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THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
- Mar 21, 2007
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Pakistan’s Nuclear Force Structure in 2025
NAEEM SALIK
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have been subjects of considerable speculation and debate since Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, and increasingly so in recent years.
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have been subjects of considerable speculation and debate since Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, and increasingly so in recent years. Within the vast debate, however, many outside Pakistan seem to have agreed that Pakistan has the fastest growing arsenal in the world.
1 Alarmists estimate that by 2025, Pakistan will become the third-largest nuclear weapon power, leapfrogging ahead of France, China, and the United Kingdom, behind only the United States and Russia.
2 Others conjecture that its growth will make it only the fifth-largest arsenal.
3 Even the best of these estimates are still highly speculative, based on assumptions about Pakistan’s goals, the capacity and efficiency of Pakistan’s nuclear materials production facilities, its ability to convert these materials into weapons components, and its ability to build an inventory of adequate numbers of delivery systems.
Estimates also assume that 100 percent of available fissile material is being converted into weapons, and that Pakistan’s reprocessing and weapons core fabrication can keep pace with the production of plutonium at the Khushab nuclear complex. These estimates draw criticism and angry responses from Pakistani officials, but a vast majority of the people in Pakistan feel elated reading such reports.
The people of Pakistan might be disappointed to learn that, contrary to the prevailing perceptions, the size of Pakistan’s arsenal is, and will remain, substantially smaller than recent reports published in the United States suggest.
So much agreement exists around incorrect estimates of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal because of a paucity of primary source data. Most estimates rely on a few common sources, such as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, periodic reports by the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) yearbooks, assessments by the Institute of Science and International Security (ISIS), and occasional reports by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
These reports in turn rely on each other to corroborate their evaluations, which means that the same data are recycled repeatedly. The appearance of broad consensus comes from circular corroboration, not repeated independent verification. T
he resulting consensus picture shows Pakistan as a state obsessed with building as many nuclear weapons as it can in as short a time as possible, totally oblivious to the deleterious effects of such an undertaking on its economic health and the regional security environment. This picture, though inaccurate, affirms the suspicion with which Western observers have viewed Pakistan’s nuclear program since its inception.
The Pakistani military’s predominant role in the management of the Pakistani nuclear program leads these same observers to perceive the Pakistani nuclear program as overly militaristic and aggressive in nature, while at the same time trusting that India’s program is moving at a leisurely pace, and that its growth is justifiable in light of the twin threat from China and Pakistan.
Most observers tend to discount the weaponization potential of India’s enriched uranium stockpiles, which are simply put aside as fuel for India’s nuclear-powered submarines. They even fail to take into account reports emerging since 2012 about the construction of a large enrichment facility in Karnataka that would considerably increase India’s enriched uranium production capability and, in turn, its weapons fabrication capacity.
The reality of Pakistan’s nuclear posture is quite different from this consensus perception.
Another factor that prevents statistical analyses from reflecting the true state of Pakistan’s nuclear program is the artful picking and choosing of data to support the conclusions at which one intends to arrive.
Some very obvious facts are simply ignored because they are apparently not in conformity with the desired inferences. Although Pakistan, like India, has not made its inventory of fissile materials or warheads public, officials in Pakistan often comment on various studies and reports on the issue to call them inaccurate, exaggerated, or propagandistic.
This publication will attempt to challenge some of the assumptions made by observers outside of Pakistan, and will try to provide an alternative and more realistic assessment of Pakistan’s current and future nuclear force structure within the constraints imposed by a lack of information in the public domain.
BEGINNINGS OF THE NUCLEAR DOCTRINAL DEBATE
Pakistan’s nuclear force structure is a consequence of the country’s nuclear doctrine. Tracing Pakistan’s doctrine over the last twenty years will, therefore, provide the context necessary to evaluate the veracity of Western estimates about the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and will lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding of Pakistan’s current and future force postures.
Prior to the overt demonstration of its nuclear capability in response to Indian nuclear tests in May 1998, Pakistan pursued a policy of ambiguity, denying the existence of a nuclear weapons program. This policy helped mitigate some of the international pressures, but by doing so it foreclosed the possibility of public discourse on Pakistan’s future nuclear doctrine. Even once the doctrine was outlined after the 1998 nuclear tests,
Pakistan remained silent about the goals of its weapons program. Only after India announced its Draft Nuclear Doctrine in August 1999 did Pakistan’s government feel any serious pressure to publish its own doctrine.
