1. Uncovering illusions
   A simple enough way of highlighting the problematic character of such claims for the efficacy of nuclear weapons in South Asia after the 1998 tests in India is to look at the early predictions/claims made by the prominent supporters of those tests (the pro-bomb lobby) who, in one way or the other, were able to enter the domain of public discourse in India. Each and every such prominent member made at least one of the following predictions. Very few made all of the below listed predictions. Most made more than one of these predictions. Pakistani anti-nuclear activists can, no doubt, draw up their own list of failed predictions/claims made by their country's pro-nuclear lobby.
2. Mutual nuclear deterrence would now ensure that there would not be any danger of an actual nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. During the Kargil conflict of 1999 some of these very predictors now publicly argued that Pakistan would not dare attack India with nuclear weapons because the U.S. would not allow Pakistan to do so. The justification had shifted from the efficacy of mutual deterrence to the powerful restraint imposed by the U.S. on an otherwise not-to-be-trusted foe. Others declared that there could not be a guarantee that Pakistan might not resort to nuclear weapons although given India's greater nuclear firepower this would be foolish on its part. Nevertheless, India had to be prepared just in case. In effect, in the context of a war-like situation, one-time confident proponents of deterrence efficacy exhibited a much more diluted sense of confidence in the power of mutual deterrence.
3. The advent of nuclear weapons in both countries would now prevent even conventional wars from taking place. Kargil took place partly because of the thinking that Pakistan possessed a 'nuclear shield' behind which they could take new risks on the conventional warfare front. To be sure, Pakistan started the war but shouldn't our 'strategic experts' have exhibited less trust in the efficacy of nuclear weapons in this respect? Obviously, at the time (just after the 1998 tests) their priority was drumming up any and all arguments for supporting bomb acquisition.
4. Nuclear weapons would bring in greater regional stability and better relations between India and Pakistan. Despite the recent thaw in Indo-Pakistan relations for reasons that have nothing to do with nuclear weapons, in a broader historical survey, the period since 1998 was marked by a war in Kargil, a level of massive military mobilisation-brinkmanship of a kind that has never taken place between two countries in peacetime since 1947, a failed summit, verbal expressions of hostility between the two governments reaching new lows, attempts to play off the U.S. against each other, continued impasse in Kashmir.
5. Since nuclear weapons would prevent conventional warfare, as well as bring about greater stability, expenditure on conventional forms of military defence and preparedness would soon be reduced. Defence expenditure in India, in real terms, has greatly increased and most pro-bomb advocates would say this is unavoidable because nuclear weapons cannot address the needs that conventional weapons address.
6. There would be no competitive nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan. The former President of India, K. R. Narayanan, was far from alone in publicly and repeatedly declaring that there was no danger of a competitive arms race between the two countries. One searched in vain for pro-bomb advocates who had the grace or the honesty to say that although there was bound to be action-reaction preparations between the two countries, i.e., a competitive arms race of some sort, this would be managed and controlled, but not prevented or preventable. Both countries would be stockpiling fissile materials, extending missile ranges, drawing up target plans, and so on. Which is, of course, what did happen.
7. India would only have a 'minimum credible deterrent'. There can be no stable 'minimum deterrent', since this is never a fixed position but a moving one connected to the preparations and arsenal development of one's presumed opponents. Further complicating the picture is the Indian desire to have such a deterrent vis-à-vis China (some voices even call for preparing such a deterrent vis-à-vis the U.S.) which propels Pakistan to worry about how minimum its deterrent should, or can be. Meanwhile, U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) development will push China to consider expanding and developing its arsenal with all the knock-on effects this can be expected to have on India and Pakistan. The end result in India is that lots of pro-nuclearists talk of only having a minimum but when it comes to specifying what this means, vagueness, imprecision and uncertainty abound.
8. Nuclear weapons would make India more independent - nay - defiant of the U.S. in its foreign policy behaviour. The most striking characteristic of Indian foreign policy behaviour since 1998 vis-à-vis the U.S. is its subservient character and the near-desperation with which Indian governments are wooing the U.S. and wanting a 'strategic partnership' with it wherein the terms can never be those of genuine equality or partnership (given the enormous asymmetry of power between the two, regardless of India's nuclear weapons) but must basically be on the lines established by the much more powerful country, the U.S. Despite all declarations to the contrary and self-delusions disguised by calls to serve the needs of 'national interest', India has behaved with obsequiousness towards the U.S. once it accepted India as a de facto nuclear power; but one which Washington is determined to maintain at the level of a 'small nuclear power' (SNP). The point is not whether India is now justified or not in seeking a strategic alliance with the U.S. but that this earlier confident declaration has been disproved by subsequent turn of events. Nor is it enough to say that the U.S. has taken India more seriously after 1998. It has done the same with Pakistan after September 11, 2001.
9. A nuclear India with now enhanced bargaining power would actually help the cause of global nuclear disarmament by strengthening the momentum towards it. In a context where the post-1998 'nuclear India' does not possess the courage to come out forcefully against the BMD and instead is manoeuvring for some contract crumbs on offer from the BMD-TMD programme as a whole, the less said about this ridiculous claim the better. It is tantamount to claiming that the best way to nuclearly disarm is to nuclearly arm! This is as silly as it sounds.

