By
Deepal Jayasekera
10 May 2013
The chairman of India’s National Security Advisory Board, Shayam Saran, has warned Pakistan that if it ever uses tactical, i.e. battlefield, nuclear weapons against Indian forces, it will be the target of an all-out Indian nuclear attack.
In an April 24 lecture titled “Is India’s nuclear deterrent credible?,” Saran declared, “[I]f [India] is attacked with such [tactical nuclear] weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary.” He continues, “From the Indian perspective…the label on a nuclear weapon used for attacking India, strategic or tactical, is irrelevant.”
A former Foreign Secretary and India’s chief negotiator during the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear treaty talks, Shayam is an authoritative spokesman on India’s military-strategic and nuclear policy. He would not have made such a bald, significant, and blood-chilling statement without having received the go-ahead from the highest levels of India’s government and military.
In his speech, Saram claimed Pakistan is developing tactical nuclear weapons so as to “dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes.” Terming this “nuclear blackmail,” Saran countered it by threatening Pakistan with nuclear annihilation should it ever try to halt a conventional Indian military attack with tactical nuclear weapons.
Declaring “a limited nuclear war … a contradiction in terms,” Saram said that any use of nuclear weapons “would swiftly and inexorably escalate to the strategic level.” To emphasize the point, he then added, “Pakistan would be prudent not to assume otherwise as it sometimes appears to do, most recently by developing and perhaps deploying [battle] theatre nuclear weapons.”
In the past, India has proclaimed its adherence to a “no first-strike” nuclear policy. While Saran claimed this remains India’s policy, his statement dramatically lowers the bar for the use of India’s strategic nuclear arsenal and the possibility of all-out nuclear war in South Asia–a war that would result in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of millions of people and potentially have catastrophic impact on life around the world.
Saram’s denunciations of Pakistani nuclear blackmail are entirely self-serving. Since their establishment through the 1947 communal partition
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site