According to the strategic concept adopted by the Pakistani elite, the objective of the country's nuclear program is to neutralize the threat posed by India, its historical rival enjoying vast superiority in both conventional forces and WMD. Besides, possessing nuclear weapons elevates Islamabad's international status, especially among the “fraternal” Muslim countries. Pakistani leaders reiterate that from the outset the entire nuclear program is of an exclusively defensive character.
The Pakistani nuclear program was born in January, 1972 when – after being defeated by India in a war that led to the establishment of Bangladesh on the territory that used to be the eastern part of Pakistan - the country made a political decision to rely on WMD in containing India. India's 1974 nuclear test forced Pakistan to boost its efforts in the nuclear sphere, and efforts in the framework of the program intensified considerably in the late 1970ies, largely owing to the contribution made by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a German-trained scientist who gained expertise in uranium enrichment technologies in the Netherlands. Khan returned to Pakistan in 1975, and in a year uranium enrichment was put on track in Pakistan. According to Western estimates, by 1986 Pakistan owned serious reserves of fission materials for use in the nuclear weapons production. It performed its first nuclear test in 1987.
Islamabad declared on May 28, 1998 that it had successfully performed five nuclear tests, and additionally tested a 12 KT nuclear munition on May 30, 1998. Pakistan's official position was that the tests were a reaction to the nuclear tests conducted by India on May 11 and 13, 1998 (India's history counted a total of five nuclear tests). Agreements on confidence-building measures (ballistic missile launch notifications, the prolongation of the nuclear test moratorium, etc.) were reached by Pakistan and India in Lahore in February, 1999 during the talks between the countries' Prime Ministers N. Sharif and A. Vajpayeee.
Assessing the state of the Pakistani nuclear sector, Western experts stress that currently the country has the capability to make relatively novel light and compact munitions which afford a broad range of uses, including those as ballistic missile warheads. It is widely known that other countries – mainly China – have been instrumental in Pakistan's achieving its current level in fission materials and ballistic missile technologies. Washington claims that Beijing played the key role in supplying to Pakistan technologies of plutonium production and modern nuclear warheads manufacturing. There also is a hypothesis that Pakistan obtained significant nuclear know-how from France and other West European countries and – in the 1990ies – from the post-Soviet republics.
US experts maintain that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is growing rapidly. Quite possibly the funds provided to the country by Washington to help it fight terrorism – a total of over $10 bn since 2001 – have given the process a boost. The US concern over the matter is explainable – the forces of politicized Islam are gaining increasing influence over the country since the epoch of the rule of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988), and the international community is worried that the Pakistani nuclear potential may be insufficiently safeguarded against Islamists, Bin Laden's Pakistani followers in particular. The latter hope that the seizure of power in Islamabad would some day become a prologue to a fundamental geopolitical overhaul in the Grand Middle East and tilt the balance of forces in the region in favor of radical Islam.
Several factors contributed to the growth of the political influence of the politicized Islam in Pakistan. First, the forces met with practically no resistance from the regime of Zia-ul-Haq – convinced that the army fully dominated Pakistan's politics, the general lightheartedly tolerated Islamists. Secondly, during R. Reagan's presidency the US-Pakistani geopolitical alliance was supposed to mobilize radical Islam in the struggle against the USSR, the result being that Islamists eventually gained an independent role in the Pakistani and broader regional politics. Thirdly, Pakistan's socioeconomic problems that the country's administration has been clearly failing to address created a situation in which it was natural for the opposition to unite on the basis of the simplistic ideology of politicized Islam, which the masses readily absorb. Altogether the above factors render some credibility to the hypothetical scenario under which proponents of a “Jihad state” seize power in Islamabad to fight “the enemies of Islam” in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The Jihadist possibility makes the army, which currently serves as the backbone of Pakistan's political system, maneuver and look into various forms of compromise with the Muslim radicals. The policy of “appeasing” Islamists largely defines the course the Pakistani administration is steering: military offensives against radicals are typically sluggish and inefficient.
The ambiguity in the army's position concerning Islamists fuels concerns over the security of the Pakistani nuclear potential whose build-up even the current global economic downturn does not seem to impede. It is widely held in the West that Pakistan's nuclear program is partially sponsored by the Saudi Arabia which regards Pakistan's nuclear arsenal as protection against Iran. The arsenal is estimated at 60-100 nuclear warheads mounted on ballistic missiles or based on US-made F-16 fighters. The munitions are distributed over the country and mostly stored in underground facilities.
Pakistan never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, invoking India's refusal to join the regime as a justification of its own position. S. Talbot, US Under-Secretary of State under B. Clinton, says an agreement with Pakistan over the issue was practically impossible to reach, and the chances for any understanding shrank further after the signing of the US-Indian nuclear deal in 2005.
Islamabad charges that a symmetric offer to Pakistan should have been paralleled the US-Indian nuclear deal. It opened to India access to advanced nuclear technologies as a reward for allowing the international community to exercise oversight over just some of its nuclear facilities. Obviously, Pakistani leaders concluded that Washington chose to side with India and that they could not regard the US as a reliable ally. The immediate consequence was that the army opined against the civilian administration's adopting the no-first-use doctrine in the relations with India.
