NEW DELHI—India's army has a strategy to rapidly respond to a terrorist attack emanating from Pakistan without triggering a nuclear war, U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer wrote in a leaked cable.
New Delhi, he added, is unlikely to put what he said was called "the Cold Start Doctrine" into action.
India's army chief told the Press Trust of India on Thursday that India has no doctrine called Cold Start.
The Indian army came under pressure from politicians and the public to demonstrate more rapid-response capabilities after a long border standoff with Pakistan in 2002, following an attack by militants on India's parliament late the previous year.
Military analysts have speculated for years about how India could strike back at Pakistan in a targeted, conventional way without provoking a nuclear response. Mr. Roemer, in a cable in February that was disclosed this week in a trove of U.S. diplomatic correspondences released by the WikiLeaks website, said India has had such a plan in place since 2004.
But he said such an attack would amount to rolling "the nuclear dice" and India would have mixed results, given its current military capabilities.
He said the country is unlikely to carry out such a plan, based on the fact that it didn't strike Pakistan after the terrorist attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants in November 2008.
Instead, India responded with diplomatic pressure to urge Pakistan to crack down on militants.
Mr. Roemer wrote that "the existence of the plan reassures the Indian public and may provide some limited deterrent effect on Pakistan."
With India denying such a "doctrine," however, it is unclear whether it could have that effect.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi declined to comment. In a statement on Nov. 30, Mr. Roemer said the U.S. condemns the disclosure of confidential and sensitive national security information by WikiLeaks, and spoke highly of U.S. relations with India.
Mr. Roemer served on the House Intelligence Committee as a congressman and was a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.
A spokesman for India's Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment on the leaks and said India has "a multifaceted and forward-looking strategic partnership with the United States."
Brahma Chellaney, a security expert at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi think tank, said the logic of Cold Start as described by Mr. Roemer is flawed, because India would likely use its air power, not ground forces, for a rapid counterattack on Pakistan.
The WikiLeaks cables reveal the difficulties for the U.S. as it seeks to develop close ties with India without offending Pakistan, whose support the U.S. needs to combat militants in the region.
In a classified cable from September 2009, then-U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson said the U.S. should reassess its growing military sales to India, "as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focus terrorist groups." A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad declined to comment.
—Vibhuti Agarwal
contributed to this article.
