The evolving trends of gray zone warfare and conflicts such as the one in Ukraine tend to fuel the dangerous thought that there is space for limited war and even limited nuclear war between nuclear powers. This proposition needs closer examination through the examples of the Russia-NATO and Pakistan-Bharat dyads.
Russian Major General Alexander Vladimirov, the author of Russia’s war bible, reportedly said that using nuclear weapons against Ukraine is inevitable. Russian leadership maintains calculated ambiguity and does not publicly endorse such confidence and inevitability. However, the ambiguous nuclear signaling betrays intent, as does the deployment of nuclear forces in Belarus, enveloping Ukraine and exposing NATO’s northern flank.
Even if there is a remote risk that Russia could use so-called battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukraine, what makes the US and its NATO partners so confident that they continue to push the limits of their so-called proxy war through Ukraine? In the ongoing foray into the Russian periphery, NATO seems confident that, at worst, Russia will only make limited use of nuclear weapons against Ukrainian forces and spare their cities. Since Ukraine is not a NATO member, the US, UK, and France have no nuclear obligation, hence their dangerous confidence in pushing a proxy war on the presumption that it would not escalate into an unwinnable NATO-Russia nuclear conflagration.
UN Security Council’s nuclear-wielding P-5 states have jointly declared that since a nuclear war cannot be won, it must never be fought. However, there is no guarantee that a limited nuclear war will not escalate to a full nuclear war in which there will be no winner and ‘the living will envy the dead.’[1]
Despite such great peril, there seems to be a tacit understanding among P-5 about keeping a space for other forms of warfare under the nuclear threshold. If they were serious about avoiding Ukraine-type conflicts, they would have pledged ‘because a nuclear war cannot be won, even a limited war must never be fought under the nuclear threshold.’ The latter pledge is as aspirational and idealistic as nuclear disarmament, and both are vulnerable to risks of crises escalating quickly to limited conventional, to limited nuclear, to a lose-lose nuclear war. Hence, Ukraine-type conflicts are classic games of chicken, laden with nuclear risk, in which each side will expect the other to relent without crossing the threshold.
The nuclear threshold is a nadir that no state can clearly define and declare because there is always a complex interplay of dynamic political, economic, and other considerations – one size does not fit all. For instance, the American threshold will likely differ for itself and its non-nuclear allies using its nuclear umbrella. While extending deterrence to more than thirty states, the US offers NATO’s famous Article-5 type assurance that ‘an attack on one is an attack on all.’ Will US take the risk of losing Washington to save another city or would they bear the loss of the latter’s inhabitants and explore other options to prevent another city from being bombed?
What would be the notion of victory without fighting a nuclear war? States would like to develop non-nuclear options by building a competitive advantage to get what they want. They would integrate a hybrid of available means, including economic, conventional military, sub-conventional, technological, and legal sinews. The bigger the reservoir of these means, the more the leverages to play.
In an asymmetric power relationship between adversaries, the more powerful may develop a false sense of security and confidence to pre-empt, strike first, and subdue the adversary. Else, more preferably, do what the US-led NATO is doing in Ukraine. However, if the adversary doesn’t have matching means to deter, it may also have the tendency to resort to first use because it would not like to risk losing its capability to a splendid strike.
The US-Russia dyad is also unstable because both have deconstructed the bilateral arms control arrangements, and their acrimony in multilateral arms control forums has increased. Absent arms control mechanism, the ‘parleys’ like Ukraine, have only increased nuclear risk. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and hypersonic cruise missiles have further disrupted the semblance of strategic balance in the nuclear age.
AI use in developing lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) can lead to ceding human control and thus increase the risk of inadvertent and accidental war. Likewise, hypersonic cruise missiles can defeat ballistic missile defense shields and create a capability imbalance. The US, Russia, and China are in such a quandary.
Then there is Pakistan-Bharat dyad which is more complex. Russia and the US are geographically apart, but Pakistan and Bharat have contiguous frontiers. The US and its Western allies are building up Bharat’s space, missiles, nuclear, and other capabilities, apparently to contain China. Russia continues to build Bharat’s nuclear submarine capabilities, amongst others. The conventional and nuclear capabilities gap between Pakistan and Bharat has widened.
The P-5 in the UN Security Council have held that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. However, the US, NATO, Russia, and also Bharat which is an aspirant for a discriminatory high table at the UN, think there could be space for limited war. in fact its Cold Start Doctrine presumes a conflict would be under a nuclear ‘overhang.’ Bharat’s propensity emanates from the sense of confidence it has developed over the years.
New Delhi aspires for a splendid first-strike option on one hand and, on the other hand, more dangerously, has an operational doctrine to fight a limited conventional war to remain below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold. Since 2003-04, Bharat has also been experimenting with phantom surgical strikes against Pakistan, stoking insurgencies in Balochistan, bedeviling the Kashmir freedom struggle, waging a lawfare on Pakistan, spreading disinformation and despair, and the jury is still out on whether BrahMos supersonic missile crash-landed in Mian Channu in 2022 was a deliberate act of testing Pakistan’s response or was accidental.
Bharat plays on China-bogey but is actively saturating the space for Pakistan across all threat spectra. Its gray-zone hybrid warfare on Pakistan has so far remained below Pakistan’s threshold. As mentioned above, the threshold is a sum of myriad factors – the lower the threshold, the greater the nuclear risk. If Bharat were a rational actor, it would at least endeavor to build a stable deterrence relationship with Pakistan. Seeking space for limited conventional or sub-conventional warfare is highly risky, especially when there are few guardrails against crisis escalation.
[1] There is a dispute about whether Nikita Khrushchev or Herman Kahn said this first in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn (1960) | Hoover Institution On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn (1960). It is also thought that it is a line from a poem by British poet T.S. Eliot.
Dr Atia Ali Kazmi
Dr Atia Ali Kazmi is a Director Research at the Center for International Strategic Studies (CISS), Islamabad.
