Sumit Ganguly
In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear weapons use as his military faces significant battlefield setbacks during its war in Ukraine. Russia’s resort to this sort of brinkmanship is certainly not lost on other nuclear powers, including those in Asia. There, China, India, and Pakistan have long been entangled in a three-way nuclear competition, which has evolved in critical ways amid shifts in geopolitics—the most important being China’s rise and increasing assertiveness.
China, India, and Pakistan may have started measuring their nuclear programs against one another as early as the 1970s, but New Delhi’s and Islamabad’s landmark nuclear tests in 1998 brought their nascent competition to the fore. A recent publication by Ashley J. Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, masterfully details the developments in nuclear policy among the three countries in the decades since. Tellis shows how the region’s nuclear competition has intensified in the past decade, as each nuclear power has modernized its arsenal to acquire new capabilities, including tactical nuclear weapons.
These developments have important ripple effects for the international system. Unlike India and Pakistan, whose nuclear programs are mostly regionally focused, China’s seeks to target regional adversaries as well as those farther afield—namely the United States. Furthermore, Moscow’s current approach to nuclear brinkmanship may embolden Beijing or Islamabad—both revisionist states—to resort to similar threats in future crises in the quest for strategic advantage.
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