ABSTRACT
South Asia was the first region to experience the politics of nuclear dynamics in the intractable conflict between India and Pakistan. By 1964 the nuclear club was complete and a decision not to allow new states to join was taken by the nuclear states in the late 1960s. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) made this policy official. When India refused to join the Treaty when it opened for signature in 1970, and Pakistan followed its rival’s lead, the value of nuclear weapons to these belligerents, which had then been engaged in a bilateral protracted conflict for twenty-three years, was manifest. Although theoretical at that stage, the value of nuclear weapons to India became known to the world when it tested its peaceful nuclear device in 1974, to the alarm of the international community, especially the five nuclear states, whose ideal of non-proliferation was shattered. Pakistan saw this as a serious security threat, given that India had been instrumental in the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, and a power asymmetry was already pronounced in the conflict. Since then, South Asia has been known as a region with nuclear interests and Pakistan’s India-centric nuclear policy in the aftermath of its rival’s nuclear tests corroborated this line of argument. From this period on India and Pakistan became serious proliferation concerns. The purpose of this chapter is to present when, how, why, and under what circumstances nuclear weapons were introduced into the India-Pakistan protracted conflict with a view to demonstrating the connection between the cause and effects of this example of proliferation. Because a nuclear deterrent capability was the primary goal for both states, deterrent stability was desired and achieved at the war level, making room for instability at the lower levels of conflict – a consequence, which was not considered when the strategic calculations and decisions were made – and creating a crisisprone environment non-conducive to conflict resolution. The introduction of nuclear weapons into the India-Pakistan conflict had the unintended consequence of making the protracted conflict intractable.
