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Confronting the Bomb: Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CONTENTS
Contributors viii
Poem ix
Author Biographies xi
Acknowledgements xv
Preface xvii
John Polyani
Introduction xxi
Pervez Hoodbhoy
1. Scientists and India’s Nuclear Bomb 1
M. V Ramana
2. The Coming of the Atomic Age to Pakistan 38
Zia Mian
3. Pakistan: Climbing the Nuclear Ladder 68
Pervez Hoodbhoy
4. Pakistan: Understanding the ‘World’s Fastest
Growing Arsenal’ 90
Pervez Hoodbhoy
5. Kashmir: From Nuclear Flashpoint to South Asia’s
Bridge of Peace? 117
Pervez Hoodbhoy
6. Nationalism and the Bomb 134
Pervez Hoodbhoy
7. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the ‘Islamic Bomb’ 151
Pervez Hoodbhoy
8. Post bin Laden: The Safety and Security of
Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal 168
Pervez Hoodbhoy
9. Commanding and Controlling Nuclear Weapons 204
Zia Mian
10. The Infeasibility of Early Warning 237
Zia Mian, R. Rajaraman, and M.V. Ramana
11. Pakistan’s Battlefield Use of Nuclear Weapons 253
Zia Mian and A.H. Nayyar
12. What Nuclear War Could Do to South Asia 267
Matthew McKinzie, Zia Mian, A.H. Nayyar, and M. V. Ramana
13. Pakistan’s Nuclear Diplomacy and the Fissile 277
Material Cut-off Treaty
Zia Mian and A.H. Nayyar
14. Speculations on the Future of Nuclear South Asia 295
Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
15. America, Global Domination, and Global Disarmament 308
Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
16. Nuclear Electricity is Not the Answer for Pakistan 326
Pervez Hoodbhoy
17. Nuclear Electricity is Not the Answer for India 348
Suvrat Raju
Tables
1. Pakistani Missile Force 102
2. Total Military and Nuclear Weapons
Spending 2010-2011 112
3. Estimated Duration of some Plausible
South Asian Missile Flights 240
4. Estimated Nuclear Casualties for each of 10 Large Indian and Pakistani Cities 275
5. Energy Profile of Pakistan 2011 327
6. PAEC’s projections for Nuclear Electricity
PREFACE
John Polyani
Nuclear weapons are a plague on the earth, differing from earlier
plagues in that they are visited upon us not by God but by man. A
plague that is man-made has its origins in a mix of fear, pride and
folly.
At the outset of the nuclear age fear dominated. The fear was
that Hitler’s Germany might secretly arm itself with these ultimate
weapons: deadly and indiscriminate. When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf
Hess, parachuted into England on 10 May 1941, it was with a
message to the King George VI that ‘new bombs with stronger
explosives’ 1 would make inevitable the destruction of Britain. Hess
was regarded as mad, and was imprisoned. Meanwhile, the few
people who understood the importance of the discovery by Otto
Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, made at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin in 1938, that they could split uranium atoms with neutrons,
were seriously considering the possibility of a devastating new form
of explosive.
Within months of Hess’s warning, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi,
European refugees working at Columbia University in New York,
demonstrated the practicability of a nuclear chain-reaction. This
demonstration led to the Manhattan Project and thereafter to the
two atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
As for Rudolf Hess, whose predictions weren’t too far off the mark,
he was still considered to be a lunatic and was transferred to a
German prison where, forty-two years later, he succeeded in hanging
himself at the age of ninety-three. The future comes slowly if, like
Hess, you are at the mercy of the bureaucracy, but with the speed
of an express train if, like Szilard, you are a free spirit. When things
change fast it is because there is a willingness to challenge accepted
thinking.
xviii PREFACE
Accepted thinking when Szilard turned his attention to the
possibilities of a nuclear chain reaction, was emphatically
discouraging. Lord Rutherford, pre-eminent among the founders of
nuclear physics, had just stated [London Times, 1933) that obtaining
energy from atomic fission ‘was a very poor and inefficient way of
producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in
the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine.’
For Szilard, the contrarian, this was a call to action. There had
to be a way. He knew enough chemistry to introduce the concept of
a branched nuclear chain-reaction, in which every nuclear parent
gave rise to two energetic offspring — with Malthusian consequences.
At that moment the atomic express train left the station. It will
require a similar feat of imagination to stop it.
I was with Leo Szilard in Moscow at an earlier Pugwash
Conference in December of 1960, when he described his preferred
terminus for the nuclear express, to a Soviet and American elite. He
could not resist a Delphic utterance. What was needed, he declared,
in order to end the Cold War, was an atomic bomb beneath Moscow
wired to an actuator under Washington, and, reciprocally, a second
such bomb in Washington wired to a trigger in Moscow. At that
level, armament could stop. I was young and callow enough to ask
him whether he was serious. What I got in return was an impish
grin.
Following World War II the nuclear contagion spread quickly
from the United States to the USSR, then on to the UK, France and
China. It moved more slowly to India, Pakistan, Israel and North
Korea. Nine nations in all — less than had been feared. But the
disease remains contagious. With Iran added to the list, expect
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which, with Israel, would comprise
five nuclear weapons states in, arguably, the most turbulent area of
the world.
It is not just fear that renders nuclear weapons contagious. There
is pride of possession, ironically most prominent among those
within the Nuclear Club, attempting at the same time to limit its
membership.
PREFACE xix
I spoke at the outset of three driving forces: fear, pride and folly,
of which folly remains. It resides in the fact that nuclear weapons,
though acquired for ‘security’, heighten insecurity.
In German composer Wagner’s Ring Cycle the possessors of gold
are similarly cursed by their fear of losing their treasure. Day and
night, underground, the Nibelung toil to increase the precious
stocks. Fortunately, this folly is no longer entirely unconstrained:
the United States and Russia, which together possess 95 per cent of
the world’s nuclear weapons, have reduced their armory from 70,000
in the 1980s, to 23,000 nuclear weapons today.
Why such a stupendous number, one asks? That was Szilard’s
question in Moscow. Today, sixty years into the nuclear age, there is
serious talk of reducing U.S.-Russian stockpile to a few hundred
weapons on either side. What feat of imagination will be required in
order to make this a reality? It is no new thought to the military
that, with the advent of nuclear weapons, we have left behind the
age of Clausewitz. War is no longer diplomacy pursued by other
means, since suicide lies outside the domain of the diplomatic.
Between nuclear armed powers there is no longer any alternative to
diplomacy.
Keeping thousands of nuclear weapons a few minutes away from
firing — as is currently being done in the U.S. and Russia — is folly.
It does not represent in any sane person’s view an alternative to
negotiation. Nor is keeping thousands of ballistic missiles aimed at
opposing ICBM’s (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) in the hope
of ‘winning’ a nuclear war, an alternative to diplomacy. This too we
presently do, though the dream of victory is rendered totally fanciful
by the destructive power aloft in aircraft, and sheltered from view
beneath the sea.
It is an extraordinary failure of the democratic process that these
fantasies of winning nuclear wars have been, till now, so ineffectively
challenged. Perhaps the time has finally come when the voices of
reason and responsibility can contain the nuclear express.
In this remarkable book, the result of a most civilized Pakistan-
India collaboration, we have the opportunity to see Wagner’s story
XX PREFACE
of the lure of nuclear gold played out on a smaller stage. The story
is, if possible, even more terrifying than the posturing between the
greater powers. First there are the clearly visible patriotic impulses,
heralding the mythical nirvana of ‘security’. Then comes the
realization of the appalling power of these weapons (this part of the
book, hair-raising as it is, was written prior to discovery of the
dreadful environmental consequences of a dust-cloud from a limited
nuclear war — though one would prefer not to think of the
eventuality, the authors of this book confront it unblinkingly). One
source of nuclear folly that the present account brings out in the
India-Pakistan context — but it is endemic — is the investment of
great influence in a few people. There is a deficiency, oftentimes an
absence, of public debate where matters relating to a nation’s ‘secret’
arsenals are concerned. Thus, India appears to have committed itself
to the nuclear path before there was any consideration of the likely
Pakistani response.
As a Canadian, I am well aware that my country’s record for
foresight is less than stellar. Canada, along with the U.S., equipped
India with a research reactor under the Eisenhower ‘Atoms for Peace
Program’. Contrary to the agreement, this provided the plutonium
for India’s first nuclear weapon. This bomb was tested in 1974. In a
pathetic bow to the country’s historic contribution to pacifism, it
was officially designated a ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosion’. The
decisions that underlay this test were made secretly at the prime
ministerial level. In similar secrecy Pakistan rushed to match India’s
feat, exploding its first nuclear weapons in 1998 just after India’s
second nuclear test.
