Pakistan’s Creeping Jihad and Expanding Nuclear Umbrella

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
C. Christine Fair
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
Dual Trajectories

To complement and enable its advances at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, Pakistan also strategically acquired nuclear weapons. We now know that Pakistan had a crude device around 1983-4, if not earlier. As Pakistan became increasingly confident of its nuclear capabilities, it was more emboldened to use its proxies in India, secure in the belief that India would be unable to punish Pakistan militarily. Consequently, Pakistan's adventurism in India became bolder through the use of state-sponsored proxies, but also through Pakistani security forces masquerading as militants in the 1999 Kargil War. Until the reciprocal nuclear tests by India and then by Pakistan in May 1998, scholars used a term introduced by McGeorge Bundy, "existential deterrence," to describe the deterrence that seemed to exist between India and Pakistan. Given the opacity and uncertainty surrounding the two countries' programs, the mutual deterrence calculation of India and Pakistan did not rest on "relative capabilities and strategic doctrines, but on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war." This chapter outlines the dual trajectories of Pakistan's development and deployment of Islamist proxies and nuclear weapons.

The Subtle Knife

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Peter Rautenbach
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Cyber Warfare ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Hybrid Warfare ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Polar Opposite

This article looks to tie together the polar opposite of hybrid warfare and nuclear deterrence. The reason for this is that hybrid warfare and its effects on nuclear deterrence need to be explored as there appears to be substantial increases in hybrid warfare’s usage. This article found that hybrid warfare has an erosion like effect on nuclear deterrence because it increases the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used. This may be due to both the fact that hybrid warfare can ignore conventional redlines, but also because the cyber aspect of hybrid warfare has unintended psychological effects on how deterrence functions. how does this relate to nuclear war? In short, cyber warfare attacks key concepts which make nuclear deterrence a viable strategy including the concepts of stability, clarity, and rationality. Therefore, hybrid warfare increases the chance of nuclear use.

A Bifurcated Global Nuclear Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh Thakur
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The World ◽  
The United Nations

The very destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes them unusable for ethical and military reasons. The world has placed growing restrictions on the full range of nuclear programs and activities. But with the five NPT nuclear powers failing to eliminate nuclear arsenals, other countries acquiring the bomb, arms control efforts stalled, nuclear risks climbing, and growing awareness of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, the United Nations adopted a new treaty to ban the bomb. Some technical anomalies between the 1968 and 2017 treaties will need to be harmonized and the nuclear-armed states’ rejection of the ban treaty means it will not eliminate any nuclear warheads. However, it will have a significant normative impact in stigmatizing the possession, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons and serve as a tool for civil society to mobilize domestic and world public opinion against the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Morgenthau
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Middle Ages

The nuclear age has ushered in a novel period of history, as distinct from the age that preceded it as the modern age has been from the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages have been from antiquity. Yet while our conditions of life have drastically changed under the impact of the nuclear age, we still live in our thoughts and act through our institutions in an age that has passed. There exists, then, a gap between what we think about our social, political, and philosophic problems and the objective conditions which the nuclear age has created.This contradiction between our modes of thought and action, belonging to an age that has passed, and the objective conditions of our existence has engendered four paradoxes in our nuclear strategy: the commitment to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise, paralyzed by the fear of having to use it; the search for a nuclear strategy which would avoid the predictable consequences of nuclear war; the pursuit of a nuclear armaments race joined with attempts to stop it; the pursuit of an alliance policy which the availability of nuclear weapons has rendered obsolete. All these paradoxes result from the contrast between traditional attitudes and the possibility of nuclear war and from the fruitless attempts to reconcile the two.

scholarly journals Normalising Nuclear War: Narrative Scenarios, Imaginative Geographies and Sites of Leisure in 1950s Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hogg
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Sociotechnical Imaginaries ◽  
Imaginative Geographies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Civil Defence

AbstractThis chapter offers an interpretation of British regional civil defence activities in the 1950s. I argue that the persistent social impact of nationwide sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear weapons cannot be fully understood without considering the localised social, geographical and discursive contexts in which civil defence was located and enacted. This chapter traces the ways in which a wider (officially maintained) sociotechnical imaginary appears to have been embedded in and intertwined with these localised contexts. After discussing the bespoke narrative scenarios created to frame civil defence exercises and offering analysis of their public representation, I focus on sites of leisure and forms of civic engagement linked to civil defence activity. Lastly, I turn to imaginative geographies to explore how sociotechnical imaginaries became localised in this era.

