“Right after I graduated, I interned with the Arms Control Association. It was terrific.”
The Perils of Proliferation in South Asia
Reviewed by Michael Krepon
Asymmetric Warfare in
Edited by Peter R. Lavoy
Cambridge University Press, 2009, 426 pp.
Nuclear Proliferation In
Edited by Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur
Routledge, 2009, 251 pp.
Inside Nuclear South Asia
Edited by Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University Press,2009, 281 pp.
There have been four nuclear-tinged crises in
One point of departure for this literature is a theorem developed in the West during the Cold War known as the stability-instability paradox. Robert Jervis defined the paradox in The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy: “to the extent that the military balance is stable at the level of all-out nuclear war, it will become less stable at lower levels of violence.”[1] This working definition assumed that stability could be achieved with large, offsetting nuclear arsenals, a goal that eluded Soviet and
One of the many reasons to welcome Lavoy’s long-awaited edited volume Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, is Jervis’ revisiting of the stability-instability paradox through the lens of Kargil, the high-altitude, limited war between India and Pakistan that occurred at the instigation of a small group of high-level Pakistani military officers in 1999, the year after both countries carried out nuclear tests. Jervis’ new formulation is that “[s]trategic stability permits if not creates instability by making lower levels of violence relatively safe because escalation up the nuclear ladder is too dangerous.”[2]
Achieving strategic stability, however, may be even more difficult for
Optimists Versus Pessimists
The books reviewed here reflect a healthy but lopsided debate between deterrence optimists and proliferation pessimists. The former believe that offsetting nuclear weapons will keep the peace; the latter maintain that more nuclear weapons will result in more dangers and perhaps mushroom clouds. Kenneth Waltz and Sagan provided an essential introduction to this debate in their two editions of The Spread of Nuclear Weapons.[3] One deterrence optimist for South Asia, Devin Hagerty, concluded in The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia, that “[t]here is no more ironclad law in international relations theory than this: nuclear weapon states do not fight wars with one another.”[4] Hagerty subsequently amended this conclusion to account for the Kargil war in the collection of essays edited by Ganguly and Kapur, Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb: “Nuclear weapons constituted one of many factors in Islamabad’s decision to undertake low-intensity operations in Kargil, but they were the main factor in containing the ensuing conflict within the Indian side of disputed Kashmir.”[5]
Ganguly and Hagerty are leading proponents of this camp of deterrence optimists. Their 2005 collaboration, Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons, concludes that timely and forceful U.S. interventions, a sufficiently stabilizing conventional military order of battle, and, especially, a mutual fear of nuclear escalation have prevented major war and dangerous escalation on the subcontinent.[6] A more in-depth account of Indian-Pakistani crises written by P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, arrives at far more cautionary conclusions. These authors note that “neither side in our four crises had a sure grasp of the other’s fears and hopes, and at times one or both sides miscalculated the role that outsiders might have played.”[7] Moreover,
all new nuclear states tend to explore the limits imposed by their possession of nuclear weapons. They push at the edges before backing off.… Clearly, the occurrence of four major crises within a twenty-year period indicates a fundamental structural problem. Whether one attributes this primarily to the Kashmir dispute or to other factors, such as
Kapur is among the ranks of proliferation pessimists, having written at book length shredding the arguments of deterrence optimists.[9] His co-edited volume with Ganguly is built around the promising idea of pairing a deterrence optimist and a proliferation pessimist to assess each crisis dating back to the 1986-1987 Indian Brasstacks exercises, which some believe were designed by Indian army chief K. Sundarji to prompt a war with Pakistan before it could acquire nuclear weapons. This book shines when top-notch analysts are paired against each other, as is the case with Praveen Swami and Kanti Bajpai on the “
Neil Joeck’s essay on Kargil is essential reading. He concludes that “the availability of nuclear weapons on both sides did not prevent war but did increase the potential for a catastrophic outcome.”[10] In Joeck’s account, both
Instead, there is compelling evidence, provided in great detail in Lavoy’s book, that significant conventional escalation did not occur for three primary reasons: Indian troops began to reclaim the heights above Kargil, the Pakistani military and diplomatic position had become untenable, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to cut his country’s losses.
