Rational Deterrence and Crisis Stability - A case study of Indo-Pakistani nuclear deterrence over 20 years

This MA thesis applies a qualitative case study to assess Kenneth Waltz’s rationalist emphasis on nuclear deterrence and crisis stability: that the spread of nuclear weapons provides stability and leads to more secure relations between conflicting rivals. The thesis situates close to the debate between Waltz and Scott Sagan in their book “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons – A debate renewed” on crisis stability in the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Unlike Waltz and Sagan’s debate, which draws on evidence from the entire span of the conflict, this thesis works to assess Waltz’s three requirements for effective deterrence to two isolated cases from after India and Pakistan’s official nuclear turn in 1998. Followingly, it examines how Waltz’s requirements can explain the dynamics of the conflict over time by comparing the observations from both cases. The first case is the Kargil war in 1999, where Pakistani forces infiltrated Kargil in Indian administered Kashmir. After three months of fighting between Pakistani and Indian conventional forces, the war ended with Pakistan’s withdrawal. For this first case, Pakistan as the aggressing state is assessed to the three requirements to observe whether Pakistan effectively deterred India and made it limit the fighting to areas surrounding Kargil. The second case is the Balakot crisis in 2019, where India reacted to what it conceived as a Pakistanisponsored suicide-bombing in Pulwama, India, by conducting airstrikes inside Pakistan near the town of Balakot. After enduring dogfights between the Pakistani air force (PAF) and the Indian air force (IAF), where a Pakistani pilot was shot down and imprisoned by India, the countries threatened escalation by firing missiles. The de-escalation of the crisis followed when Pakistan released the pilot back to India. For this second case, India as the aggressing state is assessed to the three requirements to observe whether India effectively deterred Pakistan. The thesis operationalises a set of indicators from each of the three requirements, as a step to grappling challenges connected to measurement validity. It uses open-accessed documents as the empirical data, allowing others to replicate the study as a step to secure reliable measures. By observing open-accessed documents to the set of operationalised indicators, the thesis concludes that the evidence indicates that neither Pakistan during the Kargil war nor India during the Balakot crisis met Waltz’s three requirements for effective deterrence. Assessing the cases as isolated to the requirements neither can be characterised as a case of deterrence success. It encourages future research to consider how international actors’ meddling indirectly affected the de-escalation of the crises as measures aside from Waltz’s three requirements for effective deterrence