Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal – The Babur-Nasr are Quick First Use, Not Second Strike

(***** Now published in Indian Defence Review and can be accessed HERE *****)

Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal – The Babur-Nasr are Quick First Use, Not Second Strike

The report of a successful test of a submarine launched cruise missile, Babur III, by Pakistan claims achievement of second strike capability by Pakistan. It is unambiguously clear that Pakistan’s nuclear capability, missile forces, and even conventional army have been focused, developed and designed against India. As is well-established Indian Nuclear Doctrine has the most stringent basis of No First Use (NFU). Since India will not be conducting first nuclear strike as per its vowed doctrine and ground evidence, what is the rationale of Pakistan describing this SLCM test as “achieving a credible second strike capability”?

Indian Nuclear Doctrine and need for a credible second strike capability
When I explained in my Agni-V article in Indian Defence Review (Please see Agni-V : A True Game Changer article) that Agni V gives India second strike capability , I meant second strike counter force capability it is a way to destroy enemy missile launchers in hardened sheltered strategic command and control systems in hardened underground with Target Strength of above 300 pounds per square inch of pressure, on second strike even with one single MIRVed Agni V at 5000 km range.

For Indian Nuclear Doctrine with deep roots in No-First-Use and creating a credible nuclear deterrence with massive retaliation on first strike on India, it is imperative that India should develop a counter value second strike capability. The counter value second strike implies an ability of some nuclear forces to survive the first nuclear strike on India, which may be decapitating first strike by say Pakistan and launch sufficient nuclear warheads to demolish major cities of the potential opponents. Given the consistent, complete and comprehensive posture that India has taken since 1974 PNE, Indian Nuclear Doctrine is clear case of an unambiguous anti-nuclear stance of India as a model nation of the world. A nation that taken almost a quarter century (1998) to carry out further nuclear tests when it became clear that Pakistan has the nuclear bomb – acquired under Nelson eyes of superpowers of the time. Since we have three key attributes of Indian Nuclear Doctrine – NFU, Credible Minimum Deterrence and Massive Retaliation on receiving a nuclear attack, it is but obvious that India need to develop credible, visible and viable capabilities to be able to accredit the nuclear doctrine. In this regard, India need to have second strike counter value capability.

Further, since India must create a massive retaliation capability in second strike – it is imperative that we should develop not only the second-strike counter value but also the second-strike counter force capability. Our uniquely articulated doctrine requires massive retaliation that should decapitate the capability of the attacker to launch any further nuclear attacks on us. Agni-V with MIRV capability as well as SLBMs provide that capability.

Pakistan Nuclear Doctrine – Quick First Use and Strike below Indian Threshold

Pakistan has been developing a dangerous doctrine after Kargil loss. In 1999, in what can be the only direct war between two nuclear armed adversaries, Pakistan miscalculated the value of its overt nuclear status and carried out the Kargil adventure. Since then, there have been umpteen attacks below the conventional levels. On the nuclear end of the spectrum Pakistan has been developing diverse and deeper nuclear capabilities that can only be termed usable and all of them are first strike capabilities.

NASR, Babur, Cold Start Doctrine and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)

NASR – the 60 KM range nuclear capable NASR test fired by Pakistan, couple of years back was a very specific response to India's so called "Cold Start Doctrine" ostensibly conceived in 2004 to send 8 Independent Battle Groups (each an armored division equivalent) into Pakistan at high speed and quickly. Pakistan has been giving this excuse - the CSD excuse - to develop tactical nukes and delivery mechanism like NASR.

Mutually Assured Destruction is a cold war term - Nuke deterrence term indicating the balancing of each side against nuclear strikes by the other side. However, NASR, cannot be construed as MAD. In NASR’s case, the spiral of increasing deterrence may lead to increasing probability of an actual nuke use - and looking at current state of Pakistan - the danger has increased manifolds - as non-state actors may get NASR and arm and launch it. You never know what Hafiz Saeed types can do with what they can get their hands to. In fact, with each such increase the possibility of such nukes falling in the hands of terrorists is increasing considerably (please see my article here)

With NASR Pakistan gave us a key message – “You keep on spending on conventional weapons and bleed your economy. We will sandwich your conventional capability which is not agile and anyway cannot create a tempo quick enough for any real gains - we will sandwich you in the Nukes dimensions with full spectrum capability and keep on poking you in lower end with variety of mechanisms - Kargil, Parliament attack, 26/11, beheading your soldiers and many more to come.” NASR is a first strike capability and by keeping it as tactical nuclear weapon, Pakistan brings it to forward edge of first use.

