India-Pakistan Bilateral Nuclear Arms Control System and Its Practical Implementation: a Pakistani view

Abstract

Traditionally, the term nuclear arms control is strongly associated with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or Russian-American bilateral agreements. Besides the US-Russia regime, there is at least one more interesting case in the world, which certainly deserves attention — a specific case of India-Pakistan relations in this field. These two countries had to interact in a very peculiar regional and bilateral context, and thus they have formulated their specific understanding of basic concepts of nuclear arms control. The world’s current situation is developing towards revising nuclear arms control mechanisms and possible expansion of multilateral formats of arms control negotiations. Although these states possess nuclear weapons, they are outside the current nuclear non-proliferation regime. Yet, Pakistan and India could be potentially involved in the extended format of the debate. So, the understanding of their bilateral practices addressing nuclear arms control mechanisms is necessary for the initiation of a constructive discussion with them. The measures taken by the two Governments are not regarded as arms control in the classical Western approach to research in this field. Still, the authors suppose reviewing the Pakistani attempts to establish the peculiar South Asian bilateral nuclear arms control between India and Pakistan.