Battling over Pakistan’s Battlefield Nuclear Weapons

To the Editors (Christopher Clary writes):

In “Pakistan’s Battlefield Nuclear Policy,” Jaganath Sankaran argues that Pakistan’s threat to employ tactical nuclear weapons in a war with India is not credible because the use of such weapons would cause the immediate deaths of hundreds of thousands of Pakistani civilians while achieving negligible military effects.¹ Sankaran, however, misunderstands how Pakistan is likely to employ nuclear weapons during wartime; he overstates the likely number of Pakistani civilian casualties from the initial use of tactical nuclear weapons; and he understates the potential negative battlefield consequences for the Indian army. Why would any rational Pakistani leader pull the trigger if it inevitably meant the death of so many Pakistani innocents and only a few Indian military personnel? If Sankaran’s analysis is to be believed, no leader would. Thus, Pakistan’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons to deter Indian conventional operations has been a bluff. That conclusion is dangerous, because if Indian policymakers believe it, they might discount the likelihood of Pakistani nuclear use in the event of conventional military operations, potentially risking calamity.

How would pakistan employ battlefield nuclear weapons?

Sankaran computes the likely effects of Pakistan’s use of tactical nuclear weapons against eighteen different targets, and argues that under “most scenarios” Pakistani civilian casualties would be extremely high. There are several problems with this conclusion. First, the methodology Sankaran employs assumes peacetime population levels, but the Pakistan Army would likely orchestrate the evacuation of populated areas near conventional military operations, and a substantial portion of the civilian population would flee of their own accord.²

Second, even with this computational caveat, Sankaran is correct that were Pakistan to use battlefield nuclear devices above Lahore, Sialkot, Rahim Yar Khan, and Sukkur, hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis would be killed or injured—which is why Pakistan would not use these weapons in this manner. In the first place, Indian armor would almost certainly try to bypass populated areas, so there would be no reason to target them. During the Cold War, U.S. armored forces were “trained to avoid built-up areas whenever possible,” because in urban terrain such forces must “button up” to avoid small arms fire, “thus reducing observation and heightening the prospect of ambush by close-range ATGM [antitank guided missile] fires.”³ In 1995, Russian forces in Grozny, Chechnya, suffered enormous losses, as insurgents used rocket-propelled grenades against Russian armor with great success.⁴ For similar reasons, Indian doctrine directs armored units to avoid built-up areas so as to maximize the speed of their advance and minimize danger.⁵

It is more likely that Pakistan would restrict the use of battlefield nuclear weapons to bridgeheads and other locations where Indian ground forces would be likely to concentrate, or to desert areas, where civilian casualties—as Sankaran acknowledges—would be negligible. Sankaran implies that he calculates just these scenarios, but consider his calculations regarding nuclear use in the outskirts of Sukkur. There are many obstructions near Sukkur. Sankaran’s scenario in which Pakistan detonates a device near the Sukkur Barrage bridge generates civilian casualties far in excess of many other potential aimpoints. Pakistani planners are likely to target Indian forces in areas that minimize the number of civilian deaths.

As a result, Pakistan’s use of tactical nuclear weapons would cause far fewer casualties than Sankaran implies. This would still be one of the worst days in the history of humanity. But if Pakistan detonated ten weapons against locations along canals and the outskirts of populated areas, and if some substantial portion of the population had already fled, the result might be 10,000 or 20,000 dead Pakistani civilians or maybe fewer. This would be horrible, but dozens of battles in the modern era have led to similar levels of devastation. Perhaps ten to twenty times that number died in the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan, and the Pakistan military killed perhaps ten to twenty times that many in its effort to hold on to East Pakistan in the 1971 war. In...