India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests of May 1998 put to rest years of speculation as to whether the two countries, long suspected of developing covert weapons capabilities, would openly exercise their so-called nuclear option. The dust had hardly settled from the tests, however, when a firestorm of debate erupted over nuclear weapons’ regional security implications. Optimistic observers argued that nuclearization would stabilize South Asia by making Indo-Pakistani conflict prohibitively risky. Pessimistic observers maintained that, given India and Pakistan’s bitter historical rivalry, as well as the possibility of accident and miscalculation, proliferation would make the subcontinent more dangerous.1 The tenth anniversary of the tests offered scholars an opportunity to revisit this issue with the benefit of a decade of hindsight. What lessons did the intervening years hold regarding nuclear weapons’ impact on South Asian security?
Answering this question is important not simply from an academic standpoint; it has significant real-world implications. South Asia has emerged as a major player in international affairs, thanks in large part to its rapidly growing economy. India, which had been plagued by chronic underdevelopment for most of its history, has in recent years enjoyed GDP growth of approximately 8 percent. The country has become an important force in the information technology sector, a major source of skilled labor, and a burgeoning market for foreign exports.2 In addition, South Asia’s population is enormous. With well over 1 billion people between them, India and Pakistan account for more than one-fifth of the human race.3 The subcontinent’s conventional military power is also growing, with Indian capabilities in particular increasing rapidly.4 Finally, South Asia has emerged as a region of central diplomatic importance. Indeed, the George W. Bush administration viewed improved relations with India as so important that it devised a deal to provide the Indians with civilian nuclear fuel and technology, despite India’s refusal to sign the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).5 Pakistan, for its part, has been at the center of the global antiterrorism campaign since the attacks of September 11, 2001.6 Developments in Pakistan will have especially serious implications for coalition efforts to rout the Taliban from Afghanistan and stabilize that country. Given these economic, demographic, strategic, and diplomatic factors, the international community has a significant stake in stability in the South Asian region.
Unfortunately, the subcontinent’s history has been far from stable. Independent India and Pakistan emerged out of a bloody partition that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. The two countries then endured decades of hostility, including four wars and an ongoing conflict in Kashmir between Indian security forces and Pakistan-backed insurgents. Such a violent relationship, when combined with nuclear weapons, could prove to be a combustible mix. This danger makes proliferation’s impact on the region an even more urgent subject for study.
Finally, South Asia’s experience with nuclear weapons may offer lessons that are applicable well beyond the region. Current analyses of nuclear proliferation’s likely effects are based largely on arguments drawn from Cold War history. But future proliferators such as North Korea or Iran may not closely resemble the United States or the Soviet Union. Indeed, they may have more in common with countries like India and Pakistan than with the two superpowers. If this is the case, then a careful study of nuclear weapons’ impact on South Asia can help us anticipate their likely effects on future proliferators elsewhere around the globe. Although we do not explicitly discuss states such as Iran and North Korea, the basic principles underlying our arguments can be applied to them.
This book assesses nuclear weapons’ impact on the South Asian security environment during three time periods: South Asia’s nuclear past, spanning from the late 1980s through 2002; the nuclear present from 2002 through 2007; and the nuclear future, from 2008 forward. For the first two time periods, we attempt to determine the impact that nuclear weapons had on Indo-Pakistani relations and the strategic environment on the subcontinent. For the future, we speculate as to how past proliferation-related developments may affect the South Asian strategic environment in years to come.
Nuclear proliferation’s impact on South Asia is the subject of a growing literature. In this book we take an approach that differs from existing works on the subject. First, we assess the issue of South Asian proliferation not from a single vantage point, but rather from two competing perspectives. Thus, although we examine the same historical evidence, we come to very different conclusions regarding nuclear weapons’ impact on the subcontinent. Ganguly believes that nuclear weapons helped stabilize the regional security environment in the past; are to a large degree responsible for recent improvements in Indo-Pakistani strategic relations; and will help ensure that current improvements continue into the future. His argument is straightforward: Because nuclear weapons threaten to make conflict catastrophically costly, they induce caution in New Delhi and Islamabad. This has led the two sides to defuse ongoing crises without resorting to large-scale war and to take steps toward improving their larger strategic relationship. These factors have contributed to the current thaw in Indo-Pakistani relations and should continue to stabilize the subcontinent in coming years.
Kapur, in contrast, argues that nuclear weapons had a destabilizing effect on the South Asian security environment in the past; have little to do with recent improvements in Indo-Pakistani relations; and may destabilize South Asia in the future. Kapur maintains that nuclear weapons have had two negative effects on the South Asian security environment. First, nuclear weapons’ ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan’s dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This, in turn, provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war. Second, these Indo-Pakistani crises led India to adopt a more aggressive military posture toward Pakistan. This development could exacerbate regional security-dilemma dynamics and increase the likelihood of Indo-Pakistani conflict in years to come.