Babur III -SLCM will NOT be counter force second-strike although it does increase the counter value second strike ability, as it is submarine launched. But the warhead that it carries is sufficient for a Nagasaki/Hiroshima type of nuclear bomb on a city. It cannot destroy the hardened, underground missile launchers or mobile launchers.

Quick First Use is the nuclear doctrine of Pakistan in contrast to India’s NFU. Therefore, a second-strike capability has no logic and doesn’t make sense. NASR and all HATF versions including the Babur III are not second strike but a potential third strike capability.

The escalatory ladder that Pakistan envisage, as discernible by their key nuclear capabilities developed and being deployed, is – (a) Pakistan’s asymmetric/hybrid/multi-domain attacks leads to India launching a Conventional attack – on a variant of Cold Start  (b) Pakistan thwarted 2-3 of 8 Integrated battle groups that were rapidly approaching deep in Pakistan with NASR – sub-KT nukes (c) India retaliates massively to completely decimate Pakistan (d) Pakistan uses SLCM to destroy couple of Indian Cities – say, key cities in West and South of India with SLCM – Babur III.

These stages of escalation make the SLCM a third strike capability and not the second strike. As the second strike, will be by India under massive retaliation as defined by our Nuclear Doctrine.

Key Points

Pakistan has been consistently developing a full-spectrum first-strike nuclear capability including the tactical nuclear weapons such as NASR and now the submarine launched cruise missile Babur III.  In contrast to India’s No First Use (NFU) nuclear doctrine, Pakistan’s nuclear posture and capability can only be termed as Quick First Use (QFU) – a trigger happy posture, capability and intent, that is not only dangerous for the sub-continent but potentially disastrous for the world at large. Positioning SLCM Babur III as credible second strike capability is a misnomer, as second strike in the nuclear exchange will be by India – and it will be massive. As best, if Pakistan survives Indian second strike, Babur may be a third strike counter value capability that may destroy an Indian city, after Pakistan has been eliminated from the world. 

"Agni-V - Its Value for India's Security" - My Article and its on-line Journey - a view !

India test fired Agni-V missile some months back and its next test is slated for this month sometimes as per news reports.

Given my interest in Defence I write on defence and strategic issues regularly and sometimes some of these gets published online as well.

Please see my articles on Indian Defence Review

So my article on Agni-5 or Agni-V missile was published on 3rd Feb 2016 - Agni-5 : A True Game Changer I got my usual comments from my regular friends on Facebook and over email.

But couple of days later a friend of mine on Facebook posted

The Importance Of Agni-V To India’s Security 

I was obviously curious to know as it was very close to my article. Lo and behold it was exactly the same article. However, here the shares statistics were very different - It was saying almost 1000 likes and 50 shares on facebook. I was shocked. Two reasons - the online mag never bothered to ask me about this direct lifting of my article from Indian Defence Review and secondly there are people who visit this magazine and actually are writing comments and sharing  it at a rapid pace.

By Sunday night the likes on facebook and shares had reached a mind boggling 11600+ and 800+ shares.

Whats more - it was picked up by other online defence portals as well such as defence updates
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Key lessons

If you want to write a domain specific articles get it published in domain specific portals (e.g., Indian Defence Review). But if you want wide reach - get it published to a portal where wide variety of people come. The number of likes and shares can increase exponentially.

But in my opinion - what type of people are reading it and their understanding (as reflected in their comments) will not be to the level of the domain and field readers that you hope will read.

So in effect - you hope more people in your field and domain read it - but you are also likely to get lot of random readers who are driven by totally tangential motives to the field and domain that you are addressing.

For those who want to read the article completely - you can read it here as well.
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The Importance Of Agni-V To India’s Security

The fourth Agni-V test is scheduled to be conducted during the month of February 2016. This will be the second canister launch. Agni-V will be ready for induction after few more tests – especially the test of its multiple independent targeting re-entry vehicles (MIRV) capability.

Although its induction and deployment is some years ahead, it has already produced interesting reactions. The key discussion has been about its range – whether it is 5000 km or 8000 km and above, and whether it should be truly called an ICBM. There has also been some buzz about the multiple independent targeting re-entry vehicles (MIRV) capability and their ability to carry 3-10 different warheads in a single missile. Indeed, it is a major feature and technology that will catapult India to a very small set of nations with this capability.

The ability to carry 1-1.5 tons warhead over 5,000+ kilometers range is definitely another feature of the missile that puts it in a different category than whatever missiles India has. A 500 Kg payload can give the earlier missiles ability to carry nuclear warheads with 20KT yield, or something similar to what was exploded above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With three times the payload, India now has the capability, in theory, at least, to carry higher yield, say 150KT to 1 MT yield nuclear warheads to distances more than 5000 km away. This gives India a real counterforce capability if our doctrine and strategy warrants that option.