All this is by way of introduction to the present far-sighted
volume, in which Pakistani and Indian scientists join together to
illustrate the predicament of their two countries. Here we find a
superb and well-informed catalyst for the debate that has till now
been largely lacking.
REFERENCES
1. Camp Z, Stephen McGinty, Harper Collins, 2011; p. 84.
INTRODUCTION
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Scientists made the first atomic bomb. These men of exceptional
brilliance discovered the physics of subatomic particles, and found
just how a few atomic nuclei could be coaxed and cajoled into
releasing their enormous energy, and then explicitly calculated
everything down to the last detail. Their forbiddingly difficult
mathematical formulae were based upon the newly created
disciplines of relativity and quantum mechanics. The scribbled
symbols seemed utterly abstract, but the deadly fireballs over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan showed just how real they were.
All those who created the bomb and its physics are now dead.
Some, like Edward Teller, never regretted their role. Avidly sought
after by military generals and national leaders, they happily kept
on inventing ever more terrible weapons. But some were appalled,
realizing that they had brought humankind to the brink. Robert J.
Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project’s scientific leader, famously
quoting the lines, ‘I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds’,
turned against the bomb and fell under suspicion of being disloyal
to America. His security clearance was revoked and he was accused
of being a communist, a serious matter in those hysterically anti-
communist times. Albert Einstein, whose mass-energy equivalence
formula lies at the very foundation of the bomb, became convinced
that desperate danger lurked around the corner. Einstein teamed
up with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century’s pre-eminent
philosopher and mathematician, to write the Einstein-Russell
Manifesto. This became the basis of a post-World War II movement
for eliminating nuclear weapons.
The opposition to the bomb by some of twentieth century’s
greatest scientists caused many around the world to reflect and
ponder upon the social responsibility of scientists. The authors of
xxii INTRODUCTION
this book are among them. Hailing from both sides of the Pakistan-
India border (with the exception of one, who comes from far away!),
they are scientists who reject nuclear patriotism; that misplaced
belief which says hurting an adversary country is somehow
equivalent to loving your own.
What prompted these scientist-authors to venture into the world
of nuclear weapons, war, strategy, and politics? This, after all, is not
their job and can only be distantly connected to the work that they
actually do as scientists. In fact, the monopoly of scientists over
nuclear weapons evaporated some decades ago. To kill millions in
minutes, it is now no longer necessary to have a nuclear physicist
in residence. In modern times, nuclear weapon design and construc-
tion has steadily descended from high-brow theoretical physics
towards mundane issues of engineering, management, and logistics.
Seventy years ago the detailed physics of nuclear explosions was a
matter of the highest conceptual difficulty. But today, a graduate
student with a solid grounding in physics, and access to internet
literature, could, as a PhD thesis, design a crude but workable
nuclear explosive. Computer codes allow accurate simulations of
nuclear explosions, eliminating the earlier need for the intricate
numerical procedures used by the early atomic scientists.
And yet, in dealing with thorny issues of war and peace, scientists
possibly still have some residual advantage. In part this comes from
knowing the physical principles behind modern weaponry. But it
comes still more from the nature of scientific education. Scientists
are trained to recognize and analyze a wide variety of problems of
the physical world. Of course, this does not mean that they are
always right when they work outside their own domains. It also does
not guarantee that scientists always behave rationally or humanely
in their personal lives. But the cultivation of scientific habits is
undeniably an asset that allows one to think through various issues
of war and peace plainly and logically; identify that which are rooted
in fact; and propose ways out of difficult situations. It is this hope
that brings the present authors out into a domain which, in reality,
does not belong to any single discipline.
INTRODUCTION xxiii
DOWN THE STEEP SLIPPERY SLOPE
Once the first bomb was ready, the scientists who conceived and
built it became peripheral. They were no longer courted by the
political and military leaders who now ‘owned’ it. These leaders
would decide how and when it would be used, and against whom.
They now had a calculated strategy for putting terror into the hearts
of men.
The decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not taken
in anger. White men in grey business suits and military uniforms,
after much deliberation, decided the U.S. ‘could not give the
Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian
area but that we should seek to make a profound psychological
impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible . . . [and] the
most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large
number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses .’ 1
They argued it would be cheaper in American lives to release the
nuclear genie. Besides, it was such a marvellous device to show to
the Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
And so one fine morning, banner headlines such as ‘Jap City No
More’ brought the news from across the ocean. Joyous crowds
gathered in Manhattan’s Times Square in New York to celebrate.
There was less of the enemy left. Rarely are victors encumbered by
remorse. President Harry Truman declared: ‘When you have to deal
with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable
but nevertheless true .’ 2 It is a disappointing truth that six decades
later even American liberals remain ambivalent about the morality
of nuking the two Japanese cities. The late Hans Bethe of the
Manhattan Project fame, and Nobel Prize winner in physics, became
a leading exponent of arms control some decades later. Yet, in a
speech at the Cornell University, he declared that, ‘the atom bomb
was the greatest gift we could have given to the Japanese .’ 3
Even as the United States dusted off its hands and moved on,
elsewhere the radioactive rubble of the dead cities spawned not only
a sense of dread, but also an obsessive desire for nuclear weapons.
Stalin raced ahead with his program, while Charles de Gaulle
xxiv INTRODUCTION
conceived his ‘force de frappe’. Mao Tse-Tung quietly decided that
he too wanted the bomb even as he derided it as ‘a paper tiger’. In
newly independent Israel, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion
apparently ‘had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass
destruction’, writes Avner Cohen, the historian of Israel’s nuclear
bomb. Ben Gurion ordered his agents to seek out East European
Jewish scientists who could ‘either increase the capacity to kill
masses or to cure masses.’ 4
The wind blew the poisonous clouds of fear and envy over other
third world countries as well: In 1948, while arguing to create
India’s Department of Atomic Energy, Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru told parliament, ‘I think we must develop [nuclear science]
for peaceful purposes.’ But, he added, ‘of course, if we are compelled
as a nation to use it for other purposes, possibly no pious sentiments
of any of us will stop the nation from using it that way.’ 5 Just three
years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those ‘other purposes’ were all
too clear.
Days after Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998, Japan invited the
country’s foreign minister to visit Hiroshima’s peace museum. The
minister was visibly moved after seeing the gruesome evidence of
mass devastation. His reaction: ‘we made our nukes precisely so that
this could never happen to Pakistan.’
The world is awash with terrible inventions, now in the control
of generals and politicians, very few of whom can be trusted with
public funds or keeping solemn promises. Can they be trusted with
the instruments of mass annihilation? And, if not them, then just
who should one trust?
SOME PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS
Logically, those in charge of a nation’s nuclear affairs should be
selected from amongst the wisest, most capable, and best informed
people who also have a calm temperament and capacity to withstand
extreme pressure. But in reality these conditions remain unfulfilled.
In India and Pakistan, leaders have rarely weighed the consequences
INTRODUCTION XXV
of their actions. Instead, they have simply reacted to events and
circumstances.
India started the nuclear race, so let me start with India, from
circa 1974. After it chose to test a supposedly ‘peaceful nuclear
device’, there was little care or concern about how Pakistan would
respond. The Indian leadership under Indira Gandhi was naive in its
nuclear thinking. It could not imagine that Pakistan too could
develop nuclear bombs and, ostrich-like, chose to remain ill-
informed of Pakistan’s capabilities or ponder upon the different
options it had at that time. With eyes fixed towards China, perhaps
it did not even care. Having dismissed Pakistani technical capability
as inconsequential, the thought that India’s military advantage could
be eventually nullified by a nuclear Pakistan probably never crossed
the minds of those Indians who mattered at the time. As it turned
out, Indira Gandhi’s successors proved as unenlightened as her.
A personal experience: Two months before the May 1998 nuclear
tests conducted by India and Pakistan, a delegation from the
Pugwash Movement met in Delhi with Prime Minister Inderjit
Kumar Gujral. I was one of the delegates. As we sat around a table
in the Prime Minister’s House, I expressed my worry about a possible
nuclear catastrophe befalling the subcontinent. To my surprise, Mr
Gujral twice assured me — first in public and later in private — that
there was no cause for concern. As we prepared to depart, he came
by and, upon learning that I was from Karachi, grew nostalgic about
the city he had grown up in. Putting his arm around me he
confidently and earnestly told me, speaking in Urdu/Hindi, that
Pakistan lacked the competence to make atomic bombs. For quite a
while, I felt very confused . . . could he be right?