The second difference between this book and other works on the subject is that our arguments depart from standard optimist and pessimist offerings in the nuclear proliferation literature. Ganguly’s argument shares rational deterrence theory’s assumption that the potentially catastrophic costs of conflict promote stability in a nuclear environment. However, he differs from standard optimistic approaches in an important fashion. Virtually all the work on the stability of nuclear deterrence among horizontal proliferators is based on deductive logic and not detailed empirical analysis coupled with a theoretical corpus.7 The most important work in this vein is that of Kenneth Waltz.8 Two other important contributions, from Jordan Seng and from David J. Karl, while making compelling arguments about the viability of nuclear deterrence, are not based on careful examination of particular cases. Instead Seng relies mostly on carefully constructed arguments about the structure and disposition of small nuclear forces.9 Karl, on the other hand, provides a modicum of empirical evidence from South Asia but bases his argument mostly on a critique of the propensity of nuclear pessimists to ascribe the baleful characteristics of the superpower experience with nuclear weapons to emerging nuclear powers.10
What distinguishes the present analysis from those of other proliferation optimists is the careful attention that it pays to the particular features of the South Asian political landscape. This work constitutes an attempt to carefully test the central premises of rational deterrence theory against a set of South Asian cases and demonstrate their robustness. In effect, the analysis moves away from largely logical and analytic exploration of the strategic consequences of proliferation and instead seeks to merge both theory and data.
Kapur offers a perspective that he calls strategic pessimism. This approach shares the pessimists’ belief that the spread of nuclear weapons can be highly destabilizing. Unlike leading pessimist arguments, however, it does not locate proliferations’ primary danger in suboptimal decision-making of the security and military organizations that control nuclear weapons. Rather, strategic pessimism shares optimists’ assumption of rational decision-making on the part of new nuclear states and shows that wholly rational calculations may lead proliferators to adopt risky and destabilizing behavior.
We contextualize our competing positions, as well as the standard nuclear optimist and pessimist claims, as part of what we call outcome- and process-based approaches to nuclear proliferation. A key difference between optimistic and pessimistic arguments of all stripes is the emphasis they place on different aspects of crisis behavior. Optimists tend to stress the ultimately stable outcomes of past crises between nuclear powers, while pessimists focus on the potentially catastrophic processes by which the crises erupted and escalated. We argue that both sides make valid points; nuclear weapons may both encourage the outbreak of conflict and encourage states to ensure that violence remains limited. Whether the outcome- or process-based approach is ultimately superior depends on which aspect of crisis behavior one thinks is most significant.
Our approach has several important advantages. The book’s debate-oriented structure, which alternates from point to counterpoint, gives the volume a conversational quality. This should make our analysis widely accessible while maintaining scholarly rigor. And it exposes the reader to competing sides of the South Asian proliferation argument in the space of a single volume. Our arguments, which differ in important ways from standard optimist and pessimist analyses, should add nuance to the nuclear proliferation debate.
The book proceeds in the following manner. In chapter 2, we lay out the historical and theoretical background behind the current debate over South Asian nuclear proliferation. The chapter briefly traces the origins of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, outlines the history of the South Asian proliferation process, and locates disagreements within the policy and scholarly communities over nuclear weapons’ effects on the region.
In chapter 3, we offer competing theoretical frameworks for understanding nuclear weapons’ effects on Indo-Pakistani conflict behavior and on the behavior of new nuclear powers generally. In two contrasting sections, one by Ganguly and one by Kapur, we develop our arguments. In chapter 4, we assess nuclear weapons’ past impact on the South Asian security environment. The chapter examines the three major confrontations of the nuclear era—the 1990 standoff, the Kargil war, and the 2001–2002 standoff—according to the competing frameworks developed in chapter 3. Ganguly argues that nuclear weapons ensured that these crises did not escalate to the level of nuclear or full-scale conventional conflict. Kapur maintains that nuclear weapons facilitated the crises’ outbreak and had little to do with their resolution.
In chapter 5, we address the current strategic environment in South Asia. Ganguly argues that by making continued conflict prohibitively dangerous, nuclear weapons have helped to promote the recent thaw in Indo-Pakistani relations. Kapur maintains that improvements in the regional security environment are modest and result more from economic, diplomatic, and domestic political factors than from nuclear deterrence.
We also look to South Asia’s future. Ganguly predicts that the same deterrent logic that underlies recent improvements in the regional security environment is likely to continue to stabilize South Asia in the years to come. Despite acute crises in the region none of them have spiraled out of control and there appears to be little reason based on the available evidence to believe that they are likely to do so. Kapur claims that Indo-Pakistani conflict during the 1998–2002 period, which nuclear weapons facilitated, has led the Indians to begin formulating a more aggressive conventional military doctrine. This could increase Indo-Pakistani security competition and result in rapid escalation in the event of an actual conflict.
Finally, in chapter 6, we depart from our debate-oriented framework and discuss three issues about which we agree. First, we contextualize our competing arguments, as well as the standard nuclear optimist and pessimist claims, as part of what we call outcome- and process-based approaches to nuclear proliferation. Second, we argue against the potential introduction of ballistic missile defense capabilities into South Asia. Although BMD is billed as a defensive measure, in our view it would probably encourage arms racing and could even create first-strike incentives. Finally, we argue that nuclear weapons will be of little use in solving South Asia’s most pressing security conundrum. Pakistan’s decades-long support for anti-Indian militancy has created an array of terrorist organizations that Islamabad cannot fully control. They are wreaking havoc in both India and Pakistan, and could spark a catastrophic Indo-Pakistani confrontation. India and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons will not enable them to eradicate this problem. The solution lies elsewhere, far outside the traditional boundaries of either side’s security thinking. Pakistan will finally have to realize that the costs of supporting militancy outweigh its benefits, and end its support for insurgent organizations once and for all. India will have to continue its efforts to resolve tensions within Kashmir, address the legitimate grievances of its Muslim population, and start taking internal security matters far more seriously. Such non-nuclear strategies can help to make nuclear use in South Asia less likely.
