Measuring Nuclear Weapon Capacity in India and Pakistan
DEVELOPMENTS
Terrorist attacks in Mumbai on July 13, 2011 brought back to the forefront the issue of national security in South Asia. The bombings in India’s financial center will likely be connected to groups based in nearby Pakistan, just as previous attacks had been. While proliferation talks these days often circle around North Korea and Iran, the long and deep enmity between India and Pakistan has been considered the world’s greatest nuclear flashpoint for years. In May, The Economist magazine ran a cover story about the disputed territory shared by India and Pakistan, simply titled “The world’s most dangerous border.”
Both India and Pakistan are declared nuclear weapon states, and have openly, proudly tested their weapons for one another’s benefit, and for the world to see. Veiled threats to use the atomic weaponry if needed have proliferated over the years. It is less clear exactly what each nation’s true capabilities are. How many nuclear warheads does each nation really have in inventory? How many are armed and ready to be deployed and where are they pointing? While most of this information is classified, we are able to put together some pieces of this puzzle.
BACKGROUND
India joined the exclusive nuclear weapons club in 1974 by successfully testing a nuclear device underground in the Pokhran desert. In 1998, India held a second battery of tests, detonating five nuclear devices, also underground at Pokhran. This time, Pakistan followed suit and within weeks, had conducted retaliatory tests in the Chagai hills with six underground detonations of its own. In reality, both nations had active nuclear enrichment and research programs underway for decades, and by testing the weapons were merely declaring their ability to fabricate them.
While both nations were sanctioned by the international community for their tests in 1998, neither side has decided to officially renounce their weapons capability or put a moratorium on further development. But Pakistan and India have also chosen not to openly test weapons again, though they have unveiled several new generations of long-range missiles capable of housing nuclear warheads. This brings us to the status of the nuclear weapons programs today.
Estimates of nuclear stockpiles under Indian or Pakistani control are speculative in nature at best, as neither nation’s leaders will publicly share this information. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2010, India has assembled 60–80 warheads and produced the fissile material needed for 60–105 warheads. Pakistan has assembled 70–90 warheads and produced enough fissile material for as many as ninety warheads. These numbers are consistent with estimates from other sources.
Former Indian intelligence official J.K. Sinha has said that India has six reactors capable of producing enough weapon grade plutonium for up to fifty new warheads per year. India also has several potential deployment methods for warheads, including short and intermediate range ballistic missiles, aircraft, and surface ships. India is also said to be working on submarine deployment on its Arihant class vessels. Meanwhile, Pakistan is said to have the ballistic missile capability to reach any corner of India. By the estimates of the head of security for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, there are 70,000 people who work in Pakistan’s nuclear complex, including more than 7,000 scientists.
India and Pakistan are probably in possession of a comparable range of weapons. While it is difficult to come across an estimate of how many of these warheads are actually deployed and operational, one thing is certain. Both are thoroughly committed to continue the arms race to increase capacity as rapidly as possible, at high cost, with no end in sight.
Assuming 150 active warheads in South Asia, what is the scope of destruction possible if India and Pakistan conduct a nuclear war against one another? A great deal. Plenty of research has gone into this question. The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has created several scenarios detailing possible outcomes. One of them includes twenty-four “ground bursts” of nuclear warheads in fifteen major South Asian cities- and estimates up to eight million deaths from the blasts, thirty- million deaths from radiation in the first two days, and another thirty million deaths from radioactive fallout.
Twenty-four bursts is only a fraction of the approximately 150 active warheads- so we can assume that in an all-out nuclear war, the potential effects would be worse. In any case, a majority of citizens of both nations would survive, and elements of the armed forces would remain intact to fight on using conventional warfare- causing more destruction. While these exercises in building scenarios are illustrative, the casualty numbers are so far out of the realm of human experience that they are difficult to take seriously. Perhaps this is the only way to demonstrate the seriousness of nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent.
ANALYSIS
India and Pakistan have come close to risking nuclear war at least once that we know of, in 1999 during the Kargil skirmish. It continues to be a real threat. But analysts from around the world who observe the nuclear capacities of India and Pakistan are not only interested in the very real possibility that the two nations could harm one another. Fallout, both literal and figurative could travel beyond.
India has disputed territory and a shaky relationship with yet another Asian nuclear power, China. It is likely that China and India are pointing nuclear warheads at one another too. The long-term effects of this as the two nations head toward superpower status over the coming decades are unknown.
Meanwhile, a legitimate fear with Pakistan is its role as a base for terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and their affiliates, many of whom have stated ambitions to get hold of nuclear weapons for their purposes. Some people who sympathize with these groups’ aims have also joined the Pakistani armed forces and intelligence agencies. Civilian control over the army is marginal at best, and command and control over nuclear deployments are among the Pentagon’s top concerns. In this environment the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal as well as its safeguards are of global concern. A report by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 2010 said Pakistan’s stockpile “faces a greater threat from Islamic extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other nuclear stockpile on earth.”
Indian and Pakistani officials often say that the threats related to their arsenals are overblown, and that the stockpiles of countries such as the United States and Russia are much more of a risk to humanity- and even less well secured. They have a point, at least in that the operational stockpiles of the former Cold War states dwarf all of the others in size.
Internal and external efforts to encourage India and Pakistan to curb their nuclear weapon programs have failed. The biggest lesson for outsiders to learn may be that for non-proliferation to be taken seriously by South Asian leaders, it will have to be perceived as more of a global effort and not one targeted only at the subcontinent’s nuclear powers. The secrecy surrounding the nuclear proliferation efforts of both nations will ensure that outside forces will never have a full accounting of the capability they possess- or the ability to find every last warhead in the event of an attempted raid.
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Mahanth Joishy is the South Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Digest.
