A dangerous pursuit

India is using a missile defense system to corner an unstable Pakistan

By Madhoharsi Mukherjee

The assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, unrest among the militant sectors and public unease with the government of President Pervez Musharraf have raised questions about Pakistan's stability and the safety of its nuclear arsenal. India, Pakistan's nervous neighbor, is exacerbating the concerns. In January 2008, a few weeks after an Indian missile successfully collided with another missile over the Bay of Bengal, an official announced that by 2011 India would be able to deploy an anti-ballistic missile defense system.

In its attempts to rein in its stubborn rival, India may have unwittingly increased the risk of a nuclear conflict in the region. Moreover, "anti-missile defense will increase the likelihood that India will suffer greater damage" if such a war breaks out, claims Theodore Postol, a security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

For a long time now, experts have considered the Indian subcontinent the most likely place for the flashpoint of the world's first nuclear conflict. Since India started the nuclear arms race in 1974, Pakistan has measured it against each and every development. The effort seems to have paid off for Pakistan: In 1999, when Pakistan sent paramilitary forces across the border, India repelled the attackers but did not pursue them back home, reportedly because of threats of nuclear retaliation.

The Indian planners have now decided that an anti-missile defense system is the way out of the hole they have created for themselves. They find a friend in the Bush administration, which in 2007 brokered a deal that would allow India to buy uranium from international sources for its civilian miners. If the agreement is approved, India will be able to process all of its domestically produced uranium for military purposes, and thus add about 100-60 kg of weapons-grade plutonium each year to its current stockpile (estimated at about 600 kg). Before that, in 2005, the US offered to share military technology with India, including anti-missile defense technology. Officials and military contractors from around the world have since been flocking to New Delhi hoping to sell components of defense systems.

Many scientists have already pointed out the inherent shortcomings of anti-ballistic missile defense systems. Protection systems of this type are not able, for example, to differentiate between baits and real threats. In South Asia, the short distances increase the problems. "It is very unlikely to expect that any kind of interception can be trusted," says physicist Zia Mian of Princeton University, who studies nuclear proliferation and global security. India's Defense Research and Development Organization claims that its planned defense system will destroy enemy missiles three minutes after the missile is detected by radar. An early warning radar, like the one India imported from Israel, will be able to detect the missile and determine its trajectory within 110 seconds of its launch. But a ballistic missile launched on a low trajectory from a Pakistani airbase, for example, could reach New Delhi in just five minutes, according to Mian and physicists M. V. Ramana of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore and R. R. Rajaraman of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. .

In this case, the technicians will not have enough time to find out if it is a real alarm. It happened that scientists from the USA needed eight minutes to determine that the warning of a Soviet launch was a false alarm. Indeed, false alarms are frequent when it comes to early warning systems. A flight of geese or atmospheric turbulence can fool the radar, and unusual reflections of the sun can fool infrared detectors placed on satellites. Between the years 1977 and 1988 - the only period for which the data was revealed - the US recorded an annual average of 2,600 false alarms of ballistic missile launches from the Soviet Union. Even if India responds to a false alarm by launching an interceptor missile and nothing more, the action could be interpreted by Pakistan as an attack.

Moreover, shortly after India purchased an early warning radar, Pakistan tested a cruise missile that Postol believes was reverse-engineered from an American Tomahawk missile that fell in Pakistan during a 1999 attack on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Such a missile, which is motorized throughout its flight, can fly very close to the ground to avoid radar. And as an apparent response to the nuclear deal between India and the US, Pakistan began building a plutonium production reactor that could produce a warhead small enough to be installed on a cruise missile. Pakistan also has ballistic missiles with small fins mounted on their front part that carries the payload. These structures can improve maneuverability, so that it will be very difficult to catch the warheads.

However, "the attacker is always afraid that the anti-missile defense will work better than he thinks," Postol says, and will launch more rockets than necessary to ensure that at least some of them will manage to infiltrate. He therefore offers an alternative way to avoid a nuclear holocaust. The two nations will disperse and hide their missiles and authorize a general, who will be specially appointed for this purpose and will be located in a remote outpost, to launch retaliatory strikes in the event that the political leadership specializes in a first strike of nuclear fire - and to inform the other side. In this way, the rulers of both countries will be able to know for sure that a nuclear accident will turn their homeland into history. Unlike missile defense, assured mutual destruction is at least a proven way to keep nuclear weapons at bay.

Madhuri Mukherjee, a former editor at Scientific American, writes about India's experience in World War II in a forthcoming book.