Pride and Prejudice and Prithvis: Strategic Weapons Behavior in South Asia

Abstract

South Asian security scholarship has focused extensively on the causes and consequences of India's and Pakistan's May 1998 decisions to nuclearize. However, the number of plausible explanations for especially India's decision to test nuclear weapons leaves our understanding of South Asian strategic weapons decisions muddled. Narang examines the ballistic missile flight-testing pattern in the region as a proxy for nuclearization and as an indicator for both states' strategic weapons decisions, attempting to clarify the variables that drive both India and Pakistan to test strategic weapons when they do. He shows that Pakistan is predictably driven by Indian-generated security concerns. As the more powerful actor in the region, India's motivations are more complex; domestic politics and party ideology are the unit-level variables primarily responsible for India's strategic weapons decisions. In particular, Congress and the BJP have variable conceptions of Indian pride; the former views strategic weapons as symbols of Indian self-reliance and technological sophistication ("techno-nationalist" pride) while the latter views them as a key component of its "oppositional nationalist" ideology. These different conceptions of Indian pride lead the two parties to test strategic weapons for different reasons, with testable implications for regional security dynamics.