In a webcast lecture, Professor Scott D Sagan said that if developed countries with competent civilian controls can make errors it was safe to assume that countries with “less vigorous civilian controls, less professionalised ” will behave in dangerous ways.
According to Sagan some states that have nuclear weapons don’t see them as a deterrent but as a shield behind which they can take more aggressive action. “If some militaries think war is inevitable in the long term they believe they can engage in preventive war. And if they think nuclear weapons are a good deterrent, it also gives them the incentive to use force at lower levels,” remarked Sagan. Such posturing was not witnessed even during the cold war. But, according to Sagan, we see this often between India and Pakistan, most notably during the Kargil conflict and even later.
Sagan explains Pakistan’s nuclear safety dilemma as: “The civilians are at the wheel. The military is at the accelerator and somebody is pulling the brakes.” This is neither “a rationally controlled operation nor proper nuclear signalling”. As witnessed during Kargil, he said, some of this signalling gave off vulnerabilities. Overall, he noted, Pakistan has a vulnerability-invulnerability problem. “Pakistanis keep their weapons in storage on military bases, and not in the high state of alert,” he said. “They know that those weapons are vulnerable in the event of an attack by India or the US.”
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