ramdas wrote:Pakistan is keeping the provocations below a certain level now: when their nuclear deterrent is yet to have an edge over ours. How they would behave when they achieve strategic superiority is anybody's guess. That is not a place we would want to go.
Unless I am mistaken you are saying that our arsenal has some deterrent value today but will lose that value as Pakistan's arsenal gets better. IOW Pakistan has fears about India that they are going to lose by improving their arsenal.
Let me point out the holes I see in this argument (I have pointed this out many times before, and I will do so again hoping that someone can come up with a better reason)
Why is Pakistan scared of us today? Either because we can hurt them or because we can finish them off. It does not matter which of these is correct, but if they make their arsenal bigger and bigger and better they are still gong to be finished off by us, The only thing they can achieve by making their arsenal bigger and better is to hurt us more. Even if they hurt us more we can finish them off. Of course we will get hit, but that is already true. We are already under threat and that threat increases if they get better weapons. But that will not save them. Either way Pakistan is screwed.
Let me use an analogy to illustrate what I mean. Please let us not argue with the analogy because it can never be exact, only illustrative. If you are Pakistan and you have a knife and I am India and I have a gun, you are currently afraid of me and you want a gun. If you get a gun tomorrow, the risk to me increases, but the risk to you does not change. You may shoot me but you will die anyway. You will not be any less dead.
To get back to nuclear exchanges, I believe it is your argument that Pakistan believes that they can now be destroyed by us but they cannot destroy us. So by getting stronger Pakistan can promise to destroy us. But how does that help them? They are going to be destroyed anyway.
The only way your argument can work is as follows:
India can destroy Pakistan today but they can't destroy India, so Indians think that they can get into a nuclear war with Pakistan and destroy Pakistan totally and pay the price of some "recoverable damage" to India because of which we will survive. By improving its weapons, Pakistan feels that any attack on them will lead to total destruction of India and because India can be totally destroyed by Pakistan, Indians will get scared and not try to nuke Pakistan. Then Pakistan can be free to nuke India any time.
Fine. Let us accept this argument as 100% correct. But if this argument is 100% correct what difference will it make if we increase and improve our weapons by testing? We gain nothing. Zilch. Our risk is increasing because Pakistan's arsenal is getting better. Unless we conduct a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Pakistan and simply finish them off, we gain no advantage against Pakistan by improving our nuclear weapons (there are other advantages but I am going to ignore that for now).
What I am trying to point out is is is a completely useless exercise to increase and improve our arsenal in response to Pakistan's upgrading its arsenal. The latter must scare us more but our fears cannot decrease simply because our own weapons get bigger. Our problem with Pakistan is not small Indian weapons to be addressed by bigger weapons. It is Pakistani weapons small and large. If we can restrict Pakistan's arsenal it will be an advantage to us. Increasing our arsenal by restarting tests will not reduce theirs. It will only assist them. Testing again will help us in no way against Pakistan, but will simply put obstacles in our path that we would otherwise not have to cross. Pakistan has some obstacles now - let them enjoy those obstacles and let them develop their arsenal. No matter how big they get we will still nuke the crap out of them, An increase in our arsenal can hurt China more - but with China it is problem of reaching targets that will cripple them.
Starting to test again because we want to deter China is a different subject and I will say what I think in a separate post