John H. Gill provides another cautionary note in his fine chapter on Brasstacks in the Ganguly and Kapur volume: government and institutional structures in
The essays by proliferation pessimists in Nuclear Proliferation in
Sagan has long dwelled on how strong personalities, domestic politics, accidents, and organizational compulsions and screwups could lead to a breakdown of deterrence. His new edited volume, Inside Nuclear South Asia, provides many cautionary notes. Sagan warns once again that the rational deterrence model presumes unitary actors, whereas
Kanti Bajpai’s essay, “The BJP and the Bomb,” is particularly good. Although acknowledging that Indian security concerns played a major role leading up to the Pokhran tests, he argues that “the timing of the 1998 tests, the tipping point, is better explained by domestic political considerations.”[14] If, as Bajpai concludes, “[t]he BJP played politics with the bomb”[15] in order to extend its stay in power, and if the BJP forms a new government, more nuclear testing could be in store on the subcontinent.
Kapur’s chapter argues that the Cold War definition of the stability-instability paradox does not apply to South Asia because, if it did, the Pakistani military would be deterred from employing unconventional means against
New Insights Into Kargil
Lavoy’s edited volume, Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia, provides great insight into a war previously shrouded in secrecy and self-serving accounts. Lavoy and his team of analysts at the
The military planners of Kargil were few in number, inclined toward risk taking, and badly out of touch with the international ramifications of nuclear testing on the subcontinent and Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee’s subsequent trip to
In Lavoy’s view, one lesson of Kargil is that “the armed forces of nuclear powers can fight each other, but only where their vital interests are not at stake.”[18] He provides ammunition to both deterrence optimists and proliferation pessimists. On the one hand, Lavoy notes that India and Pakistan avoided key escalatory steps and concludes that “[t]he Kargil conflict did not come close to causing a nuclear war”[19] in part because, contrary to the reports of some U.S. officials at the time, “[n]either Pakistan nor India readied its nuclear arms for employment.”[20] On the other hand, he adds, “we now know that Indian troops were within days of opening another front across the LoC and possibly the international border, an act that could have triggered a large-scale conventional military engagement.”[21] His conclusions that
Lavoy has assembled an all-star cast of analysts. There is not one weak chapter in the book, and those by Lavoy, Feroz Khan, Christopher Clary, Gill, Praveen Swami, Rajesh M. Basrur, Hasan-Askari Rizvi, and Jervis are particularly good. These authors draw varying lessons from Kargil. Rizvi, perhaps
One significant analytical problem with crisis management is that the next crisis will have new and familiar dimensions. The lessons learned and unlearned about Kargil will certainly be crucial, but the next template for crisis management for
Michael Krepon is co-founder of the
ENDNOTES
1. Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 31.
2. Robert Jervis, “Deterrence and International Relations Theory,” in Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, ed. Peter R. Lavoy (
3. Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan, eds., The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan, eds., The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (
4. Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from
5. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, eds., Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb (
6. Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (
7. P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process (
9. S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (Stanford:
10. Neil Joeck, “The Kargil War and Nuclear Deterrence,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb, ed. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur (
12. John H. Gill, “Brasstacks: Prudently Pessimistic,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb, ed. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur (
13. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, “Introduction,” in Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb, ed. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur (
14. Kanti Bajpai, “The BJP and the Bomb,” in Inside Nuclear South Asia, ed. Scott D. Sagan (Stanford:
16. S. Paul Kapur, “Revisionist Ambitions, Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe,” in Inside Nuclear South Asia, ed. Scott D. Sagan (Stanford:
17. Peter R. Lavoy, “Introduction: the Importance of the Kargil Conflict,” in Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, ed. Peter R. Lavoy (
22. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, “The Lessons of Kargil as Learned by
23. Peter R. Lavoy, “Crisis Management Strategies,” in Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, ed. Peter R. Lavoy (