The Prime Minister was scarcely alone in being mistaken. Senior
Indian defense analysts like P.R. Chari had also published articles
before May 1998 arguing this point, as had the former head of the
Indian Atomic Energy Agency, Dr Raja Ramanna. The Indian
intelligence agency RAW, which Pakistanis generally believe to be
ubiquitous and infinitely cunning, was also confused and gave
contradictory reports. In fact the confusion went all the way up to
xxvi INTRODUCTION
the top. This became apparent at the time when India was in a state
of euphoria in the days after the Pokharan tests. Mass celebrations
were still in progress when, brimming with hubris, Home Minister
L.K. Advani advised Pakistan to give up its claim on Kashmir
because the ‘geostrategic’ context had decisively changed in India’s
favour . 6 At a time when Pakistan was supposed to be just a
‘screwdriver turn away from the bomb ’, 7 Indian newspapers taunted
Pakistanis: had the Chinese forgotten to send the screwdriver over
with the bomb? Or were the instructions written in Chinese? Most
Indians firmly believed that Pakistan did not possess the bomb.
But they could not have been more wrong. Pakistan’s bomb-
makers had long been craving for an opportunity to show their own
prowess. Six months after the tests, one of their leaders gave a public
speech expressing his delight at the Indian test:
We had spent our lifetime on the project and still there was no chance
of a hot test. And on the morning of the eleventh of May this year, one
of our friends in the armed services phoned me and he said, ‘Have you
heard the news today?’ I said. ‘What?’ He said, ‘The Indians have
conducted the explosion in Pokharan.’ So I said, ‘Congratulations.’ I was
genuinely happy. He said, ‘You are congratulating us on the Indian
tests?’ I said, ‘Yes, because now we would get a chance to do our own
tests .’ 8
The confidence was well-placed. Only seventeen days later, with a
thunderous roar, the mountains of Chagai shook and then turned
white as five nuclear devices were simultaneously detonated inside
a deeply drilled tunnel prepared years earlier. Two days later, for
good measure, one more device was set off under the Ras-Koh hills.
India’s good cheer was suddenly shattered. Instead, recriminations
and excuses started flying.
Mistaken notions extended into the Indian military as well. India’s
late ‘nuclear visionary’ and army chief, General K. Sunderji, had
preached for years from a thick tome that came to be known as the
‘Sunderji Bible’. His principal claim was that nuclear weapons would
bring stability to the subcontinent, and that there would be no Cold
War type nuclear racing. Certainly he had Pakistan on his mind —
not China — when, in the 1980s, he pressed hard for weaponizing
India’s nuclear capacity. With infectious enthusiasm, Sunderji
lectured that India needed only a handful of fission weapons to ‘take
out’ major Pakistani cities. More was not better, he said. Like the
other military men of his time, this rather simple and likeable man
thought that these terrible weapons had now made war impossible.
My single encounter with Sunderji was at a Carnegie conference
in Washington in 1993. He had just finished speaking on the
absolute security that nuclear weapons would bestow upon the
world. I had never before seen a man who loved the bomb more; his
eyes would light up upon its mere mention. So, when I introduced
myself to him as a Pakistani nuclear physicist, he was overjoyed and
hugged me warmly saying: ‘I was commanding officer at Pokharan
in 1974 when the damn thing went off. Right away I told the bug
that we should give it to them [the Pakistanis] because war will then
become impossible.’ I did not have the heart to tell him that
Pakistan, inspired by India, was indeed well on its way to having
more than a few of its own. Nor, for that matter, that his (Sunderji’s)
dangerous initiative, ‘Operation Brasstacks’, had nearly brought the
two countries to blows in 1987. For all his heartiness and bonhomie,
this man’s irresponsible and dangerous antics could have led to the
deaths of thousands.
Sunderji’s infectious nuclear enthusiasm had already made its way
across the border. In March 1990, long before the nuclear tests had
been carried out, Pakistan’s General K.M. Arif wrote in The Globe :
Let India and Pakistan both become nuclear weapon states openly
and without reservations. They are both mature nations which need
no counselling on their international responsibilities and conduct.
Top Pakistani generals, whose mannerisms scarcely differ from
that of Indians, are fairly nonchalant about nuclear weapons. They
seem to view these bombs as just another kind of bomb, albeit an
oversized one. They had no appreciation of what would happen to
the country after a nuclear war, apart from a rather dim
understanding that many people would die.
INTRODUCTION
I have many tales to tell.
In late 1989, a group of seven senior military officers, then
studying operational matters at the National Defense College, came
to meet me at the physics department of Quaid-e-Azam University.
Their term project was to write a paper on nuclear strategy and
posture in the Pak-India context. Although Pakistan did not
officially acknowledge possessing such weapons then, the process of
inducting them into the forces had already begun. It was also a time
when there was almost zero understanding of nuclear matters in the
military and, quite sensibly, they were keen to learn technical details
from every available source.
Since this group was larger than could fit into my little office,
I led them to the physics department conference room (still called
the ‘tea room’ by everybody because that’s where we have our 10:30
am tea everyday). We spent the next two hours there, discussing
everything: from blast radii and firestorms to electronic locks and
PALS (Permissive Action Links). The officers took copious notes
and appeared satisfied. As they prepared to leave I asked what
circumstances, in their opinion, would warrant the use of nuclear
weapons by Pakistan. After some reflection one officer spoke up:
‘professor’, he assured me, ‘they shall be used only defensively if
at all, and only if the Pakistan Army faces defeat. We cannot allow
ourselves to be dis-honoured.’ Around the table, heads nodded in
agreement. Significantly, the calculus of destruction — that cities
and populations would be obliterated on both sides — was not what
mattered. Instead it was ghairat — the protection of honour — that
was primary. Preserving a tribal value, probably acquired around
Neolithic times, was considered more important than preserving life.
The same question put to Indian military officers would probably
elicit the same answer. Historically, honour has driven armies to
fight battles. Even as the officer spoke, my thoughts wandered to
the charge of the Light Brigade. During the Crimean War of 1854,
wave after wave of honour-charged British soldiers rode their horses
into the mouths of Russian guns which, of course, promptly mowed
them down. Tennyson later immortalized the slain men in his
famous poem: All the world wonder’d. Honour the charge they
made! Honour the Light Brigade.
In the same year that I encountered General Sunderji, I also met
with General Shamim Alam Khan. He was then Chairman, Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Frankly, it’s a little scary to receive a call from the
GHQ in Rawalpindi. Our generals usually don’t deign to talk to
professors, especially dissident ones. But here was a staff car, with a
smart uniformed officer, that had been dispatched to fetch me from
the university. I had to wait for an hour outside Gen. Alam’s office.
Dr A.Q. Khan, who walked past me (he did not know me at the time)
had suddenly dropped in to meet him.
Once Dr Khan left, the general had many questions for me. He
told me that the army was just learning to operationally integrate
its newly acquired weapons into the command structure, and so
wanted to know all about Permissive Action Links; command and
control issues; possibilities of accidental nuclear war, etc. Although
he was certainly aware of my opposition to the bomb, he was still
sufficiently curious.
General Alam was a tough, short man who passionately hated
India. He regaled me with various episodes. Once he had excused
himself in 1985 from an order received from President General Zia-
ul-Haq. Zia was about to embark for Delhi on his famous cricket
diplomacy stint and had ordered Alam to accompany him there.
Alam asked to be excused saying: ‘Sir, if I ever enter Delhi it shall
be only if I am sitting behind the turret of my tank.’ He then told
me how, borrowing a small propeller-driven army reconnaissance
plane from his Army Aviation Unit, he had piloted it into Indian
territory and flew around for a full half an hour before returning to
base. The Indians duly protested; Pakistan duly denied. His purpose
for this stint was to spite Zia for his peace initiative.
After Gen. Alam had quizzed me on technical matters for over
two hours, towards the end I said something to the effect that
nuclear war should never even be contemplated because it would
wipe out Pakistan. Alam was visibly irritated: ‘professor, what you
are claiming is nonsense.’ He then asked me to calculate roughly
XXX INTRODUCTION
how many would die if one hundred Indian bombs were dropped on
Pakistan. My rough estimation satisfied him: Pakistan would lose 13
per cent of its population of 130 million (as it was then; it’s 200
million now). Gen. Alam was triumphant — this was a tolerable
injury, and hence not sufficient reason to hold back from a nuclear
war. In time Pakistan would recover!
