WASHINGTON: There is increasing evidence that India could launch a pre-emptive first strike against Pakistan if it feared a nuclear attack was imminent, in a marked reversal of its wellknown no-first use policy, according to a nuclear strategist.

But this first strike will not be aimed at urban centres and conventional targets of a retaliatory strike intended to punish and prevent an escalation, but against Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal, to pre-empt a nuclear attack altogether.

“There is increasing evidence that India will not allow Pakistan to go first,” Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at a conference on nuclear policy hosted by Carnegie, a think tank, on Monday.

“India’s opening salvo may not be conventional strikes trying to pick off just Nasr batteries (launch vehicles for Pakistan’s tactical battlefield nuclear warheads) in the theatre, but a full ‘comprehensive counterforce strike’ that attempts to completely disarm Pakistan of its nuclear weapons…,” he said. Comprehensive counterforce is an informal phrase for counterattack on a nuclear arsenal.

Relations between the neighbours are at the lowest since a string of militant attacks on Indian military installations which New Delhi blames on Pakistan-based militants.

As evidence for his theory, Narang cited recent remarks from leading Indian strategists and a book by Shivshankar Menon, who oversaw nuclear targeting for India as NSA to PM Manmohan Singh.

To buttress his theory, Narang cited this para from Menon’s book, “Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy”: “There is a potential gray area as to when India would use nuclear weapons first against another NWS (nuclear weapon state). Circumstances are conceivable in which India might find it useful to strike first, for instance, against an NWS that had declared it would certainly use its weapons, and if India were certain that adversary’s launch was imminent.” New Delhi declared its no-first use policy in 2003, undertaking to not start a nuclear war in a neighbourhood packed with nuclear actors Pakistan and China.