Frequent changes in Washington's politics with respect to Islamabad – from de facto abandoning the attempts to watch over Pakistan's nuclear activity (under R. Reagan) and allowing it to produce WMD (under G. Bush (senior)) to imposing sanctions following the 1998 nuclear tests – have affected the process of formation of the Pakistani nuclear doctrine. Having to rely on Pakistan in his war on terror and in the operation in Afghanistan, G. Bush (junior) was forced to lift the sanctions. Due to similar reasons, B. Obama's choice of options is also limited.
Lack of continuity and marked dependence on the current political context in Washington's politics left Pakistan convinced that its maneuvers in the sphere of nuclear control are totally unconstrained. Moreover, any international pressure on Islamabad momentarily translates into the strengthening of Islamists in the country's domestic politics. It is an equally relevant circumstance that in Pakistan the nuclear program and doctrine enjoy absolute popular support – the pro-nuclear choice may in fact be the only unifying theme in the otherwise divided Pakistani society. The Pakistani population believes that the nuclear potential is an efficient guarantee of the country's territorial unity and that the rejection of the assistance of the West, which offered to safeguard the fission materials and nuclear arsenals against Jihadists, was an act asserting national sovereignty. It can be read between the lines in the Pakistani nuclear doctrine that in Pakistan the mission of maintaining the nuclear potential legitimizes the current regime.
Thus, it is a political function of the Pakistani nuclear doctrine that it cements the society facing the protracted modernization crisis. At the same time, the nuclear doctrine is efficiently used as an instrument of manipulating the masses, the domestic and international aspects of the process being tightly interwoven. For example, the Pakistani media are disseminating the notion that India is waging a cyber-space war against Pakistan's nuclear program jointly with Israel. Pakistani military experts say the purpose of the war is to “smear” Pakistan internationally.
The two key themes in Indian media related to the Pakistani nuclear program are:
1. Pakistan is a player in China's strategic design to encircle India which, allegedly, is to culminate in a nuclear attack against India by 2017;
2. The Pakistani nuclear arsenal is not properly guarded against Al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations.
Pakistani journalist F. Shah says the cyber-space war will target financial markets, government computer networks, and state communications. Likewise information is typically hard to verify but is quite usable in anti-Indian propaganda campaigns.
In reality, any political maneuvering faces limitations, and Pakistan's administration should not rely so heavily on the benefits of the country's strategic location. The only policy truly leading to security, both domestic and international, is that of development. Pakistan needs to ensure steady economic growth across its territory and to tackle seriously such problems as unemployment and socioeconomic disproportions.
The failure of the modernization project to which the Pakistani administration subscribes has already resulted in the “talibanization” of much of Pakistan's territory and can ultimately lead to a collapse of its statehood. Events have gone along a similar trajectory in Bangladesh (formerly a part of Pakistan), and the same developments in the nuclear-armed Pakistan would breed unprecedented problems.
The logic of the Pakistan-Indian rivalry can lead to such adverse effects as permanent relocations of nuclear munitions, the swelling of fission materials reserves due to both uranium enrichment and industrial-scale plutonium production, ballistic missile race that would inevitably trigger the development of missile-defense systems, the increase in the number of nuclear munitions, mass production of cruise missiles, etc.
It became clear over the past decade that the US has limited influence over the Pakistani nuclear program. The question arising in the context is whether Russia can do anything to stabilize the conflict-prone situation bred by the Pakistani nuclear policy? No doubt, stopping the Pakistani missile program is beyond the range of doable for Moscow, but there may still be things it can do to help cool the tensions between Pakistan and India.
The hypothetical scenario of Russia's gradually influencing the political thinking of the Pakistani ruling circles is:
1. The re-enactment of the strategic partnership between Russia and Pakistan that used to exist in the 1960ies and culminated in the meeting of the Soviet and Pakistani leaders in Tashkent brokered by Soviet Prime Minister A.N. Kosygin. Pakistan should be interested in Russia's return to the region where it could balance the influence exerted by China and the US. The restoration of the ties between Russia and Pakistan in trade and science could be the first step towards Russia's comeback.
2. The formation of a more complex architecture of the international relations with a new “free geometry” and a new geopolitical logic. The Russia-India-Pakistan strategic triangle can re-emerge in Asia due to the diversification of the foreign-politics strategies of the three countries. Until recently, the Indian political elite used to regard the potential progress in the relations between Russia and Pakistan as a threat, but while India is strengthening its ties with the US Russia should pragmatically do the same in dealing with Pakistan (in all spheres except for the military-technical cooperation). Quite possibly, India will see Russia as a factor of containment of the Pakistani nuclear ambitions in the new configuration.
3. Russia is among the recognized global leaders on the nuclear technology market. Pakistan is interested in attracting civilian nuclear technologies as its energy sector has to catch up with the rapid population growth. The Pakistani administration has stated a number of times that it would readily cooperate with Russia in the nuclear energy sector.
Such long-term cooperation would give Russia greater influence over South Asia and make it possible for the Russian diplomacy to work with Pakistan in the non-proliferation area.