THE CONSEQUENCES OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN SOUTH ASIA
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND PRITHVIS Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia
Vipin Narang
SOUTH ASIAN SECURITY SCHOLARSHIP has overwhelmingly focused on the causes and consequences of Indiaâs and Pakistanâs nuclearization. Insufficient attention has been paid to the other components of these statesâ strategic weapons decisions, a portrait of which may reveal a richer understanding of the motivations driving them. The May 1998 nuclear tests were certainly major strategic events, but there are multiple plausible explanations for these decisions. A more complete and accurate understanding of Indian and Pakistani strategic behavior can be gained by analyzing their ballistic missile flight-testing patterns, patterns related to nuclearization that can provide insights into the motives for both the nuclear tests and their broader strategic weapons decisions. Instead of weighing alternative explanations for one eventâthe 1998 nuclear testsâI examine the series of ballistic missile flight tests in the region that occurred repeatedly across a two-decade time frame under a variety of systemic and domestic conditions, providing new insights into the motivations for Indiaâs and Pakistanâs strategic weapons decisions.
I begin with a survey of the South Asian nuclearization debate, demonstrating in particular that there are multiple plausible explanations for Indiaâs decision to cross the nuclear weapons threshold in May 1998. This debate focuses on several possible security, domestic political, and normative or prestige variables that might influence Indiaâs and Pakistanâs strategic weapons behavior; but it is unable to resolve which variables are the most important, and when, due to limited observations. My examination of ballistic missile flight tests in the region relies on a greater number of data points, allowing me to confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses generated by the nuclearization debate. The empirical analysis that follows employs events-data and content-analysis methods to test which variables produced these statesâ ballistic missile flight-testing decisions.
The evidence suggests that Pakistan is indeed motivated primarily by security concerns, forced to keep pace with Indiaâs strategic weapons advances since it is the much weaker of the two powers. I show that the variables that best account for Indiaâs strategic weapons decisions, however, are a combination of domestic political ideology and position. Specifically, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) conceive of Indian pride in different ways. For the dominant political party, the Congress Party, Indian pride takes the form of a âtechno-nationalistâ pride, seeking to demonstrate that Indiaâs technological capabilities are indigenously developed, sophisticated, and world class; its conception of pride is self-referential and derivative of the Nehruvian emphasis on Indian self-reliance. The BJP, on the other hand, conceives of Indian pride in highly oppositional and competitive terms, seeking to repudiate the perceived malignant agentsâboth Pakistan and a hypocritical international community writ largeâthat it believes aim to keep India weak. The position of these parties relative to each other determines which form of âprestigeâ India seeks at a given moment. This domestic political dynamic captures both Indiaâs ballistic missile flight-testing pattern and its 1998 decision to nuclearize and suggests that the Indian preference for prestige needs to be disaggregated to fully understand New Delhiâs strategic weapons behavior.
The analysis in this chapter has significant implications for how Indiaâs strategic weapons decisions may unfold and how Pakistan might respond in the future. In particular, one should largely expect the BJP to be more provocative in its strategic weapons behavior than its Congress counterpart. Motivated by a techno-nationalist pride that privileges the indigenous development of what a superpower is believed to haveâabove all, technological and economic prowessâfuture Congress governments are unlikely to develop and test strategic weapons at times of potential international political offense, instead supporting the technical imperatives and testing sequence requirements of its prized strategic weapons programs. However, future BJP governments, motivated by an âoppositional nationalistâ ideology, may be more likely to develop strategic weapons at a more rapid pace than Congress governments and test or deploy them in response to challenges from perceived malignant entities, notably Pakistan and the Western powers. The consequence is that the South Asian arms race is likely to be more intense when a strong BJP government is in power.
