In his April 5 speech in Prague, President Barack Obama made a renewed pledge to push the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as a practical and immediate step to ‘seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons’. However, global efforts to attain Global Zero as spearheaded by Obama have been interrupted by the refusal of the United States and China to ratify the treaty. The CTBT is also contingent on the approval of the threshold nuclear weapons states – India, Pakistan, and Israel – who have refused to sign and ratify the treaty.
The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is emerging as a key anti-proliferation platform with a global reach. However, being a US-promoted initiative with a military dimension, the PSI is yet to gain a multilateral character and raises concerns among nations. While backing the further expansion of this initiative, President Barack Obama seeks its institutionalization and cooperative enhancement. India is exhorted to join this initiative as part of the strategic cooperation with the United States. However, India is yet to decide its approach towards the PSI owing to various concerns.
On February 6, 2009, the Pakistani judiciary acquitted Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, the symbol of Pakistani involvement in clandestine nuclear commerce. Since 2004, he had been under house arrest after the proliferation network, linking several countries, including Pakistan, was uncovered. Though he has been put under ‘unspecified security measures’, yet the release of AQ Khan – dubbed by the United States State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid as a ‘serious proliferation risk’ – is considered to be a disturbing development for the non-proliferation regime.
The concept of nuclear terrorism is possibly the least understood of all dangers emanating from nuclear weapons. However, certain drivers like the nuclear black market (the AQ Khan Network), proliferation of nuclear technology, and the increasing demand for nuclear energy can make it easier for terrorist organizations like Al Qaida to acquire fissile material. The threat of nuclear terrorism cannot be ignored any longer. Nuclear terrorism is a plausible phenomenon that deserves adequate consideration, substantial countermeasures, expertise, and competence to combat it.
Nuclear weapons cannot obviate wars, but can change its complexion and influence the manner of its conduct. In order to keep nuclear weapons from entering into real warfare, it is important to intelligently judge an adversary's nuclear thresholds and to calibrate one's own conventional strikes. For India, the exploration of this space is particularly important in order to deny Pakistan a free hand to indulge in sub-conventional conflict even as it holds the threat of an all-out nuclear war against an Indian conventional response.
Nuclear weapons deter by the possibility of their use, and in no other way. Although US and Soviet arsenals became grotesquely excessive in both numbers and diversity in the late 1960s, by the later 1908s there had been very extensive reductions in both numbers and types. NATO's collective doctrine had accepted that the only sen-sible role for its nuclear weapons was for war-termination. Western governments had increasingly accepted the idea of sufficiency, recognizing that notions of nuclear supe-riority were vacuous.
Contrary to the arguments of proliferation pessimists, this article contends that the overt nuclearization of South Asia has contributed to stability in the region. To that end this article carefully examines two recent crises in Indo-Pakistani relations and concludes that in the absence of nuclear weapons they would have culminated in full-scale war. Accordingly, while Indo-Pakistani relations may remain fraught with tension, the likelihood of major war in the region has dramatically diminished.
The tenth anniversary of India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests enables scholars to revisit the issue of South Asian proliferation with a decade of hindsight. I argue that nuclear weapons have had two destabilizing effects. First, nuclear weapons' ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan's dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war.
Although the broad contours of India's nuclear doctrine were announced within the days of May 1998 nuclear tests, the formal doctrine was made public only five years later. This article will critically examine the evolution of India's nuclear doctrine in terms of the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 2001-2002 military confrontation with Pakistan. This article concludes that the one-page nuclear doctrine of 2003 remains sketchy and subject to varied interpretations.
