The recent conventional skirmishes between Pakistan and Iran underscore a valuable truth: having nuclear weapons does not guarantee that the ‘have nots’ will refrain from pursuing military action against a nuclear-armed state. The Falklands War illustrates this point when, in the 1980s, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, even though Great Britain is a nuclear weapon state. Although the recent missile strikes between Iran and Pakistan differ — entirely — from the Falklands War, the limited utility of nuclear weapons to deter non-possessors from pursuing military action against a nuclear-armed rival is revealing and relevant to the recent skirmishes. Another recent example of military action against a nuclear possessor is Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel on April 13th, which was calibrated to avoid massive retaliation and telegraphed in advance via Turkey, intercepted by Israel and its allies, and had one reported civilian casualty.
The UK’s failure to deter Argentina’s General Gualtieri did not undermine the credibility of its deterrence: The UK has in place negative security assurances, which is to say that Trident is designed to deter acts of aggression that are perpetrated by nuclear weapon states against UK vital interests. It does so by the threat of retaliation and the threat of imposing unacceptable costs: a combination of deterrence by denial and punishment, which is the bedrock of the UK’s deterrence framing.
By contrast, the failure to deter Iran’s recent strikes matters for Pakistan because its nuclear strategy is predicated on the credibility of its undeclared option of “first use” and the ability to exert a level of control over shared risks. The inability of Pakistan to counterbalance the conventional superiority of its archrival (India) with a proportional response underscores instability at the lower conventional level. For this reason, Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine centres on the threat of nuclear escalation — the willingness to engage in a competition of nuclear pain — to deter and keep India at bay. However, and notwithstanding Iran’s ambiguity over whether it intends to develop nuclear weapons, the use of conventional military force by Iran introduces a new dimension of threat perception that Pakistan needs to consider, especially in the context of risk reduction and crisis management.
The key feature of Pakistan’s nuclear strategy — coercive nuclear escalation — bears a strong resemblance to the logic underpinning NATO’s Cold War nuclear strategy. During the Cold War, Soviet Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO forces by roughly three to one, and NATO stood little chance of prevailing in a conventional war. The alternative was to initiate a nuclear war, which was tantamount to suicide. Finding itself between a rock and a hard place, NATO solved the dilemma — in theory — by developing tactical nuclear weapons to induce Soviet caution. Rather than rely on the fear of US massive retaliation, which lacked credibility, NATO would use fewer, lower-yield tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet military targets. The purpose was to compel rollback by convincing the Kremlin that the war was “spinning out of control”, thereby pressuring Soviet leaders to stop the invasion.
Pakistan’s conventional capabilities are superior to Iran’s, and Tehran’s strike was in, not on, Pakistan, being targeted against two strongholds of the anti-Iran insurgent group Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice). Pakistani military personnel and assets were not targeted, although Pakistan has claimed civilian causalities. It is inconceivable even to suggest that Islamabad would have considered nuclear reprisal against Iran. Instead, it chose to strike proportionally at what it claims were camps of Baluch separatists in Iran instead of direct Iranian military targets. Nonetheless, in responding with military force, Pakistan risked upending a complex and fragile relationship with its neighbours — Afghanistan, India, and Iran — triggering a long-term, three-front dilemma.
The current status quo is on shaky ground because any potential future decision by Iran to go nuclear would have implications on deterrence framing for Islamabad. This is because Islamabad cannot be certain that their cordial/tolerating relations with Iran will endure once nuclear weapons are in the mix. In this regard, Pakistan’s nuclear strategy, which calls for “full spectrum dominance”, could soon morph from dyadic deterrent framing into a twin-track deterrence approach, not too dissimilar from India’s deterrence framing against Pakistan and China. In addition, because Iran cannot match the conventional capabilities of its nuclear-armed adversaries — Israel and the US — Tehran could look to the nuclear doctrine of Pakistan for guidance on how to deter its adversaries, in addition to/beyond its “deterrence network” of allied non-state armed groups. Tehran could, therefore, decide to frame nuclear deterrence around a similar policy of first use, thereby lowering the threshold for nuclear use to ensure their adversaries act cautiously.
But what of the commonly held realist assumption that nuclear states do not fight wars with each other? India and Pakistan’s adversarial relationship is a paradox that turns this assumption on its head. Since declaring themselves nuclear-armed, the two South Asian rivals have fought at a conventional level and engaged in numerous military skirmishes. In particular, the 1999 Kargil War challenges the assumption that the absence of war between nuclear powers has been granted the status of empirical law. The so-called “stability-instability paradox” is often used by neo-realists to describe this phenomenon and can best be described as the “fear of nuclear escalation”. According to the paradox, strategic stability, meaning a low likelihood that conventional war will escalate to the nuclear level, reduces the danger of launching a conventional war. But in lowering the potential costs of conventional conflict, strategic stability also makes the outbreak of such violence more likely. In this context, India and Pakistan display an uneasy (often scary) level of comfort with direct military engagement and run the serious risk of a “hot hand fallacy”; although not a foregone conclusion, sooner or later, through some form of miscalculation, misinterpretation or misperception, nuclear thresholds could be breached.
What implications does the stability-instability paradox have for Islamabad and Tehran? Past behaviour can portend the future, and the recent skirmishes could also reveal a risk of complacency in thinking that events can be controlled. Should Tehran decide to go nuclear, its entry into the ‘club’ will further complicate a volatile and nuclear-crowded region. In this context, the Iranian-Pakistan missile strikes underscore intricate geopolitical dynamics at play, with multiple actors vying for influence and pursuing divergent agendas.
This incident highlights the need for Islamabad to give pause to thought and consider how it can develop bilateral mechanisms and understandings with Iran to alleviate future escalatory pressures. Although Iran has not declared an intention to weaponise its nuclear programme and remains a signatory to the NPT, their continued membership provides little comfort that it will honour treaty obligations and refrain from the development of nuclear weapons. In addition, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi recently warned that “Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear weapons if it chooses”. However, there is also a widespread view that Tehran will be deterred from weaponising because of their fear that this might trigger an attack by Israel and/or the US, although this is a matter for debate.
North Korea’s path to nuclear-armed status also underlines the fact that membership of multilateral accords will not prevent a state from clandestinely developing nuclear weapons if they are convinced that a nuclear deterrent can meet its security needs. In this context, dialogue to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is moribund, and it is unlikely that any progress will be seen soon.
As a nuclear-armed state outside the NPT framework, Pakistan still bears special responsibilities, and with the clock ticking over Iran’s nuclear status, it is incumbent upon Islamabad to now enter a phase of internal “critical introspection” in identifying what Islamabad consider these special responsibilities to be. A step in this direction could engender internal Pakistani discussion on what Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs) with Iran could look like if Iran were to weaponise its nuclear programme. Although no substitute for arms control accords, NCBMs are an important endeavor and an important tool for building trust and mitigating nuclear risks. Although further development of NCBMs between India and Pakistan has faltered, the existence of the regime can induce some form of caution in behaviour and prevent catastrophe.
Source » europeanleadershipnetwork