Three former government officials—foreign secretary Agha Shahi, air chief Zulfiqar Ali Khan, and foreign minister Abdul Sattar—jointly authored a newspaper article in October 1999 making the case for a minimum deterrence posture.
4 They cautioned against squandering Pakistan’s limited economic resources to build an arsenal that exceeded Pakistan’s security needs, all in the name of winning a pointless competition against India. They advocated a posture that ruled out the possibility of nuclear warfighting on account of the large size and resource disparity between India and Pakistan, and argued that, since deterrence was the sole aim of the nuclear program, a small arsenal would suffice.
5Though the article was the first public statement on the nuclear program’s goals, the phrase most associated with Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, “credible minimum deterrence,” never appears. Instead, the article recommended a minimalist approach in line with the common conception of “minimum deterrence,” while perhaps contradicting itself by insisting on the dynamic nature of the concept and opening up the possibility of an ever-expanding arsenal:
“Minimum deterrence has been and should continue to be the guiding principle of Pakistan’s nuclear pursuit. Of course minimum cannot be defined in static numbers. In the absence of mutual restraints, the size of Pakistan’s arsenal and its deployment pattern have to be adjusted, to ward off dangers of pre-emption and interception. Only then can deterrence remain efficacious.”
6 The argument in support of minimum deterrence and a flexible force structure was reiterated by Abdul Sattar once he became foreign minister in the government of Pervez Musharaf. Indian decisionmakers adopted a similar approach, evident from former minister of external affairs Jaswant Singh’s argument that, as the security situation changes, the number of weapons required for minimum deterrence will also change.
7 Eventually, both India and Pakistan added the word credible to their minimum deterrence postures, indicating their discomfort with the minimal size of their respective arsenals. According to nuclear policy expert Rodney Jones, “the term credible is a much more demanding criterion than ‘minimum’ deterrence might imply by itself.”
8 The flexibility that “credible” provides effectively means that the nuclear doctrines of both India and Pakistan have allowed for reasonably large nuclear arsenals since the beginning of their respective nuclear programs.
DICHOTOMY IN DECLARATORY AND OPERATIONAL POSTURES—RATIONALE AND RAMIFICATIONS
In 2011, tests of a short-range missile called the Nasr (Hatf-IX) came as a surprise to many, especially because an official press release announced that the 60-kilometer-range missile was capable of carrying “nuclear warheads of appropriate yield.”14 Introduction of the short-range, battlefield-usable weapons by Pakistan triggered an animated debate, both in Pakistan and abroad. Those with a sympathetic view of Pakistan’s position have argued that the Nasr is a logical response to India’s provocative Cold Start war doctrine.15 Senior Pakistani officials have been quoted as saying that the Nasris meant to pour cold water over Cold Start.16 Critics, on the other hand, view the Nasr as a destabilizing development that increases the probability of a nuclear war in South Asia.17 Debate aside, there is no doubt that Pakistan has embarked upon the development of battlefield nuclear weapons capability. Pakistani government spokespersons, though, continue to tout Pakistan’s policy of credible minimum deterrence, which is a form of the so-called simple punishment model of deterrence, unlike the deterrence by denial—or warfighting model of deterrence—enabled by the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. These models have very different demands in terms of the size of arsenals, command and control, and battlefield management. However, this apparent dichotomy in the declared doctrine and actual force posture has yet to be clarified by Pakistani strategic planners.
The pandemonium created by the short range of the Nasr weapon system and perception of problems related to maintaining effective centralized command and control, not to mention the physical security of the missile launchers once operationally deployed in the field, diverted public attention away from some very important implications.
More important than the much-discussed range of the missile is the accompanying development of a sleek and miniaturized warhead to be mounted on it. This technological achievement has far-reaching implications, since it will enable Pakistan to arm its Babur (surface-launched) and Raad (air-launched) cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. It will also make it possible for Pakistan to equip naval platforms with nuclear weapon systems.
