The Kargil crisis was the first direct military conflict between two “new” nuclear weapons-capable states. It put a spotlight on widely held theories about the stabilizing, or destabilizing, properties of nuclear deterrence, at least at the low levels of nuclear arms and recessed deployment postures India and Pakistan were believed to have after their May 1998 nuclear tests. By the end of the Cold War, based on several decades of US–Soviet experience, most Western policymakers and military experts had become accustomed to the view that nuclear-armed adversaries would go to great lengths to avoid direct conventional military provocations for fear of escalation to a nuclear exchange. Pakistan's armed intrusion across the “line of control” (LoC) separating Pakistani and Indian forces in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and India's response, especially its moves to ready itself for horizontal military escalation, seemed to defy this conventional wisdom, generating new questions about the propensity of new nuclear states for risk-taking under the “nuclear shadow.”

What lessons did US policymakers debate or take away from the Kargil crisis? In retrospect, the danger that the local conflict might spark a serious nuclear crisis was a key rationale for the US diplomatic intervention that defused the conflict, but how has that concern been translated since? Key US concerns since Kargil include the possibility that Pakistan and India have taken their own, quite different, lessons from their Kargil experience, storing up yet more dangers for the future.