The Chief of the Army Staff, General Deepak Kapoor, is reported to have suggested that the country may have to revisit its “No First Use” (NFU) policy in the light of reports from some credible US sources that Pakistan may have an arsenal of 90 nuclear weapons and may be building up further stocks.

When NFU was formulated ( I was the convenor of the National Security Board that drafted it) there were no assumptions on the size of the Pakistani arsenal. The doctrine stands by itself irrespective of the size of the potential enemy’s arsenal. There is a second component of the nuclear doctrine: the credible minimum deterrent. It is that component that may call for some adjustments if the potential enemy’s arsenal were to increase. Even that is not a necessity from the point of view of deterrence, but a question of influencing the perception of the adversary. The crux of deterrence is the survivability of the retaliatory force and the aggressor’s calculation as to whether the casualties and damage likely to be inflicted by the survived retaliatory force on his population and cities can be justified by the strategic gain the unleashing of the nuclear attack will secure for the aggressor. Very rarely, if at all, can the answer to that question be in the affirmative. In such circumstances deterrence will prevail.

Deterrence is not a question of having the ability to inflict much larger casualties and damage on the adversary than, according to one’s own calculation, one is likely to suffer in retaliation. An aggressor’s attack can be counter-force or counter-value. If it is counter-force the aggressor can never be certain that he can destroy all the force of the other side and escape retaliation. In the early ’60s the United States planned a total disarming strike on the Soviet Union, when it had more than ten times the USSR’s number of warheads. When the president asked whether there could be certainty that no Soviet warhead would hit the US the answer was a clear negative. That was enough to deter the US from proceeding with its disarming strike in spite of a ten-fold superiority. Since then, surveillance methods and missile accuracies have improved. But so also the mobility of the weapon platforms, even on land; the submarine deterrent is of course exceedingly survivable. When India’s nuclear doctrine was published, many Westerners questioned the need for a sea-based deterrent; a senior NDA minister (a member of the cabinet committee on security) even called it an “academic exercise”. In our country, the learning process on nuclear issues has just begun.

... contd.