THE NUCLEARIZATION DEBATE
Much has been written about the nuclearization of South Asia, with particular focus on Indiaâs decision to test nuclear weapons when it did, since it was the regionâs first-mover on nuclear weapons in both 1974 and 1998.1 In comparison to the literature on India, there is very little debate about Pakistanâs decisions to initiate a nuclear weapons program and to finally test in 1998.2 Once India openly demonstrated its nuclear capabilities, many scholars argue that Pakistan had no option but to develop and test nuclear weapons to demonstrate the reliability of the Pakistani deterrent to India and the rest of the world.3 Although Pakistan had lived under a cloak of nuclear ambiguity for almost a decade, Indiaâs May 1998 tests forced Islamabadâs hand. For two weeks in May 1998, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says he âcarefully consideredâ what was in Pakistanâs security interest, but âIndian belligerency . . . made the retaliatory action inevitable.â4 According to Samina Ahmed, the armed forces, âwhich were still in charge of the overall direction of Pakistanâs nuclear policy,â held the âpredominant belief that Pakistan had no choice but to test. . . . [A] tit-for-tat response was almost inevitable.â5 Arguments that Pakistan tested for prestige purposes or to wield an âIslamic bombâ are difficult to square with the timing of the testâimmediately after the Indian testsâand with the widespread belief that Pakistanâs nuclear arsenal was the product of considerable Chinese assistance.6
There is substantial consensus that Pakistanâs decision to nuclearize was an overwhelming product of Indian-generated security imperatives. The implication is that any other Pakistani leader faced with the same security pressures would have done the same. Although there was some initial internal debate about whether to respond, the discussion quickly turned to how many tests Pakistan would conduct and how best to weather the international sanctions that would follow.7 As Pakistani foreign minister Shamshad Ahmad penned in Foreign Affairs, â[T] o restore strategic balance to South Asia, Pakistan was obliged to respond to Indiaâs May 1998 nuclear blasts.â8 When Pakistan finally responded, Sharif spoke of settling the score with India and of facing the âmanifest Indian [nuclear] threatâ with resolve and with nuclear-tipped Ghauri missiles.9 The summary judgment on Pakistanâs motivations to nuclearize is captured by Lowell Dittmer: âPakistanâs motive for the acquisition of nuclear weapons is . . . far less complex and more conventional: national security. As Indiaâs weaker rival, defeated in nearly all their military encounters and dismembered in the third, Pakistan has reason for concern.â10 Ć umit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty concur, arguing that the âcore aim of Pakistanâs nuclear weapons program is to prevent a repetition of 1971 [when Bangladesh was born out of East Pakistan] . . . to deter an Indian attack that might reduce Pakistanâs size even further, or perhaps even put the country out of existence entirely.â11 The critical puzzle is what therefore compelled India to openly test in May 1998, for the scholarship on Pakistanâs nuclearization almost unequivocally concludes that no matter when India chose to test, Pakistan would have had little choice but to follow suit.
In contrast to the literature on Pakistan, the debate about Indiaâs motivations for nuclearizing in 1998 is quite wide ranging, with several plausible explanations for the BJPâs decision. Realists, for example, emphasize the security pressures emanating from both international and regional actors that drove India to test. They argue that a confluence of security factors in the late 1990s created system incentives for India to exercise its nuclear option: the permanent extension of the NPT in 1995, the prospect of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) forever foreclosing Indiaâs capability to generate live test data, and the persistence of an increasingly powerful nuclear China (despite a short-term thaw in relations) assisting a thorny Pakistan on Indiaâs borders.12 The organizations responsible for Indiaâs nuclear developmentâthe Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO)âpressed for tests because of the looming CTBT;13 and Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, days after the tests, cited China as the primary motivation for nuclearization in writing to President Clinton: â[W]e have an overt nuclear-weapon state on our border, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962 . . . [and which] has materially helped another neighbor of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state.â14 Indeed, an Indian test would force Pakistanâs hand, with only net security gains for India: if Islamabad successfully tested in response, it would simply confirm what New Delhi already believed to be a de facto reality; if Islamabad failed to respond, the credibility of its nuclear deterrent would be severely undermined, to Indiaâs security advantage.
In response, those partial to the constructivist school of thought in political science have argued that Indiaâs quest to be considered a legitimate global power and concurrent desire for prestige on the international stage drove it to test in 1998 to break into what it perceived to be an exclusive club of great powers. To India, this exclusivity is legitimated by the fact that the five declared nuclear po...