A Ramshackle Deterrence

The ASP, to be the centrepiece of the AEW, was developed as an indispensable part of the effort at 'credible nuclear weapons delivery' by combat aircraft, and at creating a command and control centre which a future nuclear strike force would use. Four of the eight killed were the DRDO's early warning system experts... The accident, caused by the unhinging and collapse of the rotodome, epitomises the disaster-prone character of a good deal of Indian (and Pakistani) military as well as civilian physical infrastructure and hardware, marked as it is by frequent accidents, component failures, substandard designs, poor maintenance and unsafe operational practices. This raises disturbing questions about the operation of any kind of mutual deterrence equation, indeed the viability of an Indian and Pakistani deterrent posture itself.

The subcontinent is notorious for poor engineering capabilities even in areas where the science has been mastered. Substandard manufacturing practices, which lead to a high occurrence of defects, are rampant in Indian and Pakistani industries, especially in defence production factories, shielded from safety audits and public scrutiny. India and Pakistan have among the lowest indices in physical infrastructure development.

Generally industry and services in India and Pakistan are afflicted by mismanagement and poor maintenance, leading to mishaps and failures. India's military hardware is not immune from this. For instance, between April '91 and March '97, the IAF witnessed 187 accidents and 2729 'incidents' in which 147 aircrafts were destroyed and 63 pilots, most of them young, lost their lives. The IAF lost close to eight squadrons. In financial terms, this loss exceeds over Rs 4,000 crore. This works out to about $1 billion or a tenth of India's annual military budget, and roughly four-fifths of the IAF's annual budget! Of these 187 accidents, 130 involved fighter jets, most of them MiGs.

Among the most accident-prone planes flown by the IAF is the MiG-21, known as the IAF's 'workhorse'. "I pray for him every time he takes off," a MiG-21 test pilot's wife says about her husband. Over 40 per cent of IAF accidents are caused by technical defects which, officials say, are primarily attributable to substandard spares. In the past six years, for instance, 17 helicopters and seven transport planes were lost in accidents. There is little quality control on spares in the Indian military. Many are bought from dubious, blacklisted arms dealers and firms. Newspapers have reported 'a major racket' in the purchase of spares, 'especially for transport planes and helicopters, compromising flight safety and operational readiness'. Often, the armed services are unable to obtain basic design data from the manufacturer and hence can't do enough modification, repairs, or retrofitting. The services lack a developed system for reporting and analyzing accidents and failures. They do hold courts of inquiry when major accidents occur - but usually manned by non-experts.

In the past, many shady arms deals were foisted upon the Indian armed forces by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. For instance, in the '60s, Vijayanta tanks were bought which couldn't be taken to the battlefront because they were defective. In the '80s, the army procured supposedly new and expensive Combat Engineering Tractors, only to discover these were second-hand British army rejects. The notorious Westland helicopters, considered unfit to fly, were similarly imposed upon the IAF as part of a (political) deal between Margaret Thatcher and Rajiv Gandhi. These had to be junked.

Stories abound in India and Pakistan of non-performance of military assets, subversion of quality standards, breach of contracts, abuse of influence, bribery, etc. It appears reasonable to assume that in an extremely corrupt society and government, levels of graft would be especially high in those sectors largely exempt from parliamentary and citizens' scrutiny. An instance of the Indian armed services' violation of their own performance standards is a '96 directive from Air HQ saying that 'performance of the squadrons in actual flying aspects would not be assessed'. This meant that IAF aircraft's war-preparedness tests would be bypassed, leading experts to comment: 'Had a war broken out in '97, most IAF aircraft would've taken to the skies without having undergone a prior inspection for war preparedness throughout the previous year'.

Besides, there are generic problems arising from a poor culture of safety in India and Pakistan. Both are disaster-prone societies, marked by high rates of mishaps, sloppy precautionary design and planning, little disaster forecasting, poor emergency procedures, and undeveloped relief-provision infrastructures...

The frequency of industrial accidents in India is estimated to be four times higher than, say, in the US. Fatalities in road accidents in India are 10 times higher than in the oecd countries, and in Pakistan 13 times higher. The important point about a generally poor safety culture is simply that if Indian and Pakistani engineers fail to control and reduce the frequency of mishaps in relatively less complex and loosely 'coupled' systems such as road traffic, then they cannot inspire much confidence in being able to ensure that highly complex, 'tightly coupled' systems such as nuclear weapons and C3I structures can work safely.

Both India and Pakistan have witnessed major accidents in military installations and ordnance depots. In April '88, a huge ammunition depot at Ojhri, near Islamabad, blew up, killing over a thousand people and injuring many more. India's nuclear power programme, run by the same agency - the Department of Atomic Energy - that is responsible for making nuclear bombs, has a remarkably poor safety record. One of its worst accidents involved the collapse of a safety system, no less: the containment dome of a nuclear reactor under construction in '94. (The dome is supposed to prevent radioactivity releases into the atmosphere in case of a reactor accident.)

