How India and Pakistan Learned to Stop Worrying

Rajesh Rajagopalan, one of the brightest of the new generation of Indian scholars on strategic studies, explains why the conventional wisdom on nuclear weapons in South Asia was so hopelessly wrong. Rajagopalan, now teaching international politics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, takes apart many of the assumptions that went into the great debate on nuclear weapons, peace and stability in the Subcontinent.

What helps Rajagopalan to sort out the many of conceptual confusions in the South Asian nuclear debate is his strong grounding in the theory of nuclear deterrence, which cannot be said about much of the Indian writing on nuclear issues, barring that of K. Subrahmanyam who launched the nuclear discourse in the 1960s.

With an equally strong grasp of global atomic history, Rajagopalan explains the reasons behind the current nuclear stability in South Asia. He contends that many of the arguments against nuclear weapons in South Asia “are based on the Cold War superpower model of nuclear arsenals that are not applicable to the small nuclear forces that both India and Pakistan have built… Indian and Pakistani nuclear forces have developed at a slow pace, unworried about the kinds of vulnerabilities that the proliferation pessimists worried about, making the choices that have increased the stability of the nuclear dyad in the subcontinent.” In the literature on nuclear issues, either we have polemical and intuitive justification of various political positions or the very dense academic writing that is utterly inaccessible to even an intelligent reader.

Rajagopalan succeeds in providing insights into the doctrinal complexities of the South Asian nuclear debate without losing either academic rigour or the reader. Anyone even remotely interested in the transformation of the Subcontinent’s security politics since the late 1980s would immensely benefit from this tightly written, well-argued and insightful account of one of the most important debates of our times.

The author also deserves to be complimented for avoiding the usual temptation among the Indian writers to demonise Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and paint it in Islamic colours. While Rajagopalan provides a balanced assessment of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and strategy, there are some unresolved questions about the relationship between nuclear weapons and Pakistan’s uninhibited support for terrorism since the late 1980s.

He argues that Pakistan has always supported insurgencies in India and would have inevitably intensified it in the wake of Delhi’s troubles in Kashmir from the late 1980s.

While he is right in pointing out that Pakistan has failed in its attempts to leverage nuclear weapons to promote the Kashmir cause, the discussion on how its nuclear status has limited India’s options remains to be expanded. It is a subject Rajagopalan will hopefully take up in future.