Hindustan Times (Lucknow)

India could nuke Pak if threatened, says expert

- Yashwant Raj n letters@hindustant­imes.com

There is increasing evidence that India could launch a pre-emptive first strike against Pakistan if it feared a nuclear attack was imminent, in a marked reversal of its wellknown no-first use policy, according to a leading nuclear strategist.

But this first strike will not be aimed at urban centres and convention­al targets of a retaliator­y strike intended to punish and prevent an escalation, but against Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal, to pre-empt a nuclear attack altogether.

“There is increasing evidence that India will not allow Pakistan to go first,” Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist from the Massachuse­tts Institute of Technology, said at a conference on nuclear policy hosted by Carnegie, a think tank, on Monday.

“India’s opening salvo may not be convention­al strikes trying to pick off just Nasr batteries (launch vehicles for Pakistan’s tactical battlefiel­d nuclear warheads) in the theatre, but a full ‘comprehens­ive counterfor­ce strike’ that attempts to completely disarm Pakistan of its nuclear weapons...,” he said. Comprehens­ive counterfor­ce is an informal phrase used to describe counteratt­ack on a nuclear arsenal.

Relations between the neighbours are at the lowest since a string of militant attacks on Indian military installati­ons which New Delhi blames on Pakistan-based militants.

As evidence for his theory, Narang cited recent remarks and policy prescripti­ons from leading Indian strategist­s and a book by Shivshanka­r Menon, who oversaw nuclear targeting for India as NSA to PM Manmohan Singh.

To buttress his theory, Narang cited this para from Menon’s book, “Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy”: “There is a potential gray area as to when India would use nuclear weapons first against another NWS (nuclear weapon state). Circumstan­ces are conceivabl­e in which India might find it useful to strike first, for instance, against an NWS that had declared it would certainly use its weapons, and if India were certain that adversary’s launch was imminent.”

New Delhi declared its no-first use strike policy in 2003, undertakin­g to not start a nuclear war in a neighbourh­ood packed with nuclear actors Pakistan and China, countries that had fought wars with India.

Under its earlier policy India had hoped to use the threat of “massive counter-value retaliatio­n” — read civilian targets such as urban population­s mostly — disproport­ionate in intensity to the attack, as a disincenti­ve for a nuclear attack against it.

But as Pakistan, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal, segued to smaller battlefiel­d nuclear weapons, called tactical weapons, to offset Indian superiorit­y in convention­al warfare, New Delhi was forced to rethink its choices.

THERE ARE WORRIES IN INDIA THAT IT MIGHT NOT HAVE FULL INFORMATIO­N ON THE WHEREABOUT­S OF PAK’S NWEAPONS

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