 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. We scholars, we policymakers, when it comes to talking about Asia, tend to focus and be drawn toward the U.S.-China relationship or perhaps the U.S.-North Korea relationship. However, there is a region of Asia that doesn't get enough attention despite the amount of risks emanating from that, and that is Southern Asia, or more specifically the interaction between China, India, and Pakistan. All three are nuclear-armed states. All three are developing new kinds of ways of delivering nuclear weapons that they will naturally learn about in terms of their operation through trial and error. And Pakistan and India in particular have a record of several wars fought against each other, including a war and a near-crisis fought against each other after they both developed nuclear weapons. So my talk today is going to focus on nuclear Southern Asia and why this is such a risky area, why it deserves more attention, and why I should be watching it closely. I'm Dr. Frank O'Donnell, postdoctoral fellow in the National Security Affairs Department, and this is NWC Talks. On February 14, 2019, a suicide car bomber struck and killed over 40 Indian paramilitary forces in the disputed region of Kashmir. This region has disputed ownership between India and Pakistan and is one of the causes of their long-standing rivalry, and this long-standing rivalry has featured several wars between both states. The attack was conducted by Jayashin Mohamed, an anti-India terrorist group based in Pakistan, and following this attack, his tensions rose between the two nuclear armed rivals. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed a forceful response. This response came on February 26, with 12 Indian Mirage bombers crossing the line of control. This is the de facto border between Indian administered and Pakistan administered Kashmir. This is the first time that Indian forces had crossed the line of control since the 1971 war. And what's particularly significant about this operation is that the Mirage model is used elsewhere in India's armed force for nuclear missions, for nuclear strike missions. And the formation of having 12 of them with four protective fighters is extremely similar to the kind of formation that would be used for a nuclear strike. These bombers crossed the line of control into Pakistan administered Kashmir and launched conventional missiles into Pakistan itself. He's allegedly destroyed Pakistan militant training camps. We could already see significant escalation. And in terms of how quickly the escalation rose, the very next day on February 27, there was a Pakistani counter-strike. Pakistan fighters crossed the line of control into Indian administered Kashmir and managed to lure Indian fighters back across the line of control into a trap where the Indian fighters were gunned down. However, by freak accident, an Indian pilot was captured alive. In response to this, and again you can see how quickly this is happening, Prime Minister Modi threatens Pakistan by saying, I have 12 missiles ready to be launched unless you return that pilot immediately, peacefully, and alive. Modi does not specify whether these missiles are nuclear or conventional. And so what we can see here is that both sides were playing a high-stakes game of guessing at each other's threshold for when they would use nuclear weapons. So India in launching what appears to be very close to an air-nuclear strike formation against Pakistan is making ultimately an educated guess that Pakistan will not proceed this as being a nuclear attack and respond accordingly. Pakistan in launching its own air strike against it into Indian Ministry Kashmir is making a similar calculation that this will not lead to dangerous escalation. And when Modi threatens Pakistan by saying, I have 12 missiles ready to be launched, he's calculating that this will not lead to similar Pakistani nuclear threats or potential escalation. So this is this high-stakes game of breakmanship being played in real time as the world watched nervously. Luckily, the crisis ended peacefully. On the 1st of March, Pakistani Prime Minister returns. The captured Indian pilot alive back to India. While this crisis ended peacefully, this was only the latest crisis between the two nuclear-armed states, while China is also becoming gradually more strategically involved in the region. This is a region that back in 2000, President Clinton called the most dangerous place in the world. And as we can see, things don't look much more stable today. So what is going on in nuclear South Asia and why should you watch closely? I'll answer that question by talking through the recent strategic developments of the three nuclear states in the region, India, Pakistan and China. And then I'll wrap up by suggesting how these nuclear states can reduce the risks of a conflict spinning out of control between them. India conducted nuclear tests, nuclear detonations in 1998 and proclaimed itself a nuclear weapons state. It said that it would have a posture of credible minimum deterrence. It would not seek a kind of nuclear force that's larger than all of its adversaries, but instead one that was small enough to be able to deter that of its adversaries. And it would also have a doctrine of no first use, that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in conflict, but would only use them in retaliation to an adversary's first nuclear attack. In 2003, I paled this doctrine in a new doctrinal statement, although watered it down slightly by stating that India reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack, as well