The debate around Pakistan’s introduction of battlefield nuclear weapons has also remained narrowly focused on the Nasr’s technical attributes, ignoring the operational characteristics of the other short-range systems, such as the 180-kilometer Abdali missile.
Pakistan believes that the Nasr demonstrates a capability that will strengthen deterrence through option enhancement and threat manipulation. Lieutenant General (retired) Khalid Kidwai, speaking at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in 2015, strongly criticized the narrow focus of the debate, stating that:
I strongly believe that by introducing the variety of tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s inventory, and in the strategic stability debate, we have blocked the avenues for serious military operations by the other side.
That the debate has been hi-jacked towards the lesser issues of command and control, and the possibility of their falling into wrong hands is unfortunate, because it has distracted and diverted attention from the real purpose of the TNWs, that of reinforcing deterrence, preventing war in South Asia, ensuring peace, thereby creating an enabling environment for politics and politicians to reassert and lead the way towards conflict resolution, and give South Asia and its people a chance.18
Without denigrating the arguments of the Nasr’scritics, one needs to look into the factors that compelled Pakistan to go down this treacherous path. India has been persistently challenging the credibility of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent doctrinally, technologically, and practically. It has been insisting since February 2000 that there is a space below the nuclear threshold for a limited conventional war with Pakistan. Kidwai alluded to this, arguing that:
For 15 years I, and my colleagues, at the Strategic Plans Division in Pakistan, and worked for deterrence to be strengthened. . . . to create roadblocks in the path of those who thought that there was space for conventional war, despite the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. . . . what was probably encouraging them to find the space for conventional war, below this gap, was the absence of a complete spectrum of deterrence. . . . That there was some kind of a gap in their realization at the tactical level, and therefore it was leading to this encouragement . . . on the other side [in India] that there was space for conventional war. . . . Because war was being brought down under the Cold Start Doctrine to the tactical level. . . . Therefore, the idea of Nasr was born [out of the] need to plug this particular gap.19
Pakistan’s development and field testing of the Abdali (Hatf-II) and the Nasr (Hatf-IX) seem to be in keeping with the counsel given by Michael Quinlan, a highly respected British nuclear expert, who has argued that “The range of options available must, therefore, be an unmistakable continuum without huge gaps. That in turn meant that there had to be nuclear forces, backed by will and doctrine for their possible use, intermediate between conventional forces . . . and the ultimate strategic nuclear capability.”
20 During the Cold War, NATO’s political and geographical compulsions along the central front in Germany, which constrained its ability to give up any space in a conflict even for sound operational reasons, forced it to adopt a forward defense posture. In contemporary South Asia, Pakistan faces a similar dilemma.
Pakistan can justifiably draw a comparison between NATO’s compulsions and its own situation. It, therefore, feels compelled to promise a high probability of nuclear use in the event of a military conflict with India. Pakistan, thus, has all the basic building blocks of what it describes as full spectrum deterrence, and it is only a matter of time before missile systems, both at the shortest- and longest-range ends of the spectrum, will be available in sufficient numbers to put full spectrum deterrence into practice. However, not unlike the fluctuations in the U.S. nuclear posture between simple punishment and warfighting, Pakistan’s doctrinal evolution will not be linear.
21 The transformation in Pakistan’s strategic posture has not been brought about merely by India’s continued quest to find a space for a limited conventional war. The prolonged commitment of almost one-third of Pakistan’s military forces in counterterror or counterinsurgency operations in the tribal areas along its borders with Afghanistan has thinned Pakistan’s deployments along the eastern border, creating a feeling of vulnerability that India can easily exploit. India has also adopted a belligerent posture along the Line of Control in Kashmir, especially across the working boundary in the Jammu-Sialkot sector. By perpetually keeping these borders hot and increasing the psychological pressure on Pakistan, India forces Pakistan toward greater reliance on its nuclear capability and lowering of its nuclear threshold.
