South Asia's Security Dilemma

Abstract

In early May 1998, India held a series of nuclear test explosions, answered within a fortnight by Pakistan’s matching set. Although India had first tested no less than 24 years previously and Pakistan had long been known to be clandestinely developing a bomb, this marked a crossing of the Rubicon for this old and bitter enmity. This was “weaponization” in which the two would proceed to arm themselves with operationally deliverable nuclear warheads. South Asia had become “the most dangerous place on earth,” opined President Bill Clinton during his trip to the region in January 2000. This had been amply borne out by the 1999 eruption of hostilities in the Kargil region of Kashmir that is under Indian control, the fourth resort to organized violence since the founding of the two states in the postWorld War II decolonization. Since then, American intervention into Afghanistan in pursuit of suspected terrorists has only further complicated an already delicate regional balance. Yet, weaponization, in the view of nuclear deterrence strategists, while clearly raising the stakes, must by no means incontrovertibly upset the regional balance of power. How are we to weigh the relative prospects of stable nuclear deterrence or enhanced volatility? What are the international implications of the first explicit violation of the international nonproliferation regime since the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was signed by the five declared “nuclear weapons states” (NWSs) in 1970? How does China, the last signatory to test (exploding its first bomb on October 16, 1964) and the last to suspend testing, fit into the Indian decision, and the sudden Pakistani ability, to “go nuclear”? What are the implications for the emerging regional balance/imbalance of power, and how will these redound upon the post-Cold War international constella-