Nuclear Deterrence—Another Perfect Storm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
Global Heating ◽  
Perfect Storm

This chapter applies Stephen M. Gardiner’s model of the perfect moral storm to nuclear deterrence. Most damage from a major nuclear war would fall on third parties rather than the belligerents. Some would be present-day people in neutral countries and nonhuman animals, but future generations would be the largest group of victims. This makes ongoing reliance on large nuclear arsenals ethically indefensible. It presents many of the same problems, however, as global heating. One is that future damages are not salient to present-day publics and politicians. Another is that nuclear weapons reduce the probability of major war while greatly increasing the damage if it occurs. This affects the intergenerational distribution of costs and benefits. Nuclear deterrence is a ‘front-loaded’ good: its benefits arrive right away, whereas its costs will most likely arrive only in the future. Nuclear war is inevitable if states rely on it in perpetuity, but for a given generation, the likelihood may be small. “Business-as-usual” may thus be a good self-interested gamble for each generation until nuclear war actually occurs. Not surprisingly, it finds many defenders. The last part of the chapter considers possible solutions.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

Keeping the Bombs in the Basement: U.S. Nonproliferation Policy toward Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Or Rabinowitz ◽  
Nicholas L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nuclear Materials ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuclear Tests

How has the United States behaved historically toward friendly states with nuclear weapons ambitions? Recent scholarship has demonstrated the great lengths to which the United States went to prevent Taiwan, South Korea, and West Germany from acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet seemingly on the other side of the ledger are cases such as Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, where the United States failed to prevent proliferation, and where many have argued that the United States made exceptions to its nonproliferation objectives given conflicting geopolitical goals. A reexamination of the history of U.S. nonproliferation policy toward Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, based on declassified documents and interviews, finds that these cases are not as exceptional as is commonly understood. In each case, the United States sought to prevent these states from acquiring nuclear weapons, despite geopolitical constraints. Moreover, once U.S. policymakers realized that prior efforts had failed, they continued to pursue nonproliferation objectives, brokering deals to prevent nuclear tests, public declaration of capabilities, weaponization, or transfer of nuclear materials to other states.

Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Paul Kapur
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Limited War ◽  
Asian Security ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
To Come

The tenth anniversary of India's and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests enables scholars to revisit the issue of South Asian proliferation with a decade of hindsight. What lessons do the intervening years hold regarding nuclear weapons' impact on South Asian security? Some scholars claim that nuclear weapons had a beneficial effect during this period, helping to stabilize historically volatile Indo-Pakistani relations. Such optimistic analyses of proliferation's regional security impact are mistaken, however. Nuclear weapons have had two destabilizing effects on the South Asian security environment. First, nuclear weapons' ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan's dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This, in turn, provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war. Although the resulting Indo-Pakistani crises did not lead to nuclear or full-scale conventional conflict, such fortunate outcomes were not guaranteed and did not result primarily from nuclear deterrence. Second, these Indo-Pakistani crises led India to adopt a more aggressive conventional military posture toward Pakistan. This development could exacerbate regional security-dilemma dynamics and increase the likelihood of Indo-Pakistani conflict in years to come. Thus nuclear weapons not only destabilized South Asia in the first decade after the nuclear tests; they may damage the regional security environment well into the future.

scholarly journals Asia Treads the Nuclear Path, Unaware That Self-Assured Destruction Would Result from Nuclear War

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen B. Toon ◽  
Alan Robock ◽  
Michael Mills ◽  
Lili Xia
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
North Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

Of the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons, six are located in Asia and another, the United States, borders the Pacific Ocean. Russia and China were the first Asian nations with nuclear weapons, followed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the world's nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals or maintaining them at historic levels, but several of those in Asia—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—continue to pursue relentless and expensive programs of nuclear weapons development and production. Hopefully, the nuclear agreement reached in July 2015 between Iran, the European Union, and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council will be a step toward eliminating nuclear weapons throughout Asia and the rest of the world. As we will discuss below, any country possessing a nuclear arsenal is on a path leading toward self-assured destruction, and is a threat to people everywhere on Earth.

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