Lowell Dittmer - South Asias Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China

South Asias Nuclear Security Dilemma

India, Pakistan, and China

Lowell Dittmer
Editor

First published 2005 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Copyright 2005, Taylor & Franics. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

South Asias nuclear security dilemma : India, Pakistan, and China / edited by Lowell Dittmer.
p. cm.
An East Gate book
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-1418-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 0-7656-1419-7 (pbk.: alk. Paper)
1. National securitySouth Asia. 2. Nuclear weaponsIndia. 3. Nuclear weapons
Pakistan. 4. Nuclear weaponsChina. 5. South AsiaMilitary policy. 6. China
Military policy. I. Dittmer, Lowell.

ISBN: 9780765614193 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9780765614186 (hbk)

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In early May 1998, India held a series of five nuclear test explosions, answered within a fortnight by Pakistans matching set (with one extra, bringing the total to bilateral parity, including Indias initial 1974 test). Although India had first tested no less than twenty-four years earlier, and Pakistan had long been assumed to have clandestinely developed a bomb, this represented a crossing of the Rubicon for this enduring and volatile enmity. This marked the first step toward weaponization, a process involving the acquisition and deployment of a panoply of operationally deliverable nuclear warheads. South Asia had become the most dangerous place on earth, U.S. president Bill Clinton opined during his March 2000 trip to the region (the first presidential visit in twenty-two years). This opinion was partly inspired by the 1998 tests, partly by the 1999 eruption of hostilities in the area of Kargil in Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK), the fourth resort to large-scale organized violence (and the third involving the Kashmir issue) since the founding of the two states amid postWorld War II decolonization. But as the worlds first war between nuclear-armed adversaries, it prompted swift superpower intercession. Since then, American military incursions into Afghanistan and then Iraq in pursuit of fugitive terrorists and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) has further complicated an already fragile regional balance.

Yet weaponization, in the view of nuclear deterrence theorists, although clearly raising the stakes, need not necessarily upset the regional balance of power. Some structural realists in fact contend that a nuclear balance, by dint of its more compelling deterrence, is more stable than a conventional balance of power. As we shall see, whereas early diagnoses in the immediate aftermath of the tests tended to stress the fragility of the nuclear balance, there has more recently been a moderating trend in the trilateral regional nuclear standoff more compatible with theoretical assumptions of the stabilizing impact of nuclear weaponry. Indo-Pakistan relations have improved in the wake of a series of diplomatic visits and other confidence building measures (CBMs), culminating in the fall of 2003 with a bilateral cease-fire. During the subsequent visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Islamabad for the January 2004 meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), composite talks were initiated to discuss even the most intractable bilateral issues, such as the status of Kashmir.

Thus the South Asian region, as well as being a highly volatile hot spot, has become a theoretically relevant test case for challenges to the international nonproliferation regime in a postCold War unipolar world, and for testing the impact of nuclearization on development and security among developing countries. Pokhran tests I and II (in 1974 and 1998, respectively) after all constitute the first explicit violation of the nonproliferation regime since the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was first signed by the five declared nuclear weapons states (NWS) in 1970. The role of China, the last signatory to test (exploding its first bomb on October 16, 1964) and the last to suspend testing (not until 1997), is of particular interest, given that countrys vaunted transition of national identity upon joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) from developing country to responsible great power.

The purpose of this book is to reconsider all these questions with the benefit of six years hindsight since Pokhran-II inaugurated a new era for the region. While accepting the realist convention that accords highest priority to the power to annihilate (or be annihilated by) another nation-state, we view that power as being embedded in a larger economic and political reality that limits and conditions its application. International terrorism is just one instance of the rise of a new security threat, closely linked to the socioeconomic conditions that spawn it, which poses less anni-hilative power than a nuclear-armed adversary but is nonetheless of growing strategic importance. Second, whereas strategic analysis during the postWorld War II era tended to be bilateral, implicitly reflecting the bipolar structure of the international arena, since the end of the Cold War there have been contradictory trends toward unipolarity, regionalism, and globalism. It behooves us in this more complex strategic milieu to take greater cognizance of international structural variables, particularly the number of strategic actors and their respective geographic positions.