General Alam’s thinking was not very different from that of the
late K.S. Subrahmanyam, India’s most influential Indian defense
analyst in the 1980s and 1990s. In one of his articles, Subrahmanyam
wrote:
Even the failure of deterrence will cause vast, but still finite damage,
considering the kind of arsenal the two sides are likely to have for a long
time to come, with the advantage being in favour of India if India were
to exercise its option (to arm with nuclear weapons). It will not mean
nuclear winter, rapid escalation involving the use of hundreds of
warheads and loss of control over the war. It will be analogous to the
situation between the superpowers in the early fifties. That situation will
still be preferable to one of India remaining non-nuclear, facing the
threat of humiliation, defeat and disintegration . 9
In the early days of Indian and Pakistani nuclear development,
minimal deterrence or ‘just enough’ had been the mantra of the
times. South Asian nuclear proponents were wont to take personal
insult upon mention of an arms race, which they debunked as fear
mongering. Hawkish Indian defense strategists, following
Subrahmanyam, vehemently asserted that arms racing is a Cold War
concept invented by the western powers and totally alien to
subcontinental thinking. Their Pakistani counterparts agreed. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the nuclear philosophy of Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD) and of steady escalation were believed
to be products of twisted western minds. South Asians were
supposedly wiser and would limit destructive powers only to ‘what
was needed’.
Subrahmanyam and I had first clashed on the subject of India’s
nuclear intentions at a meeting held at the University of Chicago in
1992, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Enrico Fermi’s
nuclear reactor. We then crossed swords off and on at various
meetings over the years. The last time, just before he died of cancer,
I was in Delhi at a meeting held in 2010 at IDSA (Institute of Defense
and Strategic Analysis) of which he had been director. I reminded
him of his earlier belief that Pakistan could not develop nuclear
weapons, and then argued that India’s decision to test had shorn
it of its earlier massive military advantage over Pakistan. Perhaps
because of his illness, his response was weak and unconvincing. But
the real reason is that events had proved the great guru of Indian
nuclearization to be plain wrong.
Even if many Indians still refuse to see it that way, the fact is that
India has been essentially paralyzed after choosing to go nuclear; its
ability to respond to Pakistan was enormously reduced. Take for
example the events of early 2002, when the build-up of troops had
escalated on both sides of the border. The Indian Parliament had
been attacked weeks earlier, on 13 December 2001, and a Pakistan-
based group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, had taken responsibility before
suddenly denying it. India growled threateningly again and again.
But faced by the awful prospect of nuclear destruction, it failed to
make any moves.
Still, those were tense times. Nuclear threats had started flying
in all directions. As Pakistan Air Force fighter aircraft loudly circled
Islamabad, in a public debate with me at SDPI (Sustainable
Development Policy Institute), General Mirza Aslam Beg, former
chief of the Pakistan Army, declared: ‘We can make a first strike, and
a second strike, or even a third.’ The lethality of nuclear war left
him unmoved. ‘You can die crossing the street,’ he observed, ‘or you
could die in a nuclear war. You’ve got to die someday anyway.’ Of
course, there was no war and, thanks to the hectic efforts of U.S.
and British officials and diplomats, the crisis was eventually defused.
Times of tension have brought out the steel claws again and again.
Mumbai had just been attacked (26 November 2008), and I was on
the same television talk show as General Hamid Nawaz (retd.), who
had also served as Federal Interior Minister and Defense Secretar
of Pakistan. The general angrily attacked me for suggesting that one
of the many Pakistan-based jihad groups could have been involved
because, indeed, I said that attacking India is exactly what they had
long promised and said they would do. But Gen. Nawaz recommended
readying Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and said that a nuclear first-
strike should be among Pakistan’s preferred options.
Clearly it didn’t take much for this particular general to want to
push the button. Hopefully others are very different from him, but
then that is just a hope.
DON’T TRUST THE DIPLOMATS EITHER
Pakistan and India are, of course, different countries. When visitors
say that they are similar, they risk offending their local hosts. But
there is undeniably a critical symmetry between their peoples,
politicians, and generals that overpowers their differences.
Operations ‘Brasstacks’ and ‘Cold Start’ may have had different goals
from that of Gibraltar and Kargil, but they competed in recklessness
and readiness to needlessly provoke and kill. The symmetry in
military minds is also present in the thinking of highly paid
Pakistani and Indian diplomats and negotiators. The protagonists
can often only be distinguished by their names — and that too not
always because some Indian diplomats are Muslim!
Suave and westernized, their job is to don the mask of nuclear
respectability. Having watched them at close quarters in arms
control workshops and seminars for nearly two decades, I can vouch
that they meet with amazing civility (and even a forced cordiality),
and seem like men of the world. Fluent in the jargon of confidence-
building measures and nuclear risk reduction measures, they have
honed their skills to conceal their multi-layered mistrust and inner
hostility towards the other side. Tasked to show that their country’s
nuclear weapons are in responsible hands, they will repeat their
myth even if their leaders have screamed nuclear threats just days
earlier. They must also perforce claim that their countries do not
proliferate weapons; that their government is fully in control of its
nuclear arsenal; and that they can handle nuclear weapons just as
well as any western nation. Each side says it is a hapless victim of
terrorism. But when the going gets rough; off come the velvet gloves
and out comes the iron fist. Most diplomats probably believe their
own national fiction. Only the rare exception among them is honest
to his inner self, introspects, and takes an independent position —
and that too mostly after retirement!
SO WHO TO TRUST?
The message: Pakistanis and Indians should not trust their
respective establishments when it comes to nuclear matters. Nor
should they look to the United States (or, now, China!). Instead,
objective reality, self-protection, and self-observation need to be our
guide. It is for my Indian friends to look at the reality on their side
of the border; they will see something similar though not identical.
As a Pakistani, I am obligated to look upon my side.
Here is what the facts around me say: Pakistan has just about
every kind of problem that there is. At the core lies an exploding
population without employable skills, and thus a perpetually
staggering economy. Day after day, and for year after year, newspaper
headlines and the audio-visual media have been consistently
broadcasting some new disaster: suicide bombings, brutal
assassinations, public lynchings, pogroms, and riots.
Less dramatic but more tragic is that the population is seriously
deprived of essential needs. A 2011 Oxfam report says that nearly
two-thirds of the Pakistani population spends between 50 to 70 per
cent of its income on food. 10 A staggering 36 per cent are
undernourished. This places Pakistan among the 21 undernourished
nations of the world. In 2011, the London-based Legatum Institute
‘Prosperity Index’ ranked Pakistan at 107 out of the 110 surveyed:
above Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic. 11 India,
in spite of its booming economy and relative internal peace, does
only marginally better.
Farrukh Saleem, an astute observer of Pakistan’s economic scene,
puts it this way:
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
For the first time in recent memory, net borrowing of the private sector
has been negative — Rs81 billion — indicative of a shrinking private
sector. For the first time ever every Pakistani man, woman and child is
indebted to the tune of Rs61,000 . . . the day Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani
was taking oath of office, there were an estimated 47. 1 million Pakistanis
living in extreme poverty. Over the past three years an average of 25,000
Pakistanis per day — every single day of the past three years — have been
driven into extreme poverty. The total now stands at an estimated 72.9
million below the poverty line. ... For the first time in recent memory
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has suffered such a drastic fall over
such a short period of time — from $5.4 billion in 2008 to around a
billion. Public Sector Enterprises are now losing RslOO crore a day,
every day of the year, and no one is worried. Pepco, just by itself, is
losing Rs50 crore a day, every day of the year, and no one is worried.
The Pakistan Railways is about to add a colossal $600 million to our
national debt . . , 12
For Pakistan’s political and military establishment, all this bad news
is like water off a duck’s back. It still glows with enthusiasm about
its nuclear weapons and keeps making more. For them, these are
Pakistan’s greatest assets. General Musharraf called them ‘our crown
jewels’, and commentators refer to the May 1998 tests as ‘our finest
hour’. But the truth lies elsewhere.
DREAMS OF A NUCLEAR BAYONET
Napoleon, in an enthusiastic moment, is said to have once remarked:
‘Bayonets are wonderful! One can do anything with them except sit
on them!’ Indeed, following the 1998 nuclear tests, Pakistan’s
military and political leaders saw the bomb as a panacea for solving
Pakistan’s multiple problems. It became axiomatic that, in addition
to providing total security, this would give Pakistan international
visibility, help liberate Kashmir, create national pride and elevate
the country’s technological status.
