Nuclear Deterrence And Conflict Management Between India And Pakistan

Until the probabilities of military engagements are minimized, the possibilities of peace and stability in India and Pakistan would remain elusive. The situation asks for scholarly contribution in developing a new paradigm wherein the two neighbors are made to recognize the need to resolve their disputes instead of just managing them.

Conflict resolution and promotion of regional cooperation in South Asia has assumed a new urgency in the aftermath of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, and underlined by the outbreak of fighting in Kargil in 1999, full mobilization on the border during most of 2002, and continued low-intensity warfare and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The stability of nuclear deterrence between the two countries is therefore a matter of great urgency and has found a place on the scholarly agenda of security studies in South Asia. Several books have been written on India’s nuclear programme, but these have been mostly analytical histories. The India-Pakistan Nuclear Relationship is a new departure in that it is the first time that a group of scholars from the South Asian subcontinent have collectively tried to apply deterrence theory and international relations theory to South Asia.

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.

The Mumbai blasts of 1993, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Mumbai 26/11—cross-border terrorism has continued unabated. What can India do to motivate Pakistan to do more to prevent such attacks? In the nuclear times that we live in, where a military counter-attack could escalate to destruction beyond imagination, overt warfare is clearly not an option. But since outright peace-making seems similarly infeasible, what combination of coercive pressure and bargaining could lead to peace? The authors provide, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the violent and non-violent options available to India for compelling Pakistan to take concrete steps towards curbing terrorism originating in its homeland. They draw on extensive interviews with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, in service and retired, to explore the challenges involved in compellence and to show how non-violent coercion combined with clarity on the economic, social and reputational costs of terrorism can better motivate Pakistan to pacify groups involved in cross-border terrorism. Not War, Not Peace? goes beyond the much discussed theories of nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy to explore a new approach to resolving old conflicts.

With the nuclearization of the Indian subcontinent, Indo-Pakistani crisis behavior has acquired a deadly significance. The past two decades have witnessed no fewer than six crises against the backdrop of a vigorous nuclear arms race. Except for the Kargil war of 1998-9, all these events were resolved peacefully. Nuclear war was avoided despite bitter mistrust, everyday tensions, an intractable political conflict over Kashmir, three wars, and the steady refinement of each side's nuclear capabilities. Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty carefully analyze each crisis, reviewing the Indian and Pakistani domestic political systems and key decisions during the relevant period. This lucid and comprehensive study of the two nations' crisis behavior in the nuclear age is the first work on Indo-Pakistani relations to take systematic account of the role played by the United States in South Asia's security dynamics over the past two decades in the context of unipolarization, and formulates a blueprint for American policy toward a more positive and productive India-Pakistan relationship.

"In May 1998, India and Pakistan put to rest years of speculation about whether they possessed nuclear technology and openly tested their weapons. Some believed nuclearization would stabilize South Asia; others prophesized disaster. Authors of two of the most comprehensive books on South Asia's new nuclear era, Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, offer competing theories on the transformation of the region and what these patterns mean for the world's next proliferators." "With these two major interpretations, Ganguly and Kapur tackle all sides of an urgent issue that has profound regional and global consequences. Sure to spark discussion and debate, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb thoroughly maps the potential impact of nuclear proliferation."--Cubierta.

Conventional Deterrence is a book about the origins of war. Why do nations faced with the prospect of large-scale conventional war opt for or against an offensive strategy? John J. Mearsheimer examines a number of crises that led to major conventional wars to explain why deterrence failed. He focuses first on Allied and German decision making in the years 1939–1940, analyzing why the Allies did not strike first against Germany after declaring war and, conversely, why the Germans did attack the West. Turning to the Middle East, he examines the differences in Israeli and Egyptian strategic doctrines prior to the start of the major conventional conflicts in that region. Mearsheimer then critically assays the relative strengths and weaknesses of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to determine the prospects for conventional deterrence in any future crisis. He is also concerned with examining such relatively technical issues as the impact of precision-guided munitions (PGM) on conventional deterrence and the debate over maneuver versus attrition warfare.Mearsheimer pays considerable attention to questions of military strategy and tactics. Challenging the claim that conventional detrrence is largely a function of the numerical balance of forces, he also takes issue with the school of thought that ascribes deterrence failures to the dominance of "offensive" weaponry. In addition to examining the military consideration underlying deterrence, he also analyzes the interaction between those military factors and the broader political considerations that move a nation to war.

Changing Patterns of Warfare between India and Pakistan analyzes how advanced nuclear technologies and the advent of disruptive technologies have affected the evolving conflict between India and Pakistan. Advanced nuclear technologies such as nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, ballistic missile defence systems (BMDs), multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), anti-satellite weapons (ASAT); and disruptive technologies such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence (AI), lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) / drones and space-based and cyber technologies have all complicated crisis dynamics and the domain of warfare in the region. Further, the employment of India’s compellence strategy is an indication of a change in its stance that demonstrates smart/surgical strikes are now more likely. The phenomenon of surgical strikes raises the question of how disruptive technologies will be used to gain direct/indirect military control and hence challenge the existing status quo and deterrence stability. Against this backdrop, the authors predict how this conflict may develop in the future and evaluate the ways to stabilize deterrence and regulate the militarization of artificial intelligence and disruptive technologies between India and Pakistan. This book will be of interest to all those researching and working in the fields of security studies, strategic studies, nuclear policy, deterrence thinking and proliferation/non-proliferation aspects of the nuclear weapons programme within South Asia and beyond. It will also be relevant for the academic community, policy-makers, diplomats, members of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), professional research institutes and organizations working on India–Pakistan relations.

India and Pakistan have been in a state of persistent conflict that goes back to the very creation of these states after decolonization. This conflict has resulted in several wars and continuing armed clashes. After both states became nuclear powers, one would have expected a fundamental change in the way they wage war, since it is a fundamental principle of International Relations theory that nuclear-armed states do not go to war with each other. But the situation in South Asia seems to defy this principle. India’s conventional superiority should be neutralized by Pakistan’s nuclear capability, while Pakistan’s risk-taking behavior should be reduced. But as a matter of fact, the situation has turned out quite differently: Although large-scale conventional wars have not occurred, the nuclear status seems to have encouraged conflict and risk-taking. The number of armed clashes rose. Bluth and Mumtaz scrutinize the atypical and seemingly paradoxical impact of nuclearization on the conflict between India and Pakistan, paying extra attention on the question of how stable this paradoxical strategic relationship is. They demonstrate that the dominant paradigm used in the International Relations literature is by far not adequate to explain the strategic relations between India and Pakistan and set to work on developing a more coherent explanation. A must-read for everyone interested in International Relations and conflict resolution research.