Conceptually, credible minimum deterrence and full spectrum deterrence are different from each other in terms of both their goals and the force requirements necessary to achieve those goals. Whereas credible minimum deterrence is essentially a variety of simple punishment deterrence (with weapons mainly aimed at countervalue targets, and relatively limited force requirements), full spectrum deterrence is a kind of deterrence by denial, more akin to the flexible response or graduated response doctrines. Full spectrum deterrence targeting would include battlefield (counterforce) targets and would, therefore, require a larger arsenal size and a greater variety of both warheads and delivery systems. It would also require comparatively higher operational preparedness levels than the minimum credible deterrence posture.
Pakistan’s resource constraints and the continued insistence by official spokespersons on credible minimum deterrence as the existing policy, though, likely mean that Pakistan may not go all the way to a fully operational nuclear warfighting posture or deterrence by denial, and may instead settle for something intermediate between the two postures in the next ten years.
Though Pakistan has the advantage of learning from other states, it is still too early for it to have found definitive answers to its nuclear dilemmas. The current situation should, therefore, be considered a transient phase in Pakistan’s evolving doctrinal thinking. It is also important to recognize that India and Pakistan are in a very close dyadic nuclear relationship and, given their historic rivalry dominated by the action-reaction syndrome it is obvious that one country cannot remain oblivious to the developments in the other.
The logic of dynamic and flexible deterrence that constantly adjusts to any expansion in the adversary’s arsenal seems contradictory to the common conception of minimum deterrence, and could lead India and Pakistan toward an unintended arms race. It also opens up the possibilities of an open-ended increase in the number of nuclear weapons held by both countries. Lieutenant General Kidwai, responding to a question during his 2015 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference appearance, said that Pakistan had identified appropriate numbers to meet its minimum deterrence needs and these numbers were achieved in the recent past.
However, the adoption of full spectrum deterrence, in response to the Cold Start doctrine, introduced a new dynamism in the program and led Pakistan to revise its estimates for the necessary numbers of weapons. Kidwai, however, reiterated that these revised numbers should suffice for the next ten to fifteen years, adding that “beyond a certain number you lose the logic, it’s not an open ended race.”
22 This statement clearly indicates that Pakistan’s nuclear build-up has finite limits and is not likely to reach the level of the third-largest or even the fifth-largest nuclear power, as suggested by some analysts.
carnegieendowment.org
NAEEM SALIK
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have been subjects of considerable speculation and debate since Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, and increasingly so in recent years.
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have been subjects of considerable speculation and debate since Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, and increasingly so in recent years. Within the vast debate, however, many outside Pakistan seem to have agreed that Pakistan has the fastest growing arsenal in the world.
1 Alarmists estimate that by 2025, Pakistan will become the third-largest nuclear weapon power, leapfrogging ahead of France, China, and the United Kingdom, behind only the United States and Russia.
2 Others conjecture that its growth will make it only the fifth-largest arsenal.
3 Even the best of these estimates are still highly speculative, based on assumptions about Pakistan’s goals, the capacity and efficiency of Pakistan’s nuclear materials production facilities, its ability to convert these materials into weapons components, and its ability to build an inventory of adequate numbers of delivery systems.
Estimates also assume that 100 percent of available fissile material is being converted into weapons, and that Pakistan’s reprocessing and weapons core fabrication can keep pace with the production of plutonium at the Khushab nuclear complex. These estimates draw criticism and angry responses from Pakistani officials, but a vast majority of the people in Pakistan feel elated reading such reports.
The people of Pakistan might be disappointed to learn that, contrary to the prevailing perceptions, the size of Pakistan’s arsenal is, and will remain, substantially smaller than recent reports published in the United States suggest.
So much agreement exists around incorrect estimates of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal because of a paucity of primary source data. Most estimates rely on a few common sources, such as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, periodic reports by the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) yearbooks, assessments by the Institute of Science and International Security (ISIS), and occasional reports by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
These reports in turn rely on each other to corroborate their evaluations, which means that the same data are recycled repeatedly. The appearance of broad consensus comes from circular corroboration, not repeated independent verification. T
he resulting consensus picture shows Pakistan as a state obsessed with building as many nuclear weapons as it can in as short a time as possible, totally oblivious to the deleterious effects of such an undertaking on its economic health and the regional security environment. This picture, though inaccurate, affirms the suspicion with which Western observers have viewed Pakistan’s nuclear program since its inception.
