Lt Gen Nauman Zakaria, Commander of Pakistan Army’s I Corps, on 30 May spoke at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on the India-Pakistan strategic equation. He emphasised that nuclear reaction times between India and Pakistan have compressed from minutes to seconds, making the South Asian strategic landscape dangerously unique.
His remarks covered deterrence, crisis management, disinformation, artificial intelligence, escalation risks and the need for dialogue. He claimed that Indian sub-continent stability is being weakened by supposed Indian militarisation, adversarial rhetoric and the absence of reliable crisis-management mechanisms.
While much of the speech was more hot air than hard argument, two claims deserve attention.
First, the familiar Pakistani argument that India and Pakistan live in a uniquely compressed geography. This is often presented as a special Indian sub-continent condition; two nuclear-armed rivals sharing borders, short distances, limited warning time and intense political hostility. The implication is that escalation in the subcontinent is uniquely dangerous because missiles, aircraft and political decisions all operate under extreme time pressure.
There is some truth here. New Delhi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and major military formations are geographically close. In an India-Pakistan crisis, decision-makers may have less time to assess whether a missile launch is conventional, nuclear, accidental or demonstrative. The danger is real. But the claim of uniqueness can be overstated.
Short nuclear reaction times are not exclusive to South Asia. During the Cold War, Europe also lived under the shadow of forward-deployed theatre nuclear systems. NATO’s Pershing systems were deployed in Europe from the 1960s, and the Pershing II was designed as a mobile, medium-range nuclear-capable missile based in West Germany.
The larger fear was not simply that Washington and Moscow could attack each other across oceans, but that nuclear weapons placed inside the European theatre could compress warning time and create incentives for preemption. A 1979 US Army Russian Institute study on a Warsaw Pact short-warning nuclear attack shows that the problem of rapid nuclear decision-making in a geographically compressed theatre was already central to Cold War military thinking. It is enough to say that compressed geography is a known nuclear problem, not a Pakistani discovery.
The second striking claim was Zakaria’s statement that “…at its core, strategic stability is ultimately about responsible statecraft. Technology itself is not inherently destabilising. The real challenge lies in how technologies are governed, integrated and employed.” As a general proposition, this is reasonable.
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Responsible statecraft
Missiles, artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities, drones and submarines do not destabilise by themselves. They become destabilising when states integrate them into risky nuclear doctrines that shorten decision time, blur thresholds, or create incentives to strike first. But this is precisely where Pakistan’s own nuclear posture becomes problematic.
If the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) under full-spectrum deterrence (FSD) were not destabilising enough, Pakistan is now likely to take this ambiguity into the sea-based nuclear domain by deploying nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCM) on conventional submarines. The Babur-3 SLCM is intended to provide Pakistan with a sea-based second-strike option. It has been tested from an “underwater mobile platform” in 2017, has an estimated range of 450 km, and is likely to be deployed on Pakistan’s Agosta-90B diesel-electric submarines (SSK), with future Hangor-class SSKs also potentially assigned a nuclear role.
Once operational, it would add a sea-based leg to Pakistan’s existing land- and air-based nuclear forces. In practice, this means Pakistan may place a dual-capable nuclear delivery system on conventional boats, creating precisely the commingling problem that makes crisis management harder: New Delhi would be forced to treat even conventional Pakistani submarines as potential nuclear assets.
This creates a classic dual-use and commingling problem. Babur-3 is derived from the Babur cruise missile family, which is described as dual-capable. If nuclear-capable SLCMs are placed on conventional diesel-electric submarines, an adversary cannot definitively know whether it is tracking a conventional platform or a nuclear one. In wartime, India may treat Pakistani submarines as potential nuclear assets. Pakistan, in turn, may interpret anti-submarine operations as attempts to neutralise its second-strike capability.
That is where Zakaria’s language of “responsible statecraft” becomes a bit rich! If technology is dangerous only in how it is governed and employed, then Pakistan must answer how it intends to govern nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missiles on conventional submarines. What are the command-and-control arrangements? How will nuclear and conventional missions be separated? Will submarines carry conventional and nuclear weapons simultaneously? And if Pakistan is so worried about compressed geography and shortened reaction time, why drag nuclear commingling into the sea?
Zakaria is right that strategic stability depends on responsible statecraft. But responsible statecraft cannot only be demanded from the adversary. It must also be demonstrated in one’s own force posture. The real test is not whether leaders can produce elegant language about stability. It is whether their doctrines, deployments and technologies give the adversary more time to think — or less.
Anubhav Shankar Goswami is a PhD candidate at Murdoch University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)