Politico-Economic Ramifications Of Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia

Abstract

The testing of various Nuclear Weapons by India on May 11, 13 1998 and by Pakistan on May 28, 1998 has been paralleled by an international media and political explosion. The wave of analysis as well as criticism especially originating in the existing five recognized Nuclear Weapons Powers USA, Russia, China, Britain and France and their main supporters Germany, Japan and South Africa has perceived the public confirmation of the fact that India and Pakistan possessed Nuclear Weapons, as a sudden and shocking discovery. In articulating their disbelief at two Third World Developing Countries publicly displaying their Nuclear Weapons capacity when many of their peers and superiors in the West and East had already signed the Non-Prolifefation and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (NPT and CTBT), the critics did not adequately address the main question : what made the two countries cross the line of fire between a covert Nuclear Weapons Programme presumably concealed among other ways also by a diplomacy of public denial, which allowed the Developed countries to fend off domestic and external pressure to impose economic and technology Sanctions against them and an openly declared pursuit of building a Nuclear Deterrent which made them answerable to a dominant international public opinion and Non-Proliferation lobby.