Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy Dara Kay Cohen, an International Security Program (ISP) Faculty Affiliate, and three former ISP Fellows, Ahsan I. Butt, Rachel Elizabeth Whitlark, and Ketian Zhang, will receive International Security Studies Section awards at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto, Canada, in March 2019.

Scholars have argued that acquiring nuclear weapons should allow states the luxury of exiting conventional arms races. In turn, a decreased budgetary focus on conventional arms should make possible greater spending on social welfare. The author contests this logic of nuclear substitution by examining its most likely exponent, Pakistan. As a poor, underdeveloped state, a nuclear Pakistan should have welcomed the opportunity to cease its arms race with India, and spend greater sums on its population's welfare. Instead, the article shows that Pakistan has doubled down on its pre-nuclear conventional posture, mainly because of its revisionism over Kashmir.