Pakistan's New Nuke Threat: Why India Has To Worry

Pakistan is developing a new generation of nuclear-tipped tactical missiles that has alarmed India and the world.

- Raj Chengappa

The buddy-buddy relations between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Barack Obama were evident at the Oval Office on June 7—their seventh meeting in two years. But the ghost of Pakistan hovered in the room like a Betaal, as an Indian official put it, likening our north-western neighbour to the irksome character in the ancient fable. India had recently lobbied successfully to get the US Congress to put a temporary hold on the sale of eight nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan by refusing to subsidise their cost.

The more alarming concern for India, the US and the rest of the world, however, is Pakistan’s development of a new generation of nuclear-tipped missiles that threaten to lower the nuclear threshold and make the subcontinent, as a US official put it, “the most dangerous place in the world to live in”. Pakistan has reportedly inducted these ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons as part of its artillery arsenal to pulverise any advancing Indian army division in the event of a war.

Prior to this, both India and Pakistan had developed a panoply of ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons designed to strike terror among civilian populations in metros, or to knock out major military targets some distance away from the border. India’s Agni V, for instance, can strike targets over 5,000 km away and can be launched from as far south as Chennai to strike Islamabad or Beijing. Pakistan, too, has developed the Ghauri and Shaheen to strike anywhere in India, and has lately extended their range to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, where India has an important tri-service base. But never before were nuclear weapons meant to be used as a tactical manoeuvre on the battlefield to thwart an advancing army corps.