ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the deterrence relationship between India and Pakistan because it is this dyadic nuclear relationship which has proved to be not only unstable but for which there is available a fairly significant amount of source material against deterrence theory to examine. It examines how deterrence theory has worked on the ground in South Asia by studying it in operation in Operation Vijay (Victory) during the 1999 Kargil crisis, and Operation Parakram in 2001-2002. ‘Deterrence’, according to John Mearsheimer, ‘in the broadest sense, means persuading an opponent not to initiate a specific action because the perceived benefits do not justify the estimated costs and risks’. A variant of neorealism was ‘defensive realism’, which argued that states merely sought to survive and that they could guarantee their security by forming alliances and choosing defensive military postures based, for instance, on retaliatory nuclear forces.
