Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons/Nuclear Deterrence in Southern Asia: China, India and Pakistan/Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

Summary

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Short chapters offer concise but useful summaries of each of the six: the brief 1984 flurry when Islamabad (and Washington) worried that India might launch preventive air strikes against Pakistan's nascent nuclear facilities; the 1987 "Brasstacks" crisis; the April 1990 war scare; the mutual fear of pre-emptive nuclear strikes that followed the May 1998 nuclear tests first of India, then Pakistan; the 1999 Kargil war, which may have resulted in nearly 2,500 battle deaths; and the 2002 standoff that followed the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building in New Delhi. The underlying premise of Fearful Symmetry is that Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons capabilities and the possibility that military conflict might escalate to the nuclear level have been the main deterrent to a major war in the six crises of the past 20 years. In this context, proof would probably require access to key internal documents central to the Indian and Pakistani decision-making process or unusually candid interviews with leading political and military actors who actually participated in the key decisions for war and peace.

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Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons/Nuclear Deterrence in Southern Asia: China, India and Pakistan/Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons By Sumit Ganguly and J Devin T. Hagerty Oxford University Press, July 2005, 223 pp.

Nuclear Deterrence in Southern Asia: China, India and Pakistan By Arpit Rajain Sage Publications, December 2004, 495 pp.

Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military By Husain Haqqani Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 2005, 395 pp.

Although tensions between India and Pakistan have ebbed over the past two years, South Asia remains a brew of festering national, religious, sectarian, communal, and ethnic animosities. India and Pakistan have fought four wars since the two countries achieved independence in 1947, and both tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Periods of "peace" routinely see artillery e...

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