The Pakistani military’s predominant role in the management of the Pakistani nuclear program leads these same observers to perceive the Pakistani nuclear program as overly militaristic and aggressive in nature, while at the same time trusting that India’s program is moving at a leisurely pace, and that its growth is justifiable in light of the twin threat from China and Pakistan.
Most observers tend to discount the weaponization potential of India’s enriched uranium stockpiles, which are simply put aside as fuel for India’s nuclear-powered submarines. They even fail to take into account reports emerging since 2012 about the construction of a large enrichment facility in Karnataka that would considerably increase India’s enriched uranium production capability and, in turn, its weapons fabrication capacity.
The reality of Pakistan’s nuclear posture is quite different from this consensus perception.
Another factor that prevents statistical analyses from reflecting the true state of Pakistan’s nuclear program is the artful picking and choosing of data to support the conclusions at which one intends to arrive.
Some very obvious facts are simply ignored because they are apparently not in conformity with the desired inferences. Although Pakistan, like India, has not made its inventory of fissile materials or warheads public, officials in Pakistan often comment on various studies and reports on the issue to call them inaccurate, exaggerated, or propagandistic.
This publication will attempt to challenge some of the assumptions made by observers outside of Pakistan, and will try to provide an alternative and more realistic assessment of Pakistan’s current and future nuclear force structure within the constraints imposed by a lack of information in the public domain.
BEGINNINGS OF THE NUCLEAR DOCTRINAL DEBATE
Pakistan’s nuclear force structure is a consequence of the country’s nuclear doctrine. Tracing Pakistan’s doctrine over the last twenty years will, therefore, provide the context necessary to evaluate the veracity of Western estimates about the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and will lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding of Pakistan’s current and future force postures.
Prior to the overt demonstration of its nuclear capability in response to Indian nuclear tests in May 1998, Pakistan pursued a policy of ambiguity, denying the existence of a nuclear weapons program. This policy helped mitigate some of the international pressures, but by doing so it foreclosed the possibility of public discourse on Pakistan’s future nuclear doctrine. Even once the doctrine was outlined after the 1998 nuclear tests,
Pakistan remained silent about the goals of its weapons program. Only after India announced its Draft Nuclear Doctrine in August 1999 did Pakistan’s government feel any serious pressure to publish its own doctrine.
Three former government officials—foreign secretary Agha Shahi, air chief Zulfiqar Ali Khan, and foreign minister Abdul Sattar—jointly authored a newspaper article in October 1999 making the case for a minimum deterrence posture.
4 They cautioned against squandering Pakistan’s limited economic resources to build an arsenal that exceeded Pakistan’s security needs, all in the name of winning a pointless competition against India. They advocated a posture that ruled out the possibility of nuclear warfighting on account of the large size and resource disparity between India and Pakistan, and argued that, since deterrence was the sole aim of the nuclear program, a small arsenal would suffice.
5Though the article was the first public statement on the nuclear program’s goals, the phrase most associated with Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, “credible minimum deterrence,” never appears. Instead, the article recommended a minimalist approach in line with the common conception of “minimum deterrence,” while perhaps contradicting itself by insisting on the dynamic nature of the concept and opening up the possibility of an ever-expanding arsenal:
“Minimum deterrence has been and should continue to be the guiding principle of Pakistan’s nuclear pursuit. Of course minimum cannot be defined in static numbers. In the absence of mutual restraints, the size of Pakistan’s arsenal and its deployment pattern have to be adjusted, to ward off dangers of pre-emption and interception. Only then can deterrence remain efficacious.”
6 The argument in support of minimum deterrence and a flexible force structure was reiterated by Abdul Sattar once he became foreign minister in the government of Pervez Musharaf. Indian decisionmakers adopted a similar approach, evident from former minister of external affairs Jaswant Singh’s argument that, as the security situation changes, the number of weapons required for minimum deterrence will also change.
7 Eventually, both India and Pakistan added the word credible to their minimum deterrence postures, indicating their discomfort with the minimal size of their respective arsenals. According to nuclear policy expert Rodney Jones, “the term credible is a much more demanding criterion than ‘minimum’ deterrence might imply by itself.”
8 The flexibility that “credible” provides effectively means that the nuclear doctrines of both India and Pakistan have allowed for reasonably large nuclear arsenals since the beginning of their respective nuclear programs.