Counter-Force versus Counter-Value nuclear strategies
If a country has the capability to strike population centers of the adversary with nuclear weapons, it is considered to have counter value capability in nuclear strategy terminology. These targets include population centers including big cities, large industrial complexes, power centers, dams, oil refineries etc. The counter value targets typically are “non-military targets” of the adversary, mostly population centers. As these are mostly larger spread and “soft” targets, the lower yield nuclear weapons, say with a yield of 20 Kilo Tons (KT) of TNT or so, are considered sufficient to pronounce this capability.

Further, for counter value nuclear forces, one need a delivery weapon – can be a ballistic missile – which need not have a very high accuracy. One can understand, that if a nuclear bomb explodes above the center of the city or few kilometers away, the devastation of the city will be immense, and in the long term there will not be much qualitative difference in terms of impact on the city – say killing 1 million people immediately or 500,000 people immediately – which one will you take? The obvious answer is none.
The counter value nuclear forces are giving this message to the adversary – we will take a couple of your cities – whether our missile takes 1 million or 0.5 million people of your city is not important – we can destroy a couple of your main cities if you attack or threaten us with a nuclear weapons strike. The counter value nuclear weapons are the forces to deter the adversary. These are indeed deterrence forces.
On the other hand, counter force nuclear forces are meant to destroy adversary’s nuclear delivery capability. The counter force nuclear weapons need to deliver high KT or even Mega Ton (MT) of TNT equivalent nuclear yield to the enemy nuclear weapons housed inside the hardened, underground, nuclear shielded sites. Besides, high yield and very high accuracy (typically a Circular Error Probability of 0.01% of the range), the nuclear explosion has to be a surface burst rather than an air burst as in the case of counter value weapons.
The surface burst will create large ground craters and take the earth along with adversary’s missiles in the protected silos – to the atmosphere – thereby destroying enemy’s nuclear missiles and also creating the dreaded nuclear fallout and radioactive rains that may continue for many months in future. These are truly horrendous nuclear weapons – not only in the capabilities but also the intentions of their possessors.

India’s Nuclear Doctrine and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)

India conducted its first peaceful nuclear test in 1974. In 1998, India was forced to conduct nuclear tests so that Pakistan could come out as an overt nuclear weapons state. India should be given due credit for speaking the language of a nuclear weapons free world and acting on it till 1998. Only because one-sided treaties such as NPT, CTBT, and FMCT, were coming to force, India conducted its nuclear tests. Also, within a couple of years, it published its draft nuclear doctrine, which clearly termed the policy of No First Use (NFU) of nuclear weapons. This is a very consistent communication and definitely a responsible behavior, that none can dispute.

With the NFU doctrine, India does not need counterforce capabilities. This is true, against any adversary or potential adversary. The counterforce nuclear weapons developed during the cold war period into what in the nuclear parlance is called the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine. It is clear that MAD is the doctrine of a country that will take the nuclear attack as the first option in the escalatory spiral of any conflict. However, India has very clearly stated it is not following the MAD line and is therefore not developing any first strike capability against any adversary at any range.

However, given the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world and pressure by the world powers that are increasingly developing more and more powers, India needs to develop a second strike capability, that remains potent after a first strike by the adversary and is capable of delivering counter value punches at any range across the world.

Why ‘at any range’? The world is definitely becoming multi-polar and also the threat of force as a coercive influence to shape the future is pursued by different power centers in multiple ways. Further, a nation in the globalizing world has to identify its national interests and safeguard these globally. Hence, India needs a potent second-strike ICBM-range capability for counter value nuclear strikes as a deterrence to any potential adversary that may have designs to either threaten or actually think about taking out Indian nuclear missiles in the first strike. It is in this context that Agni-V MIRV ICBM should be viewed and considered.

Agni-V can be a second strike counter force capability – A game changer

Agni-V with its higher payload and MIRV capability – with high accuracies – does give India a counterforce capability. This is definitely a higher order message to potential adversaries. With Agni-V, India says to the world that although we stick to a no first use policy we now have a counter-force capability to strike at the nuclear strike forces of the adversary. Also, with MIRVs even if one Agni-V survives a first strike by the enemy and reaches the adversary’s capital city it will unleash complete devastation. This should make an adversary see the futility of striking against India.

Agni-5: A True Game Changer

Read more at:
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/agni-5-a-true-game-changer/

Agni-5: A True Game Changer

Read more at:
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/agni-5-a-true-game-changer/

Agni-5: A True Game Changer

Read more at:
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/agni-5-a-true-game-changer/