as a nuclear one. India's two main rivals are Pakistan and China and has unsettled border disputes with both parties, which as we just saw with this crisis can flare up, can inflame India's general threat perceptions and which can inform its own nuclear force planning. And in recent years, we've seen both credible minimum deterrence and no first use be challenged. With credible minimum deterrence, India has now inducted its Agni-5 missile, its most sophisticated longest range missile yet, that is able to reach, for the first time, the Chinese East Coast metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai. And now that it's able to reach the entirety of the Chinese mainland and the Pakistani mainland, you would think that this would be all that it needed in terms of its nuclear reach. However, it is still intent on building further reaching missiles such as the Agni-6. This begins to call into question whether or not we can still talk about India as following a posture of credible minimum deterrence. It's also developing seaborne nuclear weapons, nuclear armed submarines, in a context in which the maritime boundaries that it has with Pakistan and also with China are still unclear. This raises real risks of a nuclear armed vessel of one state coming into conventional conflict being challenged by a conventional vessel of another, leading to escalation risk. India's no first use policy is also coming under increasing debate in recent years. This has reached the level of India's then serving Minister of Defense and also two members of India's nuclear command chain, as well as a wide range of retired senior defense and nuclear decision makers. That is saying that it's time to move away from no first use and that India should have a first use policy. And finally, in its own conventional preparedness, India is building a ground force strategy called Cold Start, which intends to cross the border between India and Pakistan to seize tracks of Pakistani territory and again making an educated guess that this will not prompt significant Pakistani escalation. While its air force is also interested in attacking significant Pakistan's strategic targets, such as nuclear bases, in which the recent crisis and the recent air force strike will show to them is technically possible. So what we see here is the bottom line is that there's a greater Indian interest in flexibility and having greater ambiguity regarding what it might do in the next conventional or nuclear crisis. And this isn't really a positive development. This really elevates the risk of a crisis spinning out of control. As with this greater ambiguity, Pakistan or China may misread what India is doing. Turning now to Pakistan. India is Pakistan's primary strategic rival and Pakistan has a close defense partnership with China. Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons following its experience of the 1971 war in which India helped in uprising in what was then East Pakistan to help permanently divide it from West Pakistan and become the new independent state of Bangladesh. After 1971, Pakistan's leaders vowed that this can never be allowed to happen again. This risk of India invading again to perhaps you take even more of Pakistan's territory and they judged that having the bomb will stop and deter India from further such actions. In recent years, Pakistan has also helped cultivate and has a semi independent relationship from major terrorist groups on its own soil such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Rajesh-e-Mohammed which we just saw is conducting the attack earlier this year. Use of these terrorist actors is seen by many experts in South Asia and outside as really the most likely escalatory cause of a war between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has a first use policy. Unlike India, it will not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict and its own nuclear posture is growing towards what's called full spectrum deterrence in which we'll have a tailored nuclear capability for each potential level of conventional war with India. Most infamously, this includes the Nasser tactical ballistic missile which only has a range of 70 kilometers and which is intended to stop Indian conventional cross-border attack dead by nuclearizing it at that point in time. Pakistan, despite its feelings of vulnerability, however, already has a numerical warhead superiority to India and only has India really to worry about in terms of its nuclear targeting. It has an India specific targeting strategy. India is its primary nuclear threat. However, despite this superiority, it is still increasing its warhead count and still developing new delivery vehicles. Furthermore, it's extending its nuclear competition with India to the sea involving developing its own seaborne nuclear forces. Like with regard to India and its own seaborne forces, this does raise again the risk of Pakistan nuclear forces coming into contact with Indian conventional forces and vice versa given that these are being introduced into maritime environments where their boundaries are not clear and are disputed between each side. There are bigger concerns with regard to Pakistan's nuclear forces and how these relate to the fact that there are powerful terrorist actors operating on Pakistan's soil, some of whom are not friendly to the Pakistan government, such as the Pakistani Taliban. There are concerns that there could be terrorist attacks upon Pakistan military bases, including those holding Pakistan nuclear warheads or upon Pakistan nuclear forces themselves and that these attacks could include insider help and