Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis

Nuclear Deterrence i nSouthAsia The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis Devin T.Hagevty D i d India and Pakistan nearly fight a nuclear war in 1990?In a provocative 1993article, Seymour M. Hersh claims that they did. During a crisis with India over the rapidly escalating insurgency in Kashmir, according to Hersh, Pakistan “openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert.” As a result, ”the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.” Hersh quotes Richard J. Kerr, deputy director of the Central IntelligenceAgency in 1990,as saying: “It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been in the U.S. government. It may be as close as we‘ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.” Robert M. Gates, President George Bush‘s deputy national security adviser in 1990,reportedly told Hersh that “Pakistanand India seemed to be caught in a cycle that they couldn’tbreak out of. I was convinced that if a war started, it would be nuclear.”’ Hershs account of the 1990 Indo-Pakistani crisis has acquired the aura of conventional wisdom in both popular and scholarly circles. William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem essentially retell Hersh’s story and add that %dian nuclear forces” were also “on alert.”2 Political scientist Scott D. Sagan Devin T. Hagerty is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in August 1995. This article w a s written while the author was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University’s john M . Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Additional research support was provided in 1993-94 b y the United States Institute of Peace and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. The author would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments on earlier manifestations of this article: Stephen I? Cohen, Daniel Deudney, Avery Goldstein, Herbert G. Hagerty, and Wendy Patriquin. Thanks also to participants in the Olin Institute’s 1994-95 National Security Seminar;a colloquium series on ”South Asian Security Issues After the Cold War” at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Spring 1995; and a conference on “New Frontiers in Arms Control,” at the Center for International and Security Studies, University of Maryland, March 30-31, 1995. 1. Seymour M. Hersh, “On the Nuclear Edge,” New Yorker, March 29, 1993,pp. 56-73. The quotations are on pp. 56-57. 2. William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem, Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World (New York Simon and Schuster, 1994),p. 506. InternationalSecurity, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Winter 1995/%), pp. 79-174 0 1995by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the MassachuseRs Institute o f Technology 79 International Security 20:3 I 80 acknowledgesthat Hersh‘s thesis is ”unconfirmed,”but relies on it nonetheless to help demonstrate the ”perils of pr~liferation.”~ In this article, I present a different interpretation of South Asia‘s 1990crisis. My research suggests that a fourth Indo-Pakistani war was indeed a possibility but that Hersh misinterprets the nuclear dimension of the crisis. I have found little evidence to corroborate his core description of events, much of which appears to be based on interviews with one anonymous U.S. analy~t.~ To the contrary, a number of senior South Asian and U.S. officials have categoricallydenied Hersh’s report. I will argue below that India and Pakistan were deterred from war in 1990by each side’s knowledge that the other was nuclear weapon-capable, and therefore that any military hostilities could have escalated to the nuclear level. My case study of South Asia’s 1990war scare is framed by severalimportant issues in the scholarly analysis of nuclear proliferation. At one level, it is embedded in a lively debate over the consequencesof proliferation extending back to the early...