The mass euphoria following the tests led to the emergence of
new nuclear goals. Earlier, Pakistan had only one large reason for
wanting the bomb — Indian nuclear weapons had to be countered by
Pakistani ones. But a second purpose now emerged: a super-
confident military saw the bomb as a magic talisman. Having nukes-
for-nukes became secondary; the bomb could strip India of its
military advantage and neutralize its larger conventional land, air
and sea forces.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CONTENTS
Contributors viii
Poem ix
Author Biographies xi
Acknowledgements xv
Preface xvii
John Polyani
Introduction xxi
Pervez Hoodbhoy
1. Scientists and India’s Nuclear Bomb 1
M. V Ramana
2. The Coming of the Atomic Age to Pakistan 38
Zia Mian
3. Pakistan: Climbing the Nuclear Ladder 68
Pervez Hoodbhoy
4. Pakistan: Understanding the ‘World’s Fastest
Growing Arsenal’ 90
Pervez Hoodbhoy
5. Kashmir: From Nuclear Flashpoint to South Asia’s
Bridge of Peace? 117
Pervez Hoodbhoy
6. Nationalism and the Bomb 134
Pervez Hoodbhoy
7. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the ‘Islamic Bomb’ 151
Pervez Hoodbhoy
8. Post bin Laden: The Safety and Security of
Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal 168
Pervez Hoodbhoy
9. Commanding and Controlling Nuclear Weapons 204
Zia Mian
10. The Infeasibility of Early Warning 237
Zia Mian, R. Rajaraman, and M.V. Ramana
11. Pakistan’s Battlefield Use of Nuclear Weapons 253
Zia Mian and A.H. Nayyar
12. What Nuclear War Could Do to South Asia 267
Matthew McKinzie, Zia Mian, A.H. Nayyar, and M. V. Ramana
13. Pakistan’s Nuclear Diplomacy and the Fissile 277
Material Cut-off Treaty
Zia Mian and A.H. Nayyar
14. Speculations on the Future of Nuclear South Asia 295
Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
15. America, Global Domination, and Global Disarmament 308
Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
16. Nuclear Electricity is Not the Answer for Pakistan 326
Pervez Hoodbhoy
17. Nuclear Electricity is Not the Answer for India 348
Suvrat Raju
Tables
1. Pakistani Missile Force 102
2. Total Military and Nuclear Weapons
Spending 2010-2011 112
3. Estimated Duration of some Plausible
South Asian Missile Flights 240
4. Estimated Nuclear Casualties for each of 10 Large Indian and Pakistani Cities 275
5. Energy Profile of Pakistan 2011 327
6. PAEC’s projections for Nuclear Electricity
PREFACE
John Polyani
Nuclear weapons are a plague on the earth, differing from earlier
plagues in that they are visited upon us not by God but by man. A
plague that is man-made has its origins in a mix of fear, pride and
folly.
At the outset of the nuclear age fear dominated. The fear was
that Hitler’s Germany might secretly arm itself with these ultimate
weapons: deadly and indiscriminate. When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf
Hess, parachuted into England on 10 May 1941, it was with a
message to the King George VI that ‘new bombs with stronger
explosives’ 1 would make inevitable the destruction of Britain. Hess
was regarded as mad, and was imprisoned. Meanwhile, the few
people who understood the importance of the discovery by Otto
Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, made at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin in 1938, that they could split uranium atoms with neutrons,
were seriously considering the possibility of a devastating new form
of explosive.
Within months of Hess’s warning, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi,
European refugees working at Columbia University in New York,
demonstrated the practicability of a nuclear chain-reaction. This
demonstration led to the Manhattan Project and thereafter to the
two atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
As for Rudolf Hess, whose predictions weren’t too far off the mark,
he was still considered to be a lunatic and was transferred to a
German prison where, forty-two years later, he succeeded in hanging
himself at the age of ninety-three. The future comes slowly if, like
Hess, you are at the mercy of the bureaucracy, but with the speed
of an express train if, like Szilard, you are a free spirit. When things
change fast it is because there is a willingness to challenge accepted
thinking.
xviii PREFACE
Accepted thinking when Szilard turned his attention to the
possibilities of a nuclear chain reaction, was emphatically
discouraging. Lord Rutherford, pre-eminent among the founders of
nuclear physics, had just stated [London Times, 1933) that obtaining
energy from atomic fission ‘was a very poor and inefficient way of
producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in
the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine.’
For Szilard, the contrarian, this was a call to action. There had
to be a way. He knew enough chemistry to introduce the concept of
a branched nuclear chain-reaction, in which every nuclear parent
gave rise to two energetic offspring — with Malthusian consequences.
At that moment the atomic express train left the station. It will
require a similar feat of imagination to stop it.
I was with Leo Szilard in Moscow at an earlier Pugwash
Conference in December of 1960, when he described his preferred
terminus for the nuclear express, to a Soviet and American elite. He
could not resist a Delphic utterance. What was needed, he declared,
in order to end the Cold War, was an atomic bomb beneath Moscow
wired to an actuator under Washington, and, reciprocally, a second
such bomb in Washington wired to a trigger in Moscow. At that
level, armament could stop. I was young and callow enough to ask
him whether he was serious. What I got in return was an impish
grin.
Following World War II the nuclear contagion spread quickly
from the United States to the USSR, then on to the UK, France and
China. It moved more slowly to India, Pakistan, Israel and North
Korea. Nine nations in all — less than had been feared. But the
disease remains contagious. With Iran added to the list, expect
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which, with Israel, would comprise
five nuclear weapons states in, arguably, the most turbulent area of
the world.
It is not just fear that renders nuclear weapons contagious. There
is pride of possession, ironically most prominent among those
within the Nuclear Club, attempting at the same time to limit its
membership.
PREFACE xix
I spoke at the outset of three driving forces: fear, pride and folly,
of which folly remains. It resides in the fact that nuclear weapons,
though acquired for ‘security’, heighten insecurity.
In German composer Wagner’s Ring Cycle the possessors of gold
are similarly cursed by their fear of losing their treasure. Day and
night, underground, the Nibelung toil to increase the precious
stocks. Fortunately, this folly is no longer entirely unconstrained:
the United States and Russia, which together possess 95 per cent of
the world’s nuclear weapons, have reduced their armory from 70,000
in the 1980s, to 23,000 nuclear weapons today.
Why such a stupendous number, one asks? That was Szilard’s
question in Moscow. Today, sixty years into the nuclear age, there is
serious talk of reducing U.S.-Russian stockpile to a few hundred
weapons on either side. What feat of imagination will be required in
order to make this a reality? It is no new thought to the military
that, with the advent of nuclear weapons, we have left behind the
age of Clausewitz. War is no longer diplomacy pursued by other
means, since suicide lies outside the domain of the diplomatic.
Between nuclear armed powers there is no longer any alternative to
diplomacy.
Keeping thousands of nuclear weapons a few minutes away from
firing — as is currently being done in the U.S. and Russia — is folly.
It does not represent in any sane person’s view an alternative to
negotiation. Nor is keeping thousands of ballistic missiles aimed at
opposing ICBM’s (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) in the hope
of ‘winning’ a nuclear war, an alternative to diplomacy. This too we
presently do, though the dream of victory is rendered totally fanciful
by the destructive power aloft in aircraft, and sheltered from view
beneath the sea.
It is an extraordinary failure of the democratic process that these
fantasies of winning nuclear wars have been, till now, so ineffectively
challenged. Perhaps the time has finally come when the voices of
reason and responsibility can contain the nuclear express.
In this remarkable book, the result of a most civilized Pakistan-
India collaboration, we have the opportunity to see Wagner’s story
XX PREFACE
of the lure of nuclear gold played out on a smaller stage. The story
is, if possible, even more terrifying than the posturing between the
greater powers. First there are the clearly visible patriotic impulses,
heralding the mythical nirvana of ‘security’. Then comes the
realization of the appalling power of these weapons (this part of the
book, hair-raising as it is, was written prior to discovery of the
dreadful environmental consequences of a dust-cloud from a limited
nuclear war — though one would prefer not to think of the
eventuality, the authors of this book confront it unblinkingly). One
source of nuclear folly that the present account brings out in the
India-Pakistan context — but it is endemic — is the investment of
great influence in a few people. There is a deficiency, oftentimes an
absence, of public debate where matters relating to a nation’s ‘secret’
arsenals are concerned. Thus, India appears to have committed itself
to the nuclear path before there was any consideration of the likely
Pakistani response.
As a Canadian, I am well aware that my country’s record for
foresight is less than stellar. Canada, along with the U.S., equipped
India with a research reactor under the Eisenhower ‘Atoms for Peace
Program’. Contrary to the agreement, this provided the plutonium
for India’s first nuclear weapon. This bomb was tested in 1974. In a
pathetic bow to the country’s historic contribution to pacifism, it
was officially designated a ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosion’. The
decisions that underlay this test were made secretly at the prime
ministerial level. In similar secrecy Pakistan rushed to match India’s
feat, exploding its first nuclear weapons in 1998 just after India’s
second nuclear test.