DICHOTOMY IN DECLARATORY AND OPERATIONAL POSTURES—RATIONALE AND RAMIFICATIONS
In 2011, tests of a short-range missile called the Nasr (Hatf-IX) came as a surprise to many, especially because an official press release announced that the 60-kilometer-range missile was capable of carrying “nuclear warheads of appropriate yield.”14 Introduction of the short-range, battlefield-usable weapons by Pakistan triggered an animated debate, both in Pakistan and abroad. Those with a sympathetic view of Pakistan’s position have argued that the Nasr is a logical response to India’s provocative Cold Start war doctrine.15 Senior Pakistani officials have been quoted as saying that the Nasris meant to pour cold water over Cold Start.16 Critics, on the other hand, view the Nasr as a destabilizing development that increases the probability of a nuclear war in South Asia.17 Debate aside, there is no doubt that Pakistan has embarked upon the development of battlefield nuclear weapons capability. Pakistani government spokespersons, though, continue to tout Pakistan’s policy of credible minimum deterrence, which is a form of the so-called simple punishment model of deterrence, unlike the deterrence by denial—or warfighting model of deterrence—enabled by the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. These models have very different demands in terms of the size of arsenals, command and control, and battlefield management. However, this apparent dichotomy in the declared doctrine and actual force posture has yet to be clarified by Pakistani strategic planners.
The pandemonium created by the short range of the Nasr weapon system and perception of problems related to maintaining effective centralized command and control, not to mention the physical security of the missile launchers once operationally deployed in the field, diverted public attention away from some very important implications.
More important than the much-discussed range of the missile is the accompanying development of a sleek and miniaturized warhead to be mounted on it. This technological achievement has far-reaching implications, since it will enable Pakistan to arm its Babur (surface-launched) and Raad (air-launched) cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. It will also make it possible for Pakistan to equip naval platforms with nuclear weapon systems.
The debate around Pakistan’s introduction of battlefield nuclear weapons has also remained narrowly focused on the Nasr’s technical attributes, ignoring the operational characteristics of the other short-range systems, such as the 180-kilometer Abdali missile.
Pakistan believes that the Nasr demonstrates a capability that will strengthen deterrence through option enhancement and threat manipulation. Lieutenant General (retired) Khalid Kidwai, speaking at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in 2015, strongly criticized the narrow focus of the debate, stating that:
I strongly believe that by introducing the variety of tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s inventory, and in the strategic stability debate, we have blocked the avenues for serious military operations by the other side.
That the debate has been hi-jacked towards the lesser issues of command and control, and the possibility of their falling into wrong hands is unfortunate, because it has distracted and diverted attention from the real purpose of the TNWs, that of reinforcing deterrence, preventing war in South Asia, ensuring peace, thereby creating an enabling environment for politics and politicians to reassert and lead the way towards conflict resolution, and give South Asia and its people a chance.18
Without denigrating the arguments of the Nasr’scritics, one needs to look into the factors that compelled Pakistan to go down this treacherous path. India has been persistently challenging the credibility of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent doctrinally, technologically, and practically. It has been insisting since February 2000 that there is a space below the nuclear threshold for a limited conventional war with Pakistan. Kidwai alluded to this, arguing that:
For 15 years I, and my colleagues, at the Strategic Plans Division in Pakistan, and worked for deterrence to be strengthened. . . . to create roadblocks in the path of those who thought that there was space for conventional war, despite the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. . . . what was probably encouraging them to find the space for conventional war, below this gap, was the absence of a complete spectrum of deterrence. . . . That there was some kind of a gap in their realization at the tactical level, and therefore it was leading to this encouragement . . . on the other side [in India] that there was space for conventional war. . . . Because war was being brought down under the Cold Start Doctrine to the tactical level. . . . Therefore, the idea of Nasr was born [out of the] need to plug this particular gap.19
Pakistan’s development and field testing of the Abdali (Hatf-II) and the Nasr (Hatf-IX) seem to be in keeping with the counsel given by Michael Quinlan, a highly respected British nuclear expert, who has argued that “The range of options available must, therefore, be an unmistakable continuum without huge gaps. That in turn meant that there had to be nuclear forces, backed by will and doctrine for their possible use, intermediate between conventional forces . . . and the ultimate strategic nuclear capability.”