ii) A triad of views and former ambiguists
When, in mid-2003, India finally called off its 10-month long massive military mobilisation along the border with Pakistan and began the process of reducing the tensions it had unnecessarily ratcheted up earlier, a revealing episode took place. The then Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, declared the mobilisation a great success. India had, in effect, called Pakistan's 'nuclear bluff'. India had shown that it was not afraid to risk war or teach a lesson militarily to Pakistan. General Musharraf, on the other side, was equally quick to declare that Pakistan's nuclear weapons, far from being a bluff, were the key reason why India 'backed off' and did not militarily attack Pakistan. In effect, he had, through his nuclear arsenal called India's bluff. The BJP-chosen presidential candidate at the time, A. P. J. Kalam, while on his campaign trail and when asked by the press for his opinion, publicly declared that nuclear weapons had prevented the outbreak of conventional war between India and Pakistan despite the massive mobilisation. In effect, to the embarrassment of his BJP backers, he was publicly endorsing the claim made by Gen. Musharraf himself. The BJP had to quickly announce that this was Mr. Kalam's personal opinion not shared by the BJP. Shortly after this, the retired former Chief of Army Staff, Gen. V. P. Malik, publicly disputed both the claims of Mr. Vajpayee and of Mr. Kalam. Nuclear weapons, he declared, were irrelevant to the issue of conventional war and could not deter such wars. They could only deter nuclear exchanges and wars.

What is revealing here is that three senior figures all believe that nuclear weapons are efficacious but they cannot come to an agreement about what they are efficacious about or the range is over which their 'wondrous' deterrent properties work. They not only disagreed with each other in a concrete historical situation, showing that the outcome of a specific historical context still does not give a decisive answer to claims and counter-claims made even by the members of the pro-bomb lobby, which otherwise shares a belief in the general efficacy of nuclear weapons, but actually and forcefully, contradicted each other. In its own way, this episode highlighted precisely this dilemma about the essentially problematic nature of efficacy claims made for nuclear deterrence.

Just as revealing is what happened immediately after the Pokharan II tests of May 11, 1998 when long-time nuclear ambiguists suddenly became nuclear advocates. These were people who before May 11 had argued in favour of India's posture of ambiguity, of neither closing the nuclear option or of exercising it. When they were ambiguists for longer periods, in many cases over decades, they justified their position by positing both the deterrent potential of nuclear weapons and by pointing out the limitations and weakness, even fallacies, of nuclear deterrence thinking and arguments. After May 11, having endorsed the tests, they could now only base their case on the 'undeniable' deterrence value of nuclear weapons. The last thing they would wish to do, and for the most part avoided doing, is highlighting the problematic nature of nuclear weapons and the limitations of deterrence thinking because that could only weaken the case they were now propagating in their new role as unwavering supporters of nuclear weapons acquisition. Salesmanship had effectively overtaken intellectual scrupulousness.

iii) Abstractions of nuclear deterrence
All claims for the efficacy of nuclear weapons rest on the presumed properties of deterrence. Deterrence arguments at their most rigorous provide an utterly abstract logic to explain why countries that have nuclear weapons will not engage each other in a nuclear war. The case made for nuclear weapons through the acceptance of this logic, carries serious flaws.

