How Did India and Pakistan End Up on the Brink of Nuclear War?

The Pentagon estimates that 12 million people will die immediately if the conflict between India and Pakistan goes nuclear. This is a shocking statistic, but that these two South Asian countries find themselves on the brink of nuclear war is not shocking. They have been here before.

The story of their rivalry is best told in George Perkovich 's India's Nuclear Bomb (University of California Press). Few paid much attention to the book when it appeared in 1999, though it won the American Historical Society's Herbert Feis Award. That the book was largely ignored is unfortunate. It raises many of the questions inquisitive readers have about the course the conflict has taken in recent years. Perkovich, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, ably answers these questions.

Was it inevitable that the conflict would involve nuclear threats?

On May 18, 1974 India conducted its first nuclear test. Analysts immediately feared that this was the beginning of an aggressive nuclear weapons program and reacted with alarm, though Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister, tried to reassure people by declaring that it was a"peaceful nuclear explosion." It turned out not to have been a turning point. Confounding expectations the Indians declined to move forward with their nuclear program. For more than twenty years the Indian nuclear program remained largely moribund.

Why?"Conventional wisdom holds that India has sought and acquired nuclear weapon capability," says Perkovich,"to redress threats to its security" by China and Pakistan. As the U.S. Department of Defense concluded in 1996,"The bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan which dates to the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947, remains the impetus behind the proliferation" of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons."The security dynamics of the region are complicated further by India's perception of China as a threat.... India's pursuit of nuclear weapons was first spurred by a 1962 border clash with China and by Beijing's 1964 nuclear test."

Perkovich demurs."Domestic factors," he says, were far"more significant in determining India's nuclear policy." One such factor seems to have been a deeply felt desire to demonstrate that Indian scientists are as good as those around the world. Another is that Indians wanted to maintain the high moral ground by proving that they would abjure nuclear weapons even though they had the expertise to develop them.

A second stage in India's nuclear weapons program seems to have been reached in the late 1990s, Perkovich admits in the book's sorrowful afterward, written after India and Pakistan had test-fired nuclear missiles. By then India seems very much to have decided that nuclear weapons were critical to the country's national defense, though officials continued to insist, as they always had, that India would only use nuclear weapons in self-defense..

What was the sequence of events the led India and Pakistan to test fire missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons?

By the late 1990s tensions between India and Pakistan were rising as the political fortunes of the people in power in both countries were falling. In this heightened state of alert, leaders in both countries used the threat of nuclear weapons to win favor at home and to bolster their nation's security. The critical year was 1998. The critical month was February. That month Prime Minisiter Atal Behari Vajpayee, out on the campaign trail, pledged that his party would"take back that part of Kashmir that is under Pakistan's occupation." This in turn alarmed Pakistan, which responded two months later by test firing its first missile, the Ghauri, named in honor of a"twelfth-century Muslim invader who defeated the Indian ruler Prithviraj Chauhan." The next month India responded by test firing its own missile.

Although for several years there had been rumors that Pakistan was developing missiles, India had not believed the country was close to launching them. The Pakistani missile test therefore came as a surprise. India knew so little about the Pakistani program that officials were convinced the technology had come from China. The United States informed India it was North Korea which provided the critical expertise.

Could no one see that reason should prevail in such dangerous circumstances?

The short answer is yes. And the year following the missile tests opened on a note of high promise. In February 1999 Vajpayee took a bus to Lahore, Pakistan, to meet with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. At the end of their meeting they issued what became known as the Lahore Declaration. Observers were delighted. Both countries agreed to begin holding talks on nuclear security issues, they agreed to notify each other in advance of missile tests, and they agreed not to conduct nuclear test explosions"unless either side ... decides that extraordinary events have jeopardised its supreme interests." A nuclear arms race in South Asia suddenly seemed far less likely. Vajpayee publicly stated that he wanted to make peace with Pakistan."Despite what you Americans say," he observed,"the bomb gives us the confidence to make peace."

Unfortunately, the Lahore agreement was not warmly welcomed by everybody. As Perkovich notes,"key [Pakistani] military leaders at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi bristled at the lofty, conciliatory rhetoric and the intimations of pending rapprochement." Among the crowd of discontented leaders was General Pervez Musharraf, who worried that the happy talk between the two countries precluded Pakistan's takeover of Kashmir. Just three months later, Musharraf put into effect a devious plot to infiltrate irregular and regular army soldiers disguised as freedom fighters into Indian-controlled Kashmir at a place known as Kargil. Fighting immediately broke out. Both sides suffered substantial casualties: the Indians lost 474 soldiers, the Pakistanis nearly 1,000. Nuclear war seemed imminent. According to the British minister of state for foreign affairs,"We know the two countries came very close to a nuclear exchange over it."

In an eerie parallel with the crisis next door in the Middle East, it was the peace talks that precipitated this mini-war. As in the Middle East, the overtures of peace pushed extremist elements to desperate measures, fearful that peace put their goals in jeopardy. In this case, however, another factor was at work."Pakistan's military brass," says Perkovich, was"emboldened to initiate aggression in Kargil because it believed that nuclear deterrence would prevent India from escalating to a point of a major conventional war."

Pakistani leaders may have been right. Vajpayee responded to the crisis with forbearance. But it took the intervention of the United States to ease the crisis by putting pressure on Pakistan to withdraw. (Because the United States had tilted toward Pakistan in the last war in 1971, the United States had to lean especially hard on Pakistan now to gain India's trust.)

In the fall of 1999 General Musharraf took power in Pakistan after staging a coup. One of his goals was to resume the campaign to take over Kashmir, this time by giving secret assistance to terrorists.