South Asia's Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China and India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status

Extract

South Asia's Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China. Edited by Lowell Dittmer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004. 296p. $69.95 cloth, $28.95 paper.

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status. By Baldev Raj Nayar and T. V. Paul. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 302p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

The 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan caught the attention of international relations theorists as never before. While the earlier analyses of South Asia came primarily from those working on nonproliferation issues and regional conflict-prevention perspectives, the advent of overt nuclear weapon status of India and Pakistan presented IR scholars with the opportunity to explore a range of hypotheses about new nuclear powers. Was South Asia going to be able to take advantage of its backwardness/late entry into the deterrence game and learn from the considerable research and experience of the two superpowers during the Cold War? Were India and Pakistan as rational as the United States and the Soviet Union (if not more), and could they manage their rivalry without resorting to nuclear exchange? Will their overt nuclear weapons capabilities make India and Pakistan more careful in their responses to each other's provocative moves? Is a rivalry based in political ideology (like the U.S.-USSR one) more susceptible to rational decision making than a rivalry based in religious ideology (supposedly the primary basis of the India-Pakistan dispute)? A related set of questions raised by the tests focused primarily on the reasons/motivations behind Indian nuclear tests and their impact on the nuclear nonproliferation regime.