1. The argument is coherent only within the strictest and most demanding conditions of rationality of behaviour, which are unavailable and inoperable in the real world we live in. To believe that nuclear deterrence can be relied upon to 'always work' is to impose extraordinary conditions on the key agents concerned, namely those who control, command and man the nuclear weapon systems of the countries having them. Nuclear deterrence is the faith-like belief that terrible fear (of the consequences of nuclear war) will always promote wise decisions by fallible human beings operating under conditions of sometimes extreme tension and always operating under circumstances that neither the side seeking to deter or the side supposed to be deterred can ever fully control. Deterrence is hope disguised as strategic wisdom.
2. The abstract logic of deterrence -- being abstract -- applies universally. That is to say, the same fundamental arguments and efficacy claims apply everywhere and for all countries that have the capacities to make nuclear weapons. If having nuclear weapons enhances the safety of one country with actual or potential nuclear opponents, they do so for all other countries having actual or potential nuclear opponents. Very few nuclear strategists (Kenneth Waltz is a partial exception) are prepared to be so consistent as to endorse all countries having the capacity to do so to actually go ahead and possess such weapons because they would presumably make their regions and the world in general safer. Most strategists and pro-nuclear thinkers retreat from the demands of such an abstract logic, and from the factitious world of super-rational human beings and super-controlled environment that this logic assumes, to the real world, where horizontal proliferation of such weapons to other parts of the world is seen as de-stabilising or dangerous. Such strategists and supporters of the bomb for their own country are intellectually 'irresponsible' in being deeply inconsistent. They hypocritically combine the use of the abstract logic of deterrence to justify their own country's acquisition of nuclear weapons but parade a more sober sense of 'responsibility' and a much more down-to-earth (rather than abstract) sense of reality in recognising the dangers involved by such proliferation elsewhere.
3. The abstractness of the case made for the efficacy of nuclear weapons means it is also a strongly de-historicised, de-socialised, indeed de-politicised, way of thinking about the impact and implications of nuclear weapons in the world we live in. To make the case for nuclear weapons logically consistent and highly rigorous requires constructing a case that must not be embedded in an actual or living politics that, of course, is always historicised and socialised. That is why so much of nuclear strategising takes the form of game-theoretic, rational choice modelling, which for all its incidental insights and chess-like attractions to devoted practitioners, is effectively a retreat from thinking seriously and sophisticatedly about the actual world we live in. Like a lot of neo-classical economic theorising, there is quite sophisticated argumentation by economists (and nuclear strategists) at secondary and tertiary levels, but it is encased within a broader framework of extraordinary foundational and empirical inadequacy.

   Given this abstract character, it is hardly surprising that nuclear strategists and run-of-the-mill bomb supporters are invariably one kind of realist or the other. Realism, here, does not imply being highly realistic; in fact, far from it. It refers to the formal label for a particular school of thought (and its various branches) concerning how to understand international relations. Realism, whether understood as theory or paradigm or even as merely a world-view, is also marked by its fundamentally ahistoric and asocial character. Realism is basically a crude, but within severe limits also useful, manual for the conduct of foreign policy statecraft for strong or aspiring powers. It is a manual divided essentially into two parts -- one part providing the language of apologetics for governments; and the other providing rough guidelines, a tool-kit of do’s and don'ts, that can then help operationalise foreign policy behaviour.

4. Nuclear deterrence logic addresses concerns about nuclear war prevention. But it does not at all adequately address another issue that is also a basic motivation for countries acquiring nuclear weapons -- wanting such weapons because they are seen as instruments of power for general foreign policy support. Quite apart from the issue of how useful nuclear weapons (as such putative instruments) are, what this means is that their possession, development, deployment, brandishing and flaunting is always embedded in a politics that has little to do with issues of basic nuclear survival, and far more to do with the issue of how best to enhance the state's political or foreign policy 'advantages', 'authority', 'power', 'status', etc. The idea that nuclear weapons must only be treated as 'instruments of last resort' is thus vitiated from the very beginning. They are never treated as only that!
   
   What does this imply? First, it means that between politically hostile nuclear rivals like India and Pakistan, there invariably arise situations of nuclear-related tensions not because either side actually wants to use nuclear weapons against the other but simply because nuclear weapons are themselves embedded in the logic of confrontational politics and not in some unreal, abstract logic of 'deterrence behaviour' models. Nuclear-related tensions emerge out of the very fact of nuclear weapons possession. A new layer of tension is thereby added to the levels of tension between politically hostile rivals that pre-exist the advent of nuclear weapons. This, in itself, is a standing refutation of the standard pro-nuclear claim that nuclear weapons reduce tensions and enhance stability and security.
   
