ABSTRACT
With the failure of the nuclear nonproliferation regime to prevent the overt nuclearization of India and Pakistan in the late 1990s, the nonproliferation community’s attention has increasingly shifted to Iran and North Korea, countries that have made demonstrable progress in developing nuclear-weapon capabilities in the last decade.1 Western security analysts tend to decry the ongoing nuclearization of these “rogue regimes,” arguing that-for a variety of reasons to be discussed below-neither Pyongyang nor Tehran will be reliably “deterrable” in the bipolar US-Soviet fashion.2 While this may be true, a more fruitful comparative referent for examining the potential implications of Iran’s3 nuclear weaponization is South Asia’s nuclear experience over the last twenty years; in terms of their size, geographical positioning, level of development, technological sophistication, and regional power aspirations, India and Pakistan offer a degree of comparability with Iran that the erstwhile superpower equation lacks.4