20 During the Cold War, NATO’s political and geographical compulsions along the central front in Germany, which constrained its ability to give up any space in a conflict even for sound operational reasons, forced it to adopt a forward defense posture. In contemporary South Asia, Pakistan faces a similar dilemma.
Pakistan can justifiably draw a comparison between NATO’s compulsions and its own situation. It, therefore, feels compelled to promise a high probability of nuclear use in the event of a military conflict with India. Pakistan, thus, has all the basic building blocks of what it describes as full spectrum deterrence, and it is only a matter of time before missile systems, both at the shortest- and longest-range ends of the spectrum, will be available in sufficient numbers to put full spectrum deterrence into practice. However, not unlike the fluctuations in the U.S. nuclear posture between simple punishment and warfighting, Pakistan’s doctrinal evolution will not be linear.
21 The transformation in Pakistan’s strategic posture has not been brought about merely by India’s continued quest to find a space for a limited conventional war. The prolonged commitment of almost one-third of Pakistan’s military forces in counterterror or counterinsurgency operations in the tribal areas along its borders with Afghanistan has thinned Pakistan’s deployments along the eastern border, creating a feeling of vulnerability that India can easily exploit. India has also adopted a belligerent posture along the Line of Control in Kashmir, especially across the working boundary in the Jammu-Sialkot sector. By perpetually keeping these borders hot and increasing the psychological pressure on Pakistan, India forces Pakistan toward greater reliance on its nuclear capability and lowering of its nuclear threshold.
Conceptually, credible minimum deterrence and full spectrum deterrence are different from each other in terms of both their goals and the force requirements necessary to achieve those goals. Whereas credible minimum deterrence is essentially a variety of simple punishment deterrence (with weapons mainly aimed at countervalue targets, and relatively limited force requirements), full spectrum deterrence is a kind of deterrence by denial, more akin to the flexible response or graduated response doctrines. Full spectrum deterrence targeting would include battlefield (counterforce) targets and would, therefore, require a larger arsenal size and a greater variety of both warheads and delivery systems. It would also require comparatively higher operational preparedness levels than the minimum credible deterrence posture.
Pakistan’s resource constraints and the continued insistence by official spokespersons on credible minimum deterrence as the existing policy, though, likely mean that Pakistan may not go all the way to a fully operational nuclear warfighting posture or deterrence by denial, and may instead settle for something intermediate between the two postures in the next ten years.
Though Pakistan has the advantage of learning from other states, it is still too early for it to have found definitive answers to its nuclear dilemmas. The current situation should, therefore, be considered a transient phase in Pakistan’s evolving doctrinal thinking. It is also important to recognize that India and Pakistan are in a very close dyadic nuclear relationship and, given their historic rivalry dominated by the action-reaction syndrome it is obvious that one country cannot remain oblivious to the developments in the other.
The logic of dynamic and flexible deterrence that constantly adjusts to any expansion in the adversary’s arsenal seems contradictory to the common conception of minimum deterrence, and could lead India and Pakistan toward an unintended arms race. It also opens up the possibilities of an open-ended increase in the number of nuclear weapons held by both countries. Lieutenant General Kidwai, responding to a question during his 2015 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference appearance, said that Pakistan had identified appropriate numbers to meet its minimum deterrence needs and these numbers were achieved in the recent past.
However, the adoption of full spectrum deterrence, in response to the Cold Start doctrine, introduced a new dynamism in the program and led Pakistan to revise its estimates for the necessary numbers of weapons. Kidwai, however, reiterated that these revised numbers should suffice for the next ten to fifteen years, adding that “beyond a certain number you lose the logic, it’s not an open ended race.”
22 This statement clearly indicates that Pakistan’s nuclear build-up has finite limits and is not likely to reach the level of the third-largest or even the fifth-largest nuclear power, as suggested by some analysts.
Pakistan’s Nuclear Force Structure in 2025
Pakistan’s nuclear posture and the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal have been subjects of considerable speculation and debate since Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, and increasingly so in recent years.carnegieendowment.org
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