All this is by way of introduction to the present far-sighted
volume, in which Pakistani and Indian scientists join together to
illustrate the predicament of their two countries. Here we find a
superb and well-informed catalyst for the debate that has till now
been largely lacking.
REFERENCES
1. Camp Z, Stephen McGinty, Harper Collins, 2011; p. 84.
INTRODUCTION
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Scientists made the first atomic bomb. These men of exceptional
brilliance discovered the physics of subatomic particles, and found
just how a few atomic nuclei could be coaxed and cajoled into
releasing their enormous energy, and then explicitly calculated
everything down to the last detail. Their forbiddingly difficult
mathematical formulae were based upon the newly created
disciplines of relativity and quantum mechanics. The scribbled
symbols seemed utterly abstract, but the deadly fireballs over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan showed just how real they were.
All those who created the bomb and its physics are now dead.
Some, like Edward Teller, never regretted their role. Avidly sought
after by military generals and national leaders, they happily kept
on inventing ever more terrible weapons. But some were appalled,
realizing that they had brought humankind to the brink. Robert J.
Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project’s scientific leader, famously
quoting the lines, ‘I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds’,
turned against the bomb and fell under suspicion of being disloyal
to America. His security clearance was revoked and he was accused
of being a communist, a serious matter in those hysterically anti-
communist times. Albert Einstein, whose mass-energy equivalence
formula lies at the very foundation of the bomb, became convinced
that desperate danger lurked around the corner. Einstein teamed
up with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century’s pre-eminent
philosopher and mathematician, to write the Einstein-Russell
Manifesto. This became the basis of a post-World War II movement
for eliminating nuclear weapons.
The opposition to the bomb by some of twentieth century’s
greatest scientists caused many around the world to reflect and
ponder upon the social responsibility of scientists. The authors of
xxii INTRODUCTION
this book are among them. Hailing from both sides of the Pakistan-
India border (with the exception of one, who comes from far away!),
they are scientists who reject nuclear patriotism; that misplaced
belief which says hurting an adversary country is somehow
equivalent to loving your own.
What prompted these scientist-authors to venture into the world
of nuclear weapons, war, strategy, and politics? This, after all, is not
their job and can only be distantly connected to the work that they
actually do as scientists. In fact, the monopoly of scientists over
nuclear weapons evaporated some decades ago. To kill millions in
minutes, it is now no longer necessary to have a nuclear physicist
in residence. In modern times, nuclear weapon design and construc-
tion has steadily descended from high-brow theoretical physics
towards mundane issues of engineering, management, and logistics.
Seventy years ago the detailed physics of nuclear explosions was a
matter of the highest conceptual difficulty. But today, a graduate
student with a solid grounding in physics, and access to internet
literature, could, as a PhD thesis, design a crude but workable
nuclear explosive. Computer codes allow accurate simulations of
nuclear explosions, eliminating the earlier need for the intricate
numerical procedures used by the early atomic scientists.
And yet, in dealing with thorny issues of war and peace, scientists
possibly still have some residual advantage. In part this comes from
knowing the physical principles behind modern weaponry. But it
comes still more from the nature of scientific education. Scientists
are trained to recognize and analyze a wide variety of problems of
the physical world. Of course, this does not mean that they are
always right when they work outside their own domains. It also does
not guarantee that scientists always behave rationally or humanely
in their personal lives. But the cultivation of scientific habits is
undeniably an asset that allows one to think through various issues
of war and peace plainly and logically; identify that which are rooted
in fact; and propose ways out of difficult situations. It is this hope
that brings the present authors out into a domain which, in reality,
does not belong to any single discipline.
INTRODUCTION xxiii
DOWN THE STEEP SLIPPERY SLOPE
Once the first bomb was ready, the scientists who conceived and
built it became peripheral. They were no longer courted by the
political and military leaders who now ‘owned’ it. These leaders
would decide how and when it would be used, and against whom.
They now had a calculated strategy for putting terror into the hearts
of men.
The decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not taken
in anger. White men in grey business suits and military uniforms,
after much deliberation, decided the U.S. ‘could not give the
Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian
area but that we should seek to make a profound psychological
impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible . . . [and] the
most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large
number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses .’ 1
They argued it would be cheaper in American lives to release the
nuclear genie. Besides, it was such a marvellous device to show to
the Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
And so one fine morning, banner headlines such as ‘Jap City No
More’ brought the news from across the ocean. Joyous crowds
gathered in Manhattan’s Times Square in New York to celebrate.
There was less of the enemy left. Rarely are victors encumbered by
remorse. President Harry Truman declared: ‘When you have to deal
with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable
but nevertheless true .’ 2 It is a disappointing truth that six decades
later even American liberals remain ambivalent about the morality
of nuking the two Japanese cities. The late Hans Bethe of the
Manhattan Project fame, and Nobel Prize winner in physics, became
a leading exponent of arms control some decades later. Yet, in a
speech at the Cornell University, he declared that, ‘the atom bomb
was the greatest gift we could have given to the Japanese .’ 3
Even as the United States dusted off its hands and moved on,
elsewhere the radioactive rubble of the dead cities spawned not only
a sense of dread, but also an obsessive desire for nuclear weapons.
Stalin raced ahead with his program, while Charles de Gaulle
xxiv INTRODUCTION
conceived his ‘force de frappe’. Mao Tse-Tung quietly decided that
he too wanted the bomb even as he derided it as ‘a paper tiger’. In
newly independent Israel, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion
apparently ‘had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass
destruction’, writes Avner Cohen, the historian of Israel’s nuclear
bomb. Ben Gurion ordered his agents to seek out East European
Jewish scientists who could ‘either increase the capacity to kill
masses or to cure masses.’ 4
The wind blew the poisonous clouds of fear and envy over other
third world countries as well: In 1948, while arguing to create
India’s Department of Atomic Energy, Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru told parliament, ‘I think we must develop [nuclear science]
for peaceful purposes.’ But, he added, ‘of course, if we are compelled
as a nation to use it for other purposes, possibly no pious sentiments
of any of us will stop the nation from using it that way.’ 5 Just three
years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those ‘other purposes’ were all
too clear.
Days after Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998, Japan invited the
country’s foreign minister to visit Hiroshima’s peace museum. The
minister was visibly moved after seeing the gruesome evidence of
mass devastation. His reaction: ‘we made our nukes precisely so that
this could never happen to Pakistan.’
The world is awash with terrible inventions, now in the control
of generals and politicians, very few of whom can be trusted with
public funds or keeping solemn promises. Can they be trusted with
the instruments of mass annihilation? And, if not them, then just
who should one trust?
SOME PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS
Logically, those in charge of a nation’s nuclear affairs should be
selected from amongst the wisest, most capable, and best informed
people who also have a calm temperament and capacity to withstand
extreme pressure. But in reality these conditions remain unfulfilled.
In India and Pakistan, leaders have rarely weighed the consequences
INTRODUCTION XXV
of their actions. Instead, they have simply reacted to events and
circumstances.
India started the nuclear race, so let me start with India, from
circa 1974. After it chose to test a supposedly ‘peaceful nuclear
device’, there was little care or concern about how Pakistan would
respond. The Indian leadership under Indira Gandhi was naive in its
nuclear thinking. It could not imagine that Pakistan too could
develop nuclear bombs and, ostrich-like, chose to remain ill-
informed of Pakistan’s capabilities or ponder upon the different
options it had at that time. With eyes fixed towards China, perhaps
it did not even care. Having dismissed Pakistani technical capability
as inconsequential, the thought that India’s military advantage could
be eventually nullified by a nuclear Pakistan probably never crossed
the minds of those Indians who mattered at the time. As it turned
out, Indira Gandhi’s successors proved as unenlightened as her.
A personal experience: Two months before the May 1998 nuclear
tests conducted by India and Pakistan, a delegation from the
Pugwash Movement met in Delhi with Prime Minister Inderjit
Kumar Gujral. I was one of the delegates. As we sat around a table
in the Prime Minister’s House, I expressed my worry about a possible
nuclear catastrophe befalling the subcontinent. To my surprise, Mr
Gujral twice assured me — first in public and later in private — that
there was no cause for concern. As we prepared to depart, he came
by and, upon learning that I was from Karachi, grew nostalgic about
the city he had grown up in. Putting his arm around me he
confidently and earnestly told me, speaking in Urdu/Hindi, that
Pakistan lacked the competence to make atomic bombs. For quite a
while, I felt very confused . . . could he be right?
