ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the deficiencies in deterrence theory pertaining to conflictual dyads involving states differing vastly in size, resources and power. It focuses on the theoretical constructs spawned by the strategic side-shows of the Cold War, featuring France and the United Kingdom separately prepared to fight the Soviet Union. The chapter discusses why such and other deterrencederived concepts, such as the stability-instability paradox, are irrelevant to the South Asian context. Deterrence theory became an intellectual industry with the advent of nuclear competition when the Soviet Union too obtained the ‘Bomb’ not long after the United States had proven its phenomenally destructive qualities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British government likewise was in a quandary but was more forthright in its reasons for the country’s nuclear and thermonuclear forces. The Partition of India resulting in a secular India and a rump state of Muslim theocratic Pakistan was not clean.
