The Politics of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia by Bhumitra Chakma

Author:Bhumitra Chakma [Chakma, Bhumitra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Nuclear Warfare, Weapons, Political Science, International Relations, Arms Control, General, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781409426264
Google: y75uNCAVZBMC
Goodreads: 17684428
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T12:36:44+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the role of the United States in the Indo–Pakistani immediate deterrence dynamics. Two particular crises – the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 2001–02 Indo–Pakistani military stand-off – are explored to locate the position of the United States in the South Asian deterrence structure and explain its role. The findings of this chapter demonstrate that in both cases the United States played a pivotal role in preventing the outbreak of large-scale conflict between India and Pakistan. Without the US’s effective deterrence diplomacy, deterrence failure due to escalation or inadvertence was a likely outcome in those crises. Crisis and deterrence stability in South Asia are critically dependent on American deterrence diplomacy, even though the nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan play their part in the equation. Put simply, the United States is an integral element of Indo–Pakistani deterrence dynamics, which makes the South Asian nuclear deterrence a three-dimensional deterrence system.

There is an obvious paradox in the strategic politics of South Asia, which facilitates US penetration into the region’s deterrence dynamics and makes it deeply entrenched. Due to relative weaknesses of India and Pakistan and because of their long-standing security rivalry, the two countries have traditionally sought support from and alignment with the United States. This tendency is enhanced at the time of a crisis. The advent of nuclear weapons has made the proclivity to seek US support even deeper. While with nuclear weapons India and Pakistan have begun to take more risk in their encounters, this has pushed them to be more dependent on the US to pull them back from the brink of war. The more crises India and Pakistan went through since they acquired nuclear weapons capability, the more they became dependent on the United States to defuse their crises. Such a trend in the strategic politics of South Asia led to the growth of a classic dilemma: India and Pakistan wanted to gain strategic autonomy through building nuclear weapons, but ironically they became more dependent on the United States. Indeed, in a nuclearised South Asia, the role of the US has increased in the context of ensuring crisis stability84 and India and Pakistan have gradually become ever more dependent on the United States to prevent likely deterrence failure. As Feroz H. Khan has concluded:

An examination of the five South Asian crises [Siachen, Brasstacks, 1990 Kashmir crisis, Kargil conflict, 2001–2 military crisis] over the past two decades reveals that India and Pakistan managed earlier crises without overt outside intervention, but as their capabilities increased, the level of crises also worsened. In fact each crisis was more severe than the previous one, and the United States became more involved.85

The interesting question is, what if the United States fails to extend a similar level of support in a future Indo–Pakistani crisis? There is no easy answer to this question. Crisis is likely to occur intermittently in South Asia in the foreseeable future and it does not appear that India and Pakistan have established a reasonable level of deterrence/crisis stability.

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