Social Science Research Council

The Global Security and Cooperation program convened a group of scholars of South Asian nuclear affairs in Washington, D.C. on May 30 and 31, 2003. The intent of this planning meeting and brainstorming session was to begin a process of collective reflection on what we now know and think about the state of nuclearization in South Asia. Although there has been a tremendous increase in the quality and quantity of scholarly writing on the nuclear complexes of India and Pakistan in recent years, especially following the 1998 tests, the collective cumulation of knowledge remains far less than it could be. By not knowing what we know collectively and by not examining critically the insights we do have, both new theoretical insights remain underdeveloped and policy inputs are not as sophisticated as they could be. This prospective network is being formed in order to provide a forum to discuss competing theories and perspectives on the nature of the South Asian nuclear system, to cumulate discrete findings, and to bring empirical and theoretical findings based on the South Asian experience into more complex dialogue with prevailing theories of international relations.

The primary purpose of this network is not to initiate new studies of Indian and Pakistani nuclearization. By bringing together leading scholars who have worked on these issues we seek to assess collectively the cumulative knowledge we now have, to determine what are the most compelling and important questions still unanswered, and to discuss whether new concepts, terms, and approaches are called for in order to better understand the dynamics of nuclearization in this region.

The first meeting took as its starting point the provocation that the intellectual-historical, ideological, and strategic overhang of the Cold War, combined with a systemic absence of reliable public-access information, produced in the "Cold War" a misleading, but all too easy historical template for decision-making in New Delhi, Islamabad and Washington, DC. The workshop discussed the limits of this analogy and sought to evaluate the dangers of borrowing "lessons" from the "successful" conclusion to the Cold War to understand a very different part of the world. Given the goal of the project, to develop a theoretically and empirically robust understanding of the South Asian nuclear complex as a first step towards isolating causes for concern and reassurance, the following themes were identified as the most productive directions for future discussion and analysis.


Crisis

A number of scholars identified the notion of the "crisis" as a much invoked but little examined feature of South Asian nuclear relations. There have been a surfeit of crises in South Asia, starting in 1980s with the Brass Tacks military exercises, and continuing for the next decade into the present. It was agreed that the idea of "crisis" is related to proximity to the threshold of war and use of nuclear weapons: what was not clear was where crises come from, how they are identified, how crisis behavior manifested itself in South Asia, whether crises had become endogenous to the nuclear strategies of both states, and what insights could be drawn from a comparison with other nuclear crises, especially the 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.


Language

A number of the memos prepared for the meeting and discussion pointed to the importance of understanding how language is used in South Asian nuclear relations. Language is here meant in a broad sense, including the images deployed by decision-makers and media; the discourses of war, threat, crisis, and enmity that emanate from official sources and popular culture; the perceptions of the adversary; sources of these perceptions and how they have changed; and the role of language in nuclear signaling and communication.


"Culture"/Operational characteristics

Are there features of the South Asian nuclear relationship that are distinctly South Asian? Without seeing culture as a unique and unchanging racial essence, it was suggested that historical and contextual factors in South Asia had led to some aspects of the India-Pakistan relations acquiring a mark of distinct difference; these include the concept of limited war, minimum deterrence, a doctrine of "mutually unacceptable damage" rather than MAD, particular institutional relationships within the state, including civil-military relations, and the slow movement towards deployment, when compared to the US and USSR.


Convention-Nuclear Weapons/Nuclear weapons as Military-Political instruments

Very little is known about the threshold and conditions that would lead to escalation from sub-conventional to conventional to nuclear war. Indeed, whether these distinctions (conventional/nuclear) are even useful was questioned. One scholar claimed that South Asia had set Clausewitz on his feet again, by returning nuclear weapons to a political role from the over-emphasis on military uses of nuclear weapons in the Cold War. Much more needs to be understood here.


Institutions and Agents

A number of questions were raised about the respective roles and weights of domestic politics, intra-state dynamics, the dynamic of state-society relations, the shifting importance of the "strategic enclave" in both India and Pakistan. There was little agreement about the importance to be given to all these factors versus structural international factors; these opposing perspectives are largely seen as zero-sum.


Regimes

Finally, what implications does South Asian nuclearization and ballistic missile development have for global arms control regimes, including the non-proliferation treaty, the CTBT, the MTCR and so on. Have these bulwarks of post war stability and peace been fatally undermined by these new nuclear powers? Should we be thinking about (as in seeking to institute) strategic stability in South Asia or something else? Are new mechanisms of international restraint needed, or can these existing ones be jerry-rigged to adapt to new conditions?