Did Pakistan call a meeting of the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA), the top military-civilian body overseeing nuclear weapons and other strategic assets?
International news agencies quoted the Pakistani military as saying that Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif had convened the meeting. But within hours it was denied by Defence Minister Khwaja Asif.
Was Pakistan indulging in nuclear brinkmanship? Brig Arun Sahga (Retd), Director of the Forum for Strategic Initiatives, a Delhi-based think tank, believes that what Islamabad did was “a clear case of signalling its nuclear threshold, which means the drone and missile strike war is reaching its climax and moving into a game of nuclear brinkmanship.”
In an interview on The Gist, Brig Sahgal had pointed to Pakistan’s escalating pattern evident in its targeting of Indian military infrastructure even though India had hit only terrorist infrastructure in Punjab and PoK.
“It’s hard hitting our military targets and also hitting our population centres,” he said, “yes that was an escalation and he hit about 15 population centres broadening the intensity of the conflict … in this scenario of unintended escalation the nuclear may become a factor.”
Interesting to note that in July 2023, Lt Gen Khalid Kidwai (Retd) Adviser to Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which administers all policies and strategies regarding nuclear and missile programmes, called for Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD) against India.
In a paper Brig Sahgal co-wrote with Manpreet Sethi and Rear Admiral Sudarshan Shrikhande, FSD was described as Pakistan having sufficient capabilities to be able to respond to a wide range of threats, presumably originating from India.
Kidwai’s FSD involved two dimensions: the horizontal which is a robust tri-service inventory of a variety of nuclear weapons; and the vertical dimension where such weapons would have a range of over 2,700 km encapsulating “destructive yields suited for strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
Such an arsenal, Gen Kidwai believed would provide Pakistan with a “strategic shield”, blunting the extant conventional asymmetry with India.
But the Balakot strike in 2019 and the current conflict make it clear that India is not deterred. It has options that it will exploit and a nuclear doctrine which clearly lays out what it will do in the event of a nuclear strike. There’s no ambiguity here.
Important the world realise Pakistan’s brinkmanship and stop it from pushing the region and the world towards Armageddon.
