In the progress of nuclearisation in South Asia, India has been the leader in the sense of provoking the next stage of escalation at every turn. In this context one of the questions that needs to be asked is the degree to which nuclear weapons in Pakistan has now become part of the Pakistani identity and the extent to which getting rid of nuclear weapons would need a certain kind of vacuum at least within the elite circles.
May 1998 was a turning point in South Asian nuclear history. The tests at Pokhran were initiated by the F3IP government which had just come to power through a process which was characterised by extreme secrecy so much so that even the ministry of defence was one of the last to find out about it. The tests ended a period which had been underway from 1974, characterised by nuclear ambiguity or nuclear opaqueness. In 1974, India conducted its first nuclear test, which was described as a peaceful nuclear explosion. For the next 14 years, India worked hard to increase nuclear capacity, and Pakistan tried to systematise a haphazard nuclear programme. By the mid-1980s it was clear that Pakistan had in fact the weapon, but it took till 1998 really for that weapon to become public and the official nuclearisation of South Asia to happen.
New Delhi's decision to proceed with the nuclear explosions in 1998 is confusing from the point of view of international relations. At one stroke, India managed to get rid of its strategic advantage over Pakistan. India is many times more powerful and has resources far greater than Pakistan. The explosion allowed Pakistan to equate itself with India simply by setting off their own weapons. It became very clear that the aim of setting of these weapons was in fact to provoke Pakistan to do the same. Paradoxically, the fact that Pakistan was able to respond in the way that it did, came as a surprise to many in India. Until then, within the scientific community in particular, there had always been a suspicion that Pakistan's claims to have nuclear weapons were in fact bogus. But among a number of political leaders the attitude was that if India managed to provoke Pakistan into following suit, it would replicate in South Asia the putative cold war scenario of the United States exhausting the USSR into submission.
What is confusing, however, is why a country which already had a strategic advantage over another would decide to take an action which equated the two of them. The argument, confusing to some scholars, was that once the two countries had nuclear weapons it would result in a series of agreements and conventions which would prevent further escalation and impart greater stability in the relations between the two countries. This seemed logical from a theoretical point of view. Ironically of course this so-called theory of deterrence did not seem to work in South Asia because within a year of the tests, the Kargil war took place, initiated not by the stronger but the weaker country. This clearly seemed to suggest that not only had Pakistan equalised its strategic position vis-à-vis India, it also acquired a certain amount of freedom to take actions which in the past would be seen as extremely provocative and would perhaps have led to full-scale war. So the logic, now, of nuclear weapons in South Asia appears to be that it does not prevent war but prevents war from escalating. So, we can now assume that the series of confrontations and low-intensity conflicts that have been taking place in the region for a long time will only increase.