Drafts

The last few years have revealed an increasing trend of ‘vertical proliferation’ in the South Asian region. Recent revelations about quantitative and qualitative developments in the nuclear and missile inventories of India and Pakistan indicate a higher likelihood of an impending nuclear arms competition in the region. If the disintegration of the Soviet Union set any precedent, it suggests that an arms race would be to the detriment of Pakistan’s national security.

Ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have given Russia an opportunity to test the employment of electronic warfare (EW) capabilities that it has developed over the last decade in order to deter and counter military threats from the West. News reports suggest that pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine have utilized Russian systems and concepts for electronic warfare in their operations against Ukrainian government forces.  In that conflict, jamming technologies have hindered the operations of monitoring drones flown by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Over the past decade, the question of how to prevent nuclear proliferation in both the Middle East and East Asia has gained significant urgency. Apparently in part due to Iran’s progress towards acquiring a nuclear weapons breakout capability and North Korea’s acquisition of rudimentary nuclear weapons, several U.S. allies and friendly states appear to be at least opening the door to potential future pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Why do countries deploy nuclear weapons abroad?

There are many evidences that India and Pakistan see the principle of minimum nuclear deterrence as a basis for their nuclear doctrines.

Following usual rhetoric, the end of the Cold War replaced the global competition for supremacy of the two great powers and fears of a large-scale nuclear conflict between them with a new era of cooperation and consolidating efforts for enhancing international security.

Scholars and practitioners argue that transparency will play an important role in “cultivating confidence” on the “road to zero.” But, the conceptual definitions and implied meanings of transparency vary among the many disciplines and communities involved in the study and practice of international security. Moreover, there is little to no consensus on the origins, mechanics, or dynamics of this phenomenon. 

Contours of South Asian Nuclear Order

The paper seeks to examine some important drivers that determine the emerging South Asian Nuclear order.  South Asia’s nuclear order is easily the most dynamic one in the contemporary world. It is also widely considered to be the most dangerous and volatile nuclear order. India and Pakistan officially declared their nuclear status in 1998 although they are supposed to have crossed the nuclear threshold by developing what analyst has called recessed deterrents in the late 1980s.

Though China-Pakistan relations have been viewed by both countries as ‘all weather, time-tested’ strategic cooperative partner all along, there are comparative few studies relating to this bilateral relation in the research field of Chinese foreign affairs in China. Considering the extraordinary importance of Pakistan in the integral structure of China’s foreign relations, this kind of phenomenon in the academy of China is quite abnormal. The year 2011 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Pakistan.

Interests, Cooperation, Confidence, and Trust

There has been a lot of study on trust-building between national states. However, analysts defined the term trust in various ways. What makes things more complicated is the fact that people tended to use a number of related terms – such as trust, confidence, cooperation, and shared interests – in the same line without differentiating their different meanings and without discussing their relationships relative to each other. This makes the task of understanding trust and the mechanism for trust-building even more difficult.