   Second, the greatest danger of nuclear weapons use lies in the 'escalatory dynamic' that always resides in real-life political crisis situations for which the reassurances provided by the abstract logic of deterrence are either misleading, or at best, irrelevant. The chain of events that threaten to erupt in circumstances of political hostility between nuclear-equipped rivals goes like this: political hostility does lead to periodic crisis situations that all too often carry an escalatory dynamic which has the potential to reach the level of actual nuclear exchanges. The very point about an escalatory dynamic is that escalation beyond a point is rarely deliberate and controlled but indeed its opposite -- taking on an essentially uncontrolled and 'reactive' character on both sides. A situation of dangerous uncertainty is thereby reached which neither side to begin with had any desire or intention of reaching whatever the later, post-crisis/post-facto, self-serving rationalisations might be. This is the crucial lesson of the Cuban missile crisis and indeed of the various crisis situations of the past between India and Pakistan. No one should claim that such a situation will definitely lead to a nuclear exchange or that it will never ever do so. But it must be recognised that this chain of developments with its in-built tendency towards an 'escalatory dynamic' most certainly exists.

5. The claim that nuclear weapons bring stability and security ultimately rests on a foundation that cannot properly bear the weight of such a judgement. Nuclear weapons are supposed to have provided enhanced security and stability because after their acquisition there has been no nuclear war. Why has there been no nuclear war or exchange? This is because nuclear deterrence works. How do I know it works? Because there has been no nuclear war or exchange.

There are two crucial problems with this 'enhanced security' claim. First, there is the counterfactual nature of the claim itself whereby it cannot be either definitively proved or refuted. This being so, the case for and against its efficaciousness must be decided on the basis of a 'balance of plausibility' keeping in view the coherence of the arguments themselves and whatever illuminating historical evidence there is. Here the anti-nuclear case wins hands-down, i.e., it is much more plausible.

Second, there is not just an extreme or merely 'breakdown' test of whether or not nuclear weapons bring security. There is another more routinely applicable, continuous and pervasive test that exists quite apart from the 'breakdown' issue: do nuclear weapons actually make rival countries hostile to each other more secure? Was this the case between the U.S. and USSR during their hostile Cold War past? The same between India and Pakistan and between Israel and, say Iran, tomorrow? Will the future development and deployment of the BMD by the U.S. and its impact on Russian and Chinese nuclear preparations and developments make matters more secure? The very diffuseness, generality and partial intangibility of the notion of security means there is no universally acceptable answer to this question. But once again, the 'balance of plausibility', given the actual evolution of the world we live in -- the insane levels of actual nuclear weapons production, storage, deployment, R&D, proliferation -- favours the anti-nuclear side, not the pro-nuclear side.

In this regard, it may be noted that George Lee Butler, the head of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) of the U.S. between 1991-94 (the one person the U.S. president had to speak to before pressing the nuclear button), and one-time staunch believer in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence, on retirement declared that the honest truth was that throughout the Cold War period, the nuclear establishment of both the USSR and US did not feel secure, hence the absurd character and levels of their nuclear preparations, but deeply insecure. There is, in fact, one piece of evidence favouring the anti-nuclear case that, though not clinching, is certainly revealing -- the proportion of defectors from the one-time pro-nuclear side to the anti-nuclear side is far greater than the opposite flow of defectors. It is probably around 25-30 times greater. Admittedly, this usually happens after retirement (itself revealing about the relationship between deterrence advocacy and the pressures of careerism) but the number has included the topmost civilian and military 'nuclear warriors' of the past, now repudiating that past.

II. Moving Towards Nuclear Sanity
We cannot stabilise a nuclear regime in South Asia. Nuclear weapons destabilise the security conditions between rival nuclear-equipped countries like India and Pakistan and the region (South Asia) where they exist cheek-by-jowl. Of course, one can fully expect the two governments of India and Pakistan to make such stability claims. But that does not mean we should take this seriously.1 The tenuousness of such stability claims can be easily perceived by just asking ourselves what would most likely happen in South Asia if the U.S. government decides to carry out nuclear testing once again! As long as nuclear weapons exist, you can only try and make the situation less unstable and less insecure by transitional measures such as nuclear risk reduction. These are transitional measures because they cannot, in themselves, make the region nuclear safe; in fact, they make it only less unsafe. Genuine and enduring nuclear safety comes from being 'nuclear free' regionally and globally. There is no substitute for nuclear disarmament and to believe that we must always 'live with nuclear weapons' is to make a grievous mistake. Interestingly,