Poor safety culture is bound to affect the working of all the hardware and software involved in any possible command, control, communications, and intelligence systems India and Pakistan may build in the future. Their present warning and detection technology is grossly inefficient and unreliable. For instance, in December '95, a large transport aircraft carrying firearms entered Indian airspace across the western border without authorisation or warning. Not only was it not intercepted; it was not even properly detected. There was no coordination between the civilian and military authorities involved. The plane crashlanded at Purulia, in West Bengal, more than 1,000 km from the western border, before its crew were apprehended.

Indian and Pakistani missiles and warheads too pose their own safety problems. Many of these were not resolved, and are unlikely to be resolved, given the clandestine nature of nuclear and missile programmes, and official anxiety to avoid detection and publicity (especially as regards technical details). For instance, the Prithvi missile, as well as the second stage of the Agni missile, use highly corrosive liquid fuel. This is extremely difficult to handle, and highly inflammable.

If there ever was a case of 'ramshackle deterrence', or deterrence breaking down under the weight of incompetence of its own practitioners, then it is more likely to be found in India and Pakistan. The problem is aggravated by the total absence of public scrutiny of military, in particular nuclear, programmes.

Neither India nor Pakistan has either the geographical distance that the US and ussr had from each other, nor the prolonged period of time they had to learn from their experience of innumerable false warnings. At the beginning of the Cold War, the superpowers had many hours to determine the truth and falsity of warnings. In the '60s, their icbms flight time still allowed for 25-30 minutes to react to alarms. When in the '80s some missiles were deployed off each other's coasts allowing 10 minutes flight time, both countries had accumulated years of experience in dealing with each other's arsenals and with deficiencies in their own warning systems. They had agreed to dozens of cbms, crisis-handling protocols and procedures. However, once missiles are deployed, India and Pakistan will from the beginning have much smaller time margins for correcting error. India, Pakistan, and China all have contiguous borders. Flight times are short, especially between the former. Finally, domestic unrest can produce detonations, accidental or otherwise, in a variety of scenarios from faction fighting within the military to civil strife in the country. If there's one obvious lesson to be learnt from the Cold War stand-off, it is that the likelihood of use of nuclear weapons is always greatest between adversaries in a wartime or near-wartime situation. If the country that has nuclear weapons feels its territorial survival is endangered even by opponents who do not have nuclear weapons, the possibility of use also becomes greater. In any such face-off between nuclear rivals, which also have a history of wars between them, matters become even more fragilely poised when one side perceives itself to be strongly 'disadvantaged' in regard to the nuclear and military balance. This is precisely what Pakistan feels vis-a-vis India.

This is an asymmetry which India's talk of a 'minimum deterrent' does nothing to alter. This is a 'minimum' that'll be calculated and pursued with regard to China, not Pakistan. Besides, there is the fact that India is not able to quantify this minimum. This is not possible to quantify for reasons already given; that it is a moving position whose point of temporary rest depends on what China's nuclear capacities at any time are. Of all the NWSS, China is the only one that is not significantly reduced the size of its arsenal over the last decade, and has left open the prospect of its quantitative expansion, if it believes changed circumstances require this.

Such a state of affairs does not bode well for the prospect of establishing a 'stable minimum' deterrent equation for India. Even without a submarine-based nuclear-tipped missile force, India may over the next decade develop missiles with the range to hit some of China's population centres. This is, however, still well short of having an assured second-strike capability against China. However, any notion of an Indian minimum, even a conservatively estimated one, will still be far in excess of the Pakistani arsenal. Insofar as a Pakistani capacity to produce a survivable second-strike capacity against a massive Indian first strike is concerned, this is more than 15, if not 20, years away. Pakistan will be for all this time presented with a 'use them or lose them' scenario regarding its own missile strength in the face of India's capacity to 'decapitate' Pakistan or launch a massive first strike at its military-nuclear infrastructure. Once the two countries openly deploy their weapons, they will let themselves into a zone of considerable nuclear tension and danger. Moreover, no Chinese leadership can remain sanguine in the face of determined Indian efforts to eventually have a triadic pattern of deployment even if it falls short of building a credible second-strike capacity. Recent accounts indicate that this is what New Delhi currently has in mind. Once India has missiles that can hit China, then the latter has to factor India into its nuclear operational and targeting strategy. It is at this point that China will explore the issue of a closer nuclear relationship with Pakistan, especially if Pakistan has developed a nuclear capacity that can do great damage to India.