The Prime Minister was scarcely alone in being mistaken. Senior
Indian defense analysts like P.R. Chari had also published articles
before May 1998 arguing this point, as had the former head of the
Indian Atomic Energy Agency, Dr Raja Ramanna. The Indian
intelligence agency RAW, which Pakistanis generally believe to be
ubiquitous and infinitely cunning, was also confused and gave
contradictory reports. In fact the confusion went all the way up to
xxvi INTRODUCTION
the top. This became apparent at the time when India was in a state
of euphoria in the days after the Pokharan tests. Mass celebrations
were still in progress when, brimming with hubris, Home Minister
L.K. Advani advised Pakistan to give up its claim on Kashmir
because the ‘geostrategic’ context had decisively changed in India’s
favour . 6 At a time when Pakistan was supposed to be just a
‘screwdriver turn away from the bomb ’, 7 Indian newspapers taunted
Pakistanis: had the Chinese forgotten to send the screwdriver over
with the bomb? Or were the instructions written in Chinese? Most
Indians firmly believed that Pakistan did not possess the bomb.
But they could not have been more wrong. Pakistan’s bomb-
makers had long been craving for an opportunity to show their own
prowess. Six months after the tests, one of their leaders gave a public
speech expressing his delight at the Indian test:
We had spent our lifetime on the project and still there was no chance
of a hot test. And on the morning of the eleventh of May this year, one
of our friends in the armed services phoned me and he said, ‘Have you
heard the news today?’ I said. ‘What?’ He said, ‘The Indians have
conducted the explosion in Pokharan.’ So I said, ‘Congratulations.’ I was
genuinely happy. He said, ‘You are congratulating us on the Indian
tests?’ I said, ‘Yes, because now we would get a chance to do our own
tests .’ 8
The confidence was well-placed. Only seventeen days later, with a
thunderous roar, the mountains of Chagai shook and then turned
white as five nuclear devices were simultaneously detonated inside
a deeply drilled tunnel prepared years earlier. Two days later, for
good measure, one more device was set off under the Ras-Koh hills.
India’s good cheer was suddenly shattered. Instead, recriminations
and excuses started flying.
Mistaken notions extended into the Indian military as well. India’s
late ‘nuclear visionary’ and army chief, General K. Sunderji, had
preached for years from a thick tome that came to be known as the
‘Sunderji Bible’. His principal claim was that nuclear weapons would
bring stability to the subcontinent, and that there would be no Cold
War type nuclear racing. Certainly he had Pakistan on his mind —
not China — when, in the 1980s, he pressed hard for weaponizing
India’s nuclear capacity. With infectious enthusiasm, Sunderji
lectured that India needed only a handful of fission weapons to ‘take
out’ major Pakistani cities. More was not better, he said. Like the
other military men of his time, this rather simple and likeable man
thought that these terrible weapons had now made war impossible.
My single encounter with Sunderji was at a Carnegie conference
in Washington in 1993. He had just finished speaking on the
absolute security that nuclear weapons would bestow upon the
world. I had never before seen a man who loved the bomb more; his
eyes would light up upon its mere mention. So, when I introduced
myself to him as a Pakistani nuclear physicist, he was overjoyed and
hugged me warmly saying: ‘I was commanding officer at Pokharan
in 1974 when the damn thing went off. Right away I told the bug
that we should give it to them [the Pakistanis] because war will then
become impossible.’ I did not have the heart to tell him that
Pakistan, inspired by India, was indeed well on its way to having
more than a few of its own. Nor, for that matter, that his (Sunderji’s)
dangerous initiative, ‘Operation Brasstacks’, had nearly brought the
two countries to blows in 1987. For all his heartiness and bonhomie,
this man’s irresponsible and dangerous antics could have led to the
deaths of thousands.
Sunderji’s infectious nuclear enthusiasm had already made its way
across the border. In March 1990, long before the nuclear tests had
been carried out, Pakistan’s General K.M. Arif wrote in The Globe :
Let India and Pakistan both become nuclear weapon states openly
and without reservations. They are both mature nations which need
no counselling on their international responsibilities and conduct.
Top Pakistani generals, whose mannerisms scarcely differ from
that of Indians, are fairly nonchalant about nuclear weapons. They
seem to view these bombs as just another kind of bomb, albeit an
oversized one. They had no appreciation of what would happen to
the country after a nuclear war, apart from a rather dim
understanding that many people would die.
INTRODUCTION
I have many tales to tell.
In late 1989, a group of seven senior military officers, then
studying operational matters at the National Defense College, came
to meet me at the physics department of Quaid-e-Azam University.
Their term project was to write a paper on nuclear strategy and
posture in the Pak-India context. Although Pakistan did not
officially acknowledge possessing such weapons then, the process of
inducting them into the forces had already begun. It was also a time
when there was almost zero understanding of nuclear matters in the
military and, quite sensibly, they were keen to learn technical details
from every available source.
Since this group was larger than could fit into my little office,
I led them to the physics department conference room (still called
the ‘tea room’ by everybody because that’s where we have our 10:30
am tea everyday). We spent the next two hours there, discussing
everything: from blast radii and firestorms to electronic locks and
PALS (Permissive Action Links). The officers took copious notes
and appeared satisfied. As they prepared to leave I asked what
circumstances, in their opinion, would warrant the use of nuclear
weapons by Pakistan. After some reflection one officer spoke up:
‘professor’, he assured me, ‘they shall be used only defensively if
at all, and only if the Pakistan Army faces defeat. We cannot allow
ourselves to be dis-honoured.’ Around the table, heads nodded in
agreement. Significantly, the calculus of destruction — that cities
and populations would be obliterated on both sides — was not what
mattered. Instead it was ghairat — the protection of honour — that
was primary. Preserving a tribal value, probably acquired around
Neolithic times, was considered more important than preserving life.
The same question put to Indian military officers would probably
elicit the same answer. Historically, honour has driven armies to
fight battles. Even as the officer spoke, my thoughts wandered to
the charge of the Light Brigade. During the Crimean War of 1854,
wave after wave of honour-charged British soldiers rode their horses
into the mouths of Russian guns which, of course, promptly mowed
them down. Tennyson later immortalized the slain men in his
famous poem: All the world wonder’d. Honour the charge they
made! Honour the Light Brigade.
In the same year that I encountered General Sunderji, I also met
with General Shamim Alam Khan. He was then Chairman, Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Frankly, it’s a little scary to receive a call from the
GHQ in Rawalpindi. Our generals usually don’t deign to talk to
professors, especially dissident ones. But here was a staff car, with a
smart uniformed officer, that had been dispatched to fetch me from
the university. I had to wait for an hour outside Gen. Alam’s office.
Dr A.Q. Khan, who walked past me (he did not know me at the time)
had suddenly dropped in to meet him.
Once Dr Khan left, the general had many questions for me. He
told me that the army was just learning to operationally integrate
its newly acquired weapons into the command structure, and so
wanted to know all about Permissive Action Links; command and
control issues; possibilities of accidental nuclear war, etc. Although
he was certainly aware of my opposition to the bomb, he was still
sufficiently curious.
General Alam was a tough, short man who passionately hated
India. He regaled me with various episodes. Once he had excused
himself in 1985 from an order received from President General Zia-
ul-Haq. Zia was about to embark for Delhi on his famous cricket
diplomacy stint and had ordered Alam to accompany him there.
Alam asked to be excused saying: ‘Sir, if I ever enter Delhi it shall
be only if I am sitting behind the turret of my tank.’ He then told
me how, borrowing a small propeller-driven army reconnaissance
plane from his Army Aviation Unit, he had piloted it into Indian
territory and flew around for a full half an hour before returning to
base. The Indians duly protested; Pakistan duly denied. His purpose
for this stint was to spite Zia for his peace initiative.
After Gen. Alam had quizzed me on technical matters for over
two hours, towards the end I said something to the effect that
nuclear war should never even be contemplated because it would
wipe out Pakistan. Alam was visibly irritated: ‘professor, what you
are claiming is nonsense.’ He then asked me to calculate roughly
XXX INTRODUCTION
how many would die if one hundred Indian bombs were dropped on
Pakistan. My rough estimation satisfied him: Pakistan would lose 13
per cent of its population of 130 million (as it was then; it’s 200
million now). Gen. Alam was triumphant — this was a tolerable
injury, and hence not sufficient reason to hold back from a nuclear
war. In time Pakistan would recover!
