Indians have been asking themselves what the elections in our troubled neighbour portend The one, single threat that matters is that a collapsing Pakistani state could skip towards a nuclear castastrophe.

Eight weeks after 9/11, the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir sat down for a meal of bread and olives with Osama bin Laden in Kabul. “I wish to declare,” bin Laden told him, “that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons, than we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons.”

Now, as Pakistan heads into a fateful general election, bin Laden’s ideological heirs are closer than ever to possession of the weapon he yearned for. For the past several years, Pakistan has been growing its arsenal low-yield plutonium nuclear weapons—called tactical or theatre nuclear weapons. The idea is to ensure India continues to roll with the punches as it did after 26/11—rather than consider unleashing new military capacities it is acquiring for short, punitive wars. To Pakistan’s estimated 90-110 warheads, some 10-12 TNWs are being added each year. New reactors going critical at Khushab will likely boost that number even further.

Indians contemplating Pakistan’s murderous elections, have been asking themselves what it portends. The answer is simple: the seeds of apocalypse are sprouting next door. TNWs, designed for mobility and ease of deployment, are hard to secure—raising risks of threat. Shaun Gregory has estimated at least 70,000 people are involved in handling Pakistan’s nuclear weapons; some of them have been sympathetic to al-Qaeda’s world view. The Pakistani state, were it to collapse or fall to jihadists, could itself reach for TNWs in a crisis with India.

TNWs emerged in the 1950s, as the United States sought ways to address the Soviet Union’s overwhelming conventional superiority in continental Europe. Less than two months after Hiroshima, the stellar work of military analyst David Smith shows, the United States’ military produced its first paper on nuclear weapons might be used. The paper concluded that the nuclear bomb was “primarily a strategic weapon of destruction against concentrated industrial areas”. Even as these words were being written, though, scientists were beginning to discuss the production of smaller, lighter nuclear weapons that produced lower yields.

Thinking soldiers were underwhelmed. In a 1949 article, General Omar Bradley, commander of the United States armies that swept across Europe in 1944-1945, was patently contemptuous of TNW advocates. “This train of thought represents so much compound folly that it is hard to answer patiently”, he wrote. Put simply, TNWs would kill friends along with foes—making them worse than useless.

In 1953, though, President Dwight Eisenhower took office, with a plan of budget cuts that needed United States forces in Europe to reduced to 500,000 from 1.5 million. TNWs seemed an attractive way of making sure this didn’t give the Soviets a huge edge.

From the outset, it was evident to the military that this idea wasn’t strategically brilliant. In June, 1955, an exercise code-named CARTEBLANCHE concluded that a limited war in the north German plains using TNWs would kill 2 million, injure another 3 million, and leave the country’s industrial heartland uninhabitable. SAGEBRUSH, another exercise, suggested almost all participating formations would be annihilated. Put simply, tactical nuclear weapons had pretty much the same outcomes as strategic nuclear weapons: mutual destruction.

President John F Kennedy’s administration understood the need for a more robust conventional weapons posture—wasn’t willing to cut back the TNW programme. The number of tactical warheads sited in Europe continued to swell through the 1960s, from 3,000 to about 7,000.

Even though new bombs kept sprouting in the nuclear greenhouse, successive military studies were concluding TNWs were useless. FALLEX, an exercise conducted in 1962, concluded 10-15 million Germans would be slaughtered in a limited nuclear war—this despite targeting instructions designed to minimise civilian casualties. OREGON TRAIL, conducted from 1963-1965, even questioned the ability of conventional forces to continue to function in a nuclear battlefield. Forces, when concentrated to fight conventionally, “offered lucrative nuclear targets”. But if they “ dispersed to avoid nuclear strikes, the units could be defeated by conventional tactics”.

From the mid-1970s, United States military manuals simply stopped trying to tell commanders how to fight a nuclear war: it became clear there wasn’t a winnable option. In 1991, President George Bush announced that his country had decided to unilaterally “eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range, that is, theatre, nuclear weapons”.

In essence, the United States had walked down much the same road as Pakistan is doing—only to realise there was no strategic gold-dust to be had at the end of a long and exceptionally expensive journey.

Pakistan’s generals understand the inexorable military illogic of TNWs. None of their war-games, highly placed military sources have told Firstpost, have ever suggested a conflict with India would end in a nuclear exchange. Instead, the generals see TNWs as a kind of insurance policy against the consequences of their own behaviour. Former Lieutenant-General Khalid Kidwai has described Pakistan’s short-range Nasr missile, designed to carry TNWs, as “consolidating Pakistan’s strategic deterrence capability at all levels of the threat spectrum”. The scholar Adil Sultan has described this risk-management pursuit as “a ‘Strategy of Assured Deterrence’”.

Earlier this year, eminent diplomat Shyam Saran lucidly explained this jargon in simple English. Pakistan hoped, he said, “to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes such as the horrific 26/11 attack on Mumbai. What Pakistan is signalling to India and to the world is that India should not contemplate retaliation even if there is another Mumbai because Pakistan has lowered the threshold of nuclear use to the theatre level”.

This is blackmail — but doesn’t always work. Cold War planners, after all, discovered TNWs yield lose-lose outcomes. The only way India can deter Pakistan from using a TNW, after all, is by using strategic weapons in retaliation, at the end of which both countries will be rubble.

Experts aren’t persuaded, moreover, that Pakistan’s TNWs in fact secure it against a punitive Indian strike across the border. In a 2010 paper, for example, AH Nayyar and Zia Mian argued that the use of TNWs would be of little use if “Indian armed forces had prepared for a nuclear attack and were able to rapidly disperse.” There is evidence, from Cold War studies, that dispersed tank formations are relatively impervious to TNW strikes.Ejaz Haider, never wont to call a bulldozer a spade, has bluntly said the confused state of the Pakistan’s doctrinal debate on TNWs “essentially means we don’t know what the hell to do with them”.

Yet, a kind of atomic perpetual-motion machine is in place. The reason is simple: the western TNW rollback, Shashank Joshi has noted, was facilitated by its overwhelming technology-driven superiority over the Soviets. In the Pakistan case, though, the gap is increasing, meaning “its reliance on nuclear weapons will grow”.

Pakistan’s pursuit of security can be secured much more simply: by staging an effective campaign against the jihadists who threaten India, the West, and its own survival as a nation-state. Instead, its generals are skipping towards catastrophe.

Like so much else to do with Pakistan’s military decision-making, common sense isn’t likely to prevail. Essays in the Green Books, collections of essays the Pakistan army publishes for internal circulation, show a clinically paranoiac view of the world. In 1992, Lieutenant-Colonel Muhammad Farooq Maan, warned the United States was preparing to attack Pakistan “in collaboration with Indian forces and coalition forces”. The West, argued Brigadier Muhammad Zia in 2002, believed “a nuclear Pakistan has to be kept in control, lest it leads the Islamic world towards the formation of a new and powerful economic and military bloc.”

Thus, Pakistan’s nuclear madness can heal only if the military makes its peace with its place in the world—something there’s little evidence is going to happen any time soon.