If you go with this definition then the bigger threat is from arm race of middle east. Our arm race is nothing. And this arm race is never going to stop whether we go peaceful or not.
New Recruit
Another bias western BS article . talking about Indo-Pakistan race and it implications.Really US telling us about us about arms race forgetting it's past of Cold war and its race with USSR how blindly they tested 1000 nuclear weapons and created largest stock of world deadleast weapons forgetting it's Implications on world.Usa is most hypocritical nation in the world when it comes to arms race.india don't need american dictation on world peace. Indians never had a expansionist approach or policies like Usa and history is there to witness who had done what.
- All are requested not to post any comment till the complete Research Paper of Toby Dalton, Jaclyn Tandler is posted
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- This paper was published dated SEPTEMBER 13, 2012
Understanding the Arms "Race" in South Asia
The apparently rapid pace of nuclear developments in India and Pakistan has led many analysts to warn of an impending arms race between the two countries. India and Pakistan are indeed entangled in a long-standing security competition. However, they are not two closely matched opponents engaged in a competitive tit-for-tat cycle of nuclear weapons development in which one state makes advancements to its nuclear capability and the other reacts in kind.
An analysis of aggregated missile test data since 1998 reveals that the armament dynamic is far more complex. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs are largely decoupled. The data show little correlation between the adversaries’ testing behavior contrary to what would be expected in a classic arms race. In fact, the types and ranges of missiles under development provide concrete evidence of the divergence in their nuclear objectives and security strategies.
India and Pakistan are indeed racing toward their respective national security objectives, but they are running on different tracks and chasing vastly different goals. Pakistan is building weapons systems to deter India from conventional military operations below the nuclear threshold. India is developing systems primarily to strengthen its strategic deterrent against China, meaning this dynamic is not confined to the subcontinent. Government policies that aim to change the trajectory of the South Asian security competition need to take these complexities into account.
THE SOUTH ASIAN SECURITY DYNAMIC
In its third missile test of the year, India conducted the first test launch of its new Agni V ballistic missile on April 19. Six days later, Pakistan tested the Shaheen IA, also a ballistic missile, one of six missile tests undertaken by Islamabad in 2012. This recent spate of nuclear-capable missile tests in South Asia has revived long-standing concerns that India and Pakistan are entangled in a nuclear arms race.
These concerns might be passed off as Western media hype, if not for the serious scholars and practitioners voicing them. Recently, for instance, retired Indian Navy Admiral Arun Prakash argued that “India and Pakistan are edging dangerously close to a spiral in the growth of their nuclear weapons arsenals. This could become a mindless race, driven by mutual suspicion, rather than the actual needs of deterrence and stability.”1 Similarly, Hudson Institute defense analyst Richard Weitz argued that the most dangerous aspect of security in South Asia “is almost certainly the nuclear arms racing between [India and Pakistan].”2
In recent years, both states have indeed tested a broad spectrum of ballistic and cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, including short-range, tactical systems. But is this frequent testing and development of similar types and ranges of missiles really indicative of an arms race or is there another dynamic at play?
The variable most frequently used by academics and strategists to answer that question is military expenditure because it is reasonably easy to track and measure in consistent terms over time. But the strategic context in South Asia has changed since 1998, the year both India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests and announced possession of nuclear weapons. The recent missile testing, for instance, takes place against the backdrop of significant economic growth and an associated quadrupling of military spending in India, but serious economic troubles and comparatively slow growth in military spending in Pakistan. Expenditures alone therefore cannot describe a potential arms race.
Missile testing provides an interesting alternative window into the current security dynamic between India and Pakistan. Through analyzing aggregated missile test data since 1998, it becomes apparent that the Indo-Pakistani relationship is explained less by classic conventional or nuclear arms race models than by the asymmetries in their security strategies as reflected in the types of nuclear delivery capabilities they are developing. These asymmetries are widely recognized, but the missile data add concrete evidence of the extent to which Indian and Pakistani nuclear capabilities are disjunctive. Pakistan is building systems to deter India from conventional military operations below the nuclear threshold, while India is developing systems primarily to strengthen its strategic deterrent against China. Both states may be racing, but they are running on different tracks and chasing vastly different goals.
ON YOUR MARKS
Since before World War II, scholars have sought to define, model, and hypothesize the causes and effects of arms races, from the famed Dreadnoughtrace between Great Britain and Germany in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War nuclear contest between the United States and Soviet Union. In the academic literature, an “arms race” is defined as a competitive, reciprocal, peacetime increase or improvement in armaments by two states perceiving themselves to be in an adversarial relationship. Early scholars of arms race theory hypothesized that an arms race is animated by a security dilemma in which a state’s pursuit of security decreases the real or perceived security of its adversary, producing an “action-reaction cycle” in which one state reacts to the other’s current or anticipated military and political behavior, and vice versa.3
The interactive competition may result in a rivalry that can be quite destabilizing and dangerous, not to mention expensive. U.S. and Soviet deployments of thousands of nuclear warheads during the Cold War—in total, sufficient to obliterate life on earth several times over—demonstrated the absurd heights to which adversaries might carry an arms race.
Academics and strategists have modeled arms races extensively, relying for the most part on statistical analysis of rates of military expenditures or, less frequently, stockpiling of particular categories of armaments.4 In particular, scholars look for the existence of a linear relationship between the change in military stocks or expenditure of one country and that of its rival’s rate of change in the same areas. Looking at relationship-based rates of change seems to provide the best evidence of the action-reaction dynamic at the heart of the arms race. Several scholars have applied this model to South Asia directly to test for empirical evidence of an arms race. However, studies on military expenditures by India and Pakistan have produced no unanimity of view on whether an arms race existed historically, let alone today.5
Military expenditure data may be relatively easy to collect and track, but it comes with a high degree of uncertainty. Publicly available budget data presumably omit secret programs, including some nuclear and missile development efforts. The data also tend to capture just one aspect of a security dynamic and are relatively insensitive to other trends or external factors, as well as to the military capabilities still under development.
For instance, during several periods of its history, including in the last decade, the United States provided sizable assistance to Pakistan’s military, which inflated military spending. During the same period, India began to increase its own military spending in gross terms consistent with its economic growth, but its expenditure did not increase as a percentage of GDP. Figure 1 demonstrates this real and concurrent growth in the military expenditures of both countries. On aggregate, then, change in military expenditures in the last decade might suggest a linear relationship characteristic of an arms race, but the reality is much more complex. Focusing just on expenditure misses the defining feature of the evolving security paradigm in South Asia—the introduction of nuclear weapons in 1998.
