India, Pakistan Tinker with Nuclear Deterrence Paradox

For a brief time last month, it looked like the India-Pakistan conflict risked spiraling into nuclear war.

The U.S. and other nations raced to calm things down, eventually producing a ceasefire that is still holding roughly two weeks later, Daniel Ten Kate reported for Bloomberg News.

So far, the Stability-Instability Paradox has shown that cooler heads will eventually prevail.

On its face, the episode showed that nuclear deterrence worked as intended—but it may have set the stage for a more dangerous conflict down the road. India and Pakistan have long been a case study in what’s known as the Stability-Instability Paradox.

The theory, credited to international relations professor Glenn Snyder in 1965, says that while the threat of mutually assured destruction reduces the likelihood of nuclear powers clashing head-on, it makes it more likely they’ll engage in peripheral conventional wars or proxy fights.

In other words, nuclear powers are more likely to engage in smaller-scale skirmishes because they can be confident fear of nuclear war will keep things from spiraling out of control.

In 1999, just a year after India and Pakistan declared themselves nuclear powers, Pakistan initiated a low-level conflict by infiltrating Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir.

India responded with a military operation to push Pakistan back, using conventional tactics that didn’t escalate into all-out war.

But these days, New Delhi officials are increasingly frustrated, and their new stance will test the limits of the Stability-Instability Paradox. After this month’s ceasefire,

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said any terrorist attack against the country would be considered an act of war, and that all of Pakistan would be fair game for retaliation.

He’s calling Pakistan’s bluff—betting that it won’t actually use atomic weapons in future fights. That, in turn, will incentivize Pakistan to show that its nuclear threats are serious.

So far, the Stability-Instability Paradox has shown that cooler heads will eventually prevail. But if one day they don’t, the world will need a new theory—assuming anyone is still around to think it up.