South Asia

35 Items

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual news conference in Moscow

AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko

Journal Article - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

How the Next Nuclear Arms Race Will Be Different from the Last One

| 2019

All the world's nuclear-armed states (except for North Korea) have begun modernizing and upgrading their arsenals, leading many observers to predict that the world is entering a new nuclear arms race. While that outcome is not yet inevitable, it is likely, and if it happens, the new nuclear arms race will be different and more dangerous than the one we remember. More nuclear-armed countries in total, and three competing great powers rather than two, will make the competition more complex. Meanwhile, new non-nuclear weapon technologies — such as ballistic missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology — will make nuclear deterrence relationships that were once somewhat stable less so.

Skulls at site of executions ordered by Pakistan military officials, Bangladesh, December 13, 1971.

AP

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Bargaining Away Justice: India, Pakistan, and the International Politics of Impunity for the Bangladesh Genocide

    Author:
  • Gary Bass
| Fall 2016

During the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence from Pakistan, the Pakistan army carried out a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. The perpetrators never faced trial. Archival documents reveal how India and Bangladesh sacrificed the opportunity for war crimes trials to gain Pakistan’s agreement on key security goals—the Simla peace agreement and recognition of Bangladesh’s independence. The legacy of this decision continues to blight Bangladesh’s politics.

East Pakistanis, fleeing from their homes to seek safety in India, as they pass through the provisional capital of Chuadanga April 16, 1971.

AP

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Pakistan's Forgotten Genocide—A Review Essay

| Fall 2014

In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,Gary Bass argues that both the Nixon administration and the global community purposely ignored Pakistan’s genocide of civilians in East Pakistan. Sumit Ganguly reviews the book and reflects on the significance of the 1971 genocide.

Ethnofederalism: The Worst Form of Institutional Arrangement…?

Getty Images

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Ethnofederalism: The Worst Form of Institutional Arrangement…?

    Author:
  • Liam Anderson
| Summer 2014

Critics of ethnofederalism—a political system in which federal subunits reflect ethnic groups’ territorial distribution—argue that it facilitates secession and state collapse. An examination of post-1945 ethnofederal states, however, shows that ethnofederalism has succeeded more often than not.

Gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment recovered en route to Libya in 2003.

U.S. Department of Energy

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Nonproliferation Emperor Has No Clothes: The Gas Centrifuge, Supply-Side Controls, and the Future of Nuclear Proliferation

| Spring 2014

Policymakers have long focused on preventing nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling technology. Even developing countries, however, may now possess the technical ability to create nuclear weapons. The history of gas centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective. To reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, policymakers will have look toward the cultural, normative, and political organization of the world.

An unidentified Mujahideen rebel stands on guard on high ground over looking the rocky mountainous while on patrol in the area of Kunar Province near the Pakistan border, Feb., 1980, Afghanistan.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad

| Winter 2010/11

Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U.S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes.

A supporter of Pakistan Muslim League-N party arranges an oil lamp at the model of Chaghi Mountain, the site of Pakistan’s nuclear test, in connection with the celebrations of its 10th anniversary, May 27, 2008 in Islamabad, Pakistan.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Daedalus

The Minimum Deterrent & Beyond

| Fall 2009

"...[A] primary goal in the next decades must be to remove this risk of near global self-destruction by drastically reducing nuclear forces to a level where this outcome is not possible, but where a deterrent value is preserved — in other words, to a level of minimum deterrence. This conception was widely discussed in the early years of the nuclear era, but it drowned in the Cold War flood of weaponry. No matter how remote the risk of civilization collapse may seem now — despite its being so vivid only a few decades ago — the elimination of this risk, for this century and centuries to come, must be a primary driver for radical reductions in nuclear weapons."