South Asian nuclear arms race accelerates amid India-Pakistan standoff
By
Sampath Perera
28 February 2017
Recent weeks have witnessed a further intensification of the nuclear arms race in South Asia, with arch-rivals India and Pakistan both carrying out tests of nuclear-capable missiles and making bellicose war threats.
India and Pakistan came perilously close to all-out war last fall, after India boasted it had terminated its policy of “strategic restraint” and would continue to mount military strikes inside Pakistan until Islamabad stops all logistical support for the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir.
For two months thereafter, the Indian and Pakistani armies exchanged daily, often lethal, artillery and gun-fire barrages across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistan-held Kashmir.
While the cross-border firing has now abated, relations between South Asia’s nuclear powers remain fraught and both countries have stepped up their war preparations.
India has reportedly spent more than US $3 billion (20,000 crore rupees) since September on emergency arms purchases from Russia, Israel, and France. According to Indian press accounts, the purchases include ammunition, engines and spare parts for fighter jets and other aircraft, armour-piercing rockets for battle-tanks, and anti-tank missiles. The ammunition and parts are supposed to ensure that India has the capacity to wage at least 10 days of “intense fighting.”
India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has effectively frozen all ties with Islamabad since the mid-September attack that Islamist Kashmiri separatists carried out on the Indian Army base at Uri—an attack the BJP, with the full support of India’s political establishment, blamed on Pakistan. In a statement…