ABSTRACT
In early 1987, India and Pakistan experienced a near-war crisis surrounding India’s Exercise Brasstacks, the largest military training exercise ever conducted by either country. At its peak in mid-January that year, several hundred thousand troops were deployed on each side of the border in a tense and unpredictable confrontation. After a build-up of several months, however, the crisis receded swiftly; the two sides had returned to a watchful peace by the beginning of February. Although India and Pakistan came perilously close to conventional conflict, Brasstacks was not a nuclear crisis. Nuclear issues were a regular feature of the South Asian security discourse in 1986-7, but neither country was a nuclear-weapons power at the time and the available evidence does not suggest that nuclear weapons played a role in either the outbreak or resolution of the crisis. Nonetheless, the Brasstacks crisis exposed several abiding aspects of the India-Pakistan security dynamic that are important as we look to the future and assess the role of nuclear weapons in their relationship. Moreover, the salience of the confrontation within the troubled history of India-Pakistan relations-at the turning-point after which all India-Pakistan crises assume an unambiguously nuclear coloration-has made it a touchstone in the deterrence optimism/pessimism debate, even though nuclear weapons were not a major factor.2 Deterrence or proliferation optimists, focused on the eventual peaceful resolution of the crisis, tend to dismiss it as a routine exercise that generated unnecessary excitement, “a typical instance of Indian failure to coordinate policies,” but “not something new in the nuclear annals.”3 Pessimists, on the other hand, point to the escalatory danger inherent in the situation, highlight the problem of “imperfect humans inside imperfect organizations,” and conclude that war was avoided by only a narrow margin.4