General Alam’s thinking was not very different from that of the
late K.S. Subrahmanyam, India’s most influential Indian defense
analyst in the 1980s and 1990s. In one of his articles, Subrahmanyam
wrote:
Even the failure of deterrence will cause vast, but still finite damage,
considering the kind of arsenal the two sides are likely to have for a long
time to come, with the advantage being in favour of India if India were
to exercise its option (to arm with nuclear weapons). It will not mean
nuclear winter, rapid escalation involving the use of hundreds of
warheads and loss of control over the war. It will be analogous to the
situation between the superpowers in the early fifties. That situation will
still be preferable to one of India remaining non-nuclear, facing the
threat of humiliation, defeat and disintegration . 9
In the early days of Indian and Pakistani nuclear development,
minimal deterrence or ‘just enough’ had been the mantra of the
times. South Asian nuclear proponents were wont to take personal
insult upon mention of an arms race, which they debunked as fear
mongering. Hawkish Indian defense strategists, following
Subrahmanyam, vehemently asserted that arms racing is a Cold War
concept invented by the western powers and totally alien to
subcontinental thinking. Their Pakistani counterparts agreed. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the nuclear philosophy of Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD) and of steady escalation were believed
to be products of twisted western minds. South Asians were
supposedly wiser and would limit destructive powers only to ‘what
was needed’.
Subrahmanyam and I had first clashed on the subject of India’s
nuclear intentions at a meeting held at the University of Chicago in
1992, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Enrico Fermi’s
nuclear reactor. We then crossed swords off and on at various
meetings over the years. The last time, just before he died of cancer,
I was in Delhi at a meeting held in 2010 at IDSA (Institute of Defense
and Strategic Analysis) of which he had been director. I reminded
him of his earlier belief that Pakistan could not develop nuclear
weapons, and then argued that India’s decision to test had shorn
it of its earlier massive military advantage over Pakistan. Perhaps
because of his illness, his response was weak and unconvincing. But
the real reason is that events had proved the great guru of Indian
nuclearization to be plain wrong.
Even if many Indians still refuse to see it that way, the fact is that
India has been essentially paralyzed after choosing to go nuclear; its
ability to respond to Pakistan was enormously reduced. Take for
example the events of early 2002, when the build-up of troops had
escalated on both sides of the border. The Indian Parliament had
been attacked weeks earlier, on 13 December 2001, and a Pakistan-
based group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, had taken responsibility before
suddenly denying it. India growled threateningly again and again.
But faced by the awful prospect of nuclear destruction, it failed to
make any moves.
Still, those were tense times. Nuclear threats had started flying
in all directions. As Pakistan Air Force fighter aircraft loudly circled
Islamabad, in a public debate with me at SDPI (Sustainable
Development Policy Institute), General Mirza Aslam Beg, former
chief of the Pakistan Army, declared: ‘We can make a first strike, and
a second strike, or even a third.’ The lethality of nuclear war left
him unmoved. ‘You can die crossing the street,’ he observed, ‘or you
could die in a nuclear war. You’ve got to die someday anyway.’ Of
course, there was no war and, thanks to the hectic efforts of U.S.
and British officials and diplomats, the crisis was eventually defused.
Times of tension have brought out the steel claws again and again.
Mumbai had just been attacked (26 November 2008), and I was on
the same television talk show as General Hamid Nawaz (retd.), who
had also served as Federal Interior Minister and Defense Secretar
of Pakistan. The general angrily attacked me for suggesting that one
of the many Pakistan-based jihad groups could have been involved
because, indeed, I said that attacking India is exactly what they had
long promised and said they would do. But Gen. Nawaz recommended
readying Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and said that a nuclear first-
strike should be among Pakistan’s preferred options.
Clearly it didn’t take much for this particular general to want to
push the button. Hopefully others are very different from him, but
then that is just a hope.
DON’T TRUST THE DIPLOMATS EITHER
Pakistan and India are, of course, different countries. When visitors
say that they are similar, they risk offending their local hosts. But
there is undeniably a critical symmetry between their peoples,
politicians, and generals that overpowers their differences.
Operations ‘Brasstacks’ and ‘Cold Start’ may have had different goals
from that of Gibraltar and Kargil, but they competed in recklessness
and readiness to needlessly provoke and kill. The symmetry in
military minds is also present in the thinking of highly paid
Pakistani and Indian diplomats and negotiators. The protagonists
can often only be distinguished by their names — and that too not
always because some Indian diplomats are Muslim!
Suave and westernized, their job is to don the mask of nuclear
respectability. Having watched them at close quarters in arms
control workshops and seminars for nearly two decades, I can vouch
that they meet with amazing civility (and even a forced cordiality),
and seem like men of the world. Fluent in the jargon of confidence-
building measures and nuclear risk reduction measures, they have
honed their skills to conceal their multi-layered mistrust and inner
hostility towards the other side. Tasked to show that their country’s
nuclear weapons are in responsible hands, they will repeat their
myth even if their leaders have screamed nuclear threats just days
earlier. They must also perforce claim that their countries do not
proliferate weapons; that their government is fully in control of its
nuclear arsenal; and that they can handle nuclear weapons just as
well as any western nation. Each side says it is a hapless victim of
terrorism. But when the going gets rough; off come the velvet gloves
and out comes the iron fist. Most diplomats probably believe their
own national fiction. Only the rare exception among them is honest
to his inner self, introspects, and takes an independent position —
and that too mostly after retirement!
SO WHO TO TRUST?
The message: Pakistanis and Indians should not trust their
respective establishments when it comes to nuclear matters. Nor
should they look to the United States (or, now, China!). Instead,
objective reality, self-protection, and self-observation need to be our
guide. It is for my Indian friends to look at the reality on their side
of the border; they will see something similar though not identical.
As a Pakistani, I am obligated to look upon my side.
Here is what the facts around me say: Pakistan has just about
every kind of problem that there is. At the core lies an exploding
population without employable skills, and thus a perpetually
staggering economy. Day after day, and for year after year, newspaper
headlines and the audio-visual media have been consistently
broadcasting some new disaster: suicide bombings, brutal
assassinations, public lynchings, pogroms, and riots.
Less dramatic but more tragic is that the population is seriously
deprived of essential needs. A 2011 Oxfam report says that nearly
two-thirds of the Pakistani population spends between 50 to 70 per
cent of its income on food. 10 A staggering 36 per cent are
undernourished. This places Pakistan among the 21 undernourished
nations of the world. In 2011, the London-based Legatum Institute
‘Prosperity Index’ ranked Pakistan at 107 out of the 110 surveyed:
above Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic. 11 India,
in spite of its booming economy and relative internal peace, does
only marginally better.
Farrukh Saleem, an astute observer of Pakistan’s economic scene,
puts it this way:
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
For the first time in recent memory, net borrowing of the private sector
has been negative — Rs81 billion — indicative of a shrinking private
sector. For the first time ever every Pakistani man, woman and child is
indebted to the tune of Rs61,000 . . . the day Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani
was taking oath of office, there were an estimated 47. 1 million Pakistanis
living in extreme poverty. Over the past three years an average of 25,000
Pakistanis per day — every single day of the past three years — have been
driven into extreme poverty. The total now stands at an estimated 72.9
million below the poverty line. ... For the first time in recent memory
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has suffered such a drastic fall over
such a short period of time — from $5.4 billion in 2008 to around a
billion. Public Sector Enterprises are now losing RslOO crore a day,
every day of the year, and no one is worried. Pepco, just by itself, is
losing Rs50 crore a day, every day of the year, and no one is worried.
The Pakistan Railways is about to add a colossal $600 million to our
national debt . . , 12
For Pakistan’s political and military establishment, all this bad news
is like water off a duck’s back. It still glows with enthusiasm about
its nuclear weapons and keeps making more. For them, these are
Pakistan’s greatest assets. General Musharraf called them ‘our crown
jewels’, and commentators refer to the May 1998 tests as ‘our finest
hour’. But the truth lies elsewhere.
DREAMS OF A NUCLEAR BAYONET
Napoleon, in an enthusiastic moment, is said to have once remarked:
‘Bayonets are wonderful! One can do anything with them except sit
on them!’ Indeed, following the 1998 nuclear tests, Pakistan’s
military and political leaders saw the bomb as a panacea for solving
Pakistan’s multiple problems. It became axiomatic that, in addition
to providing total security, this would give Pakistan international
visibility, help liberate Kashmir, create national pride and elevate
the country’s technological status.
The mass euphoria following the tests led to the emergence of
new nuclear goals. Earlier, Pakistan had only one large reason for
wanting the bomb — Indian nuclear weapons had to be countered by
Pakistani ones. But a second purpose now emerged: a super-
confident military saw the bomb as a magic talisman. Having nukes-
for-nukes became secondary; the bomb could strip India of its
military advantage and neutralize its larger conventional land, air
and sea forces.
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