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.