within Pakistan's military. So as we're seeing with regard to Pakistan and its nuclear force developments, the pathways to a new crisis continue to grow. Lastly, a look at China. And China is the big challenge that U.S. foreign policymakers and many scholars of Asia are concerned with. We're concerned with China with regard to the economy, to global governance, to the U.S. relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Taiwan, to the South China Sea. However, it also plays a big and increasing role in Southern Asia. The relationship of Chinese deterrents, nuclear deterrents to that of Indian Pakistan, however, isn't as simple as that in the Cold War. In the Cold War, we had the U.S. and the USSR, which saw each other as their primary nuclear threats and measured their nuclear arsenals against each other. And with regard to China and India and Pakistan, the deterrents relationship is better talked of as being a strategic chain, as a recent Brookings Institute report called it. China's primary threat is the United States. And it developed its nuclear posture really around the U.S. and what it proceeds to be the U.S.'s own nuclear intentions against China. It doesn't pay much attention to what India is doing with regard to its own nuclear forces. However, India watches very closely what China does in response to what the U.S. is doing and sees this as being directed against India. And India undertakes its own nuclear posture and expansions with regard to that. Pakistan, for its own part, watches what India is doing partly with an eye toward China, as we've just seen, and sees this as being directed against Pakistan. So rather than this being kind of a symmetrical relationship, as we saw in the Cold War, what we have is kind of a cascading effect. However, within China, there are shifting views of what India's nuclear force means for China's deterrence and what the real degree of Indian nuclear threat is toward China. Interviews with Chinese officials and experts have confirmed that, at least at this official expert level, that there is a real concern with India potentially reaching parity or symmetry with China's nuclear forces in terms of arsenal size or capability. And multiple of these officials and experts have said that they would not permit this to happen and that they don't see Beijing policy makers as allowing this to happen. What that means is that if China sees India is getting closer to India, to China's own nuclear arsenal in size, China would upscale its nuclear arsenal to prevent that happening and India may be compelled to follow suit. So while there isn't really a direct interactive bilateral symmetrical China-India arms race, there could be in the years to come. China is also feeling its own nuclear arms submarines with the same kind of dangerous effects we've talked about. And it's also devoting increasing resources to Pakistan in terms of both civilian and military personnel and Pakistan administered Kashmir and Pakistan with regard to its one belt, one road, developmental project. This poses real complications for India in the next India-Pakistan crisis because if India conducts further kinds of physical force attacks, they could inadvertently strike and injure or kill Chinese nationals, whether they be civilian or military, that are positioned in Pakistan administered Kashmir or Pakistan. And so this creates a greater risk of crisis initiation between China and India with regard to nuclear Southern Asia and also a greater risk of entanglement in which China might get drawn into an existing crisis through India perhaps targeting Chinese forces by mistake. So what recommendations do I have to help stabilize this situation? The first is that the three capitals have to undertake strategic dialogue with regard to finding ways to discuss scenarios of potential escalation, to discuss what their strategic perceptions are of each other and to develop kinds of confidence-building measures and certain playbooks around how to reduce tensions in the next crisis so that they all get a better sense of strategic perceptions and how they perceive each other. This can avoid the kind of miscalculation that we've seen there being a greater risk of. Secondly, there has to be greater US involvement and awareness of how its own nuclear policy affects all of this. So US hawkish nuclear rhetoric, hawkish nuclear policies toward China does encourage China to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal to increase in its size, to increase in its survivability, which has that cascading effect, which gives India a greater sense of nuclear threat from China and which then gives Pakistan a greater sense of nuclear threat from India. Thirdly, the US government has to begin developing contingency planning for the most likely crisis scenarios that might emerge in the next crisis in Southeast Asia and how the US will respond to them. So it has a playbook ready to go when the crisis happens. The most recent crisis, as we saw in February, was extremely fast-moving. The Indian Air Force strike took place on February 26. The Pakistani Air Force strike takes place the very next day. There has to be contingency planning so that the US is prepared and ready to go when the next crisis happens. And finally, for you watching, simply watch this space. The strategic story of the 21st century will likely be decided in Asia and how all these issues play out in Southern Asia will play a big part of that. Thank you for spending a few minutes with me today. I am Dr. Frank O'Donnell, post-doc drill fellow in the National Security Affairs Department, and this has been NWC Talks.