the former. Just as India’s conventional strike options have been greatly fettered by Pakistan’s TNWs, and now the FSD due to the Indian leadership’s fear of escalation, the FSD cannot prevent New Delhi resorting to the use of airpower or attacks by the IA’s special operations forces.

The cross-LoC surgical strikes by the Indian Army (IA) coupled with the IAF’s Balakot airstrike indicated unpredictable strategic behaviour by India.

From the standpoint of Indian strategy, behaving unpredictably against Pakistan’s resort to sub-conventional violence against the backdrop of nuclear weapons is indispensable if New Delhi is to significantly arrest or circumscribe Rawalpindi’s use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy. Most of India’s response options against Pakistan have been constrained by an absence of will and indecision at the political level, which to some extent the Modi government has overcome. Beyond keeping the Pakistanis guessing over how India will retaliate against Pakistani terrorism, India too could acquire its own TNW capability, which successive governments, including the current one, have steadfastly avoided. From a doctrinal standpoint, Massive Retaliation (MR) has been central to India’s retaliatory strategy—which may require a revisit, review, and change—but this prescription has been mostly reserved for redressing asymmetries against the People’s Republic of China (PRC). There have also been calls for India to drop its NFU stricture to keep the Pakistanis and the Chinese off-balance, but mostly because of Pakistan’s reduced threshold for nuclear use. Indeed, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh stated clearly, on record, that it is a possibility: “…till today, our nuclear policy is ‘no first use’. What happens in the future depends on the circumstances.” Alternatively, New Delhi could accumulate TNWs without making changes to its Official Nuclear Doctrine (OND). This will entail a shift in India’s posture and deployment, but not in its declared doctrine. Finally, if India’s leaders are too wary of or inhibited in tinkering with India’s nuclear doctrine and the quantitative strength of its nuclear stockpile and posture, non-nuclear strategic capabilities should be a key area of investment for the country. One such area is cyber warfare capabilities, which is most likely already underway to inflict retaliatory punishment against Pakistani adventurism. Honing the combined use of cyber-attacks and Electronic Warfare with kinetic attacks such as air strikes should also be prioritised. Cyber weapons are not the only arrow in India’s quiver, the other being focused and well-developed counterspace capabilities to non-kinetically cripple Pakistani satellites. Despite Pakistan’s deployment of a wide range of nuclear capabilities as part of its FSD strategy, there is no need for India to be alarmed. New Delhi needs to methodically plan and acquire a whole suite of technologies and capabilities with well-trained personnel that India’s leadership can deploy in a contingency.

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Kartik Bommakanti is a Senior Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at Observer Research Foundation.

• Neighbourhood
• Defence and Security
• Nuclear Security
• India
• Neighbourhood
• Pakistan
• Cold Start Doctrine
• cyber warfare
• Full Spectrum Deterrence
• nuclear arsenal
• NUCLEAR DOCTRINE
• surgical strikes
• Terrorism

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