Few policy issues deserve greater attention than the need to prevent nuclear war. No other pair of nuclear rivals has worried the world more consistently in this regard since the end of the Cold War than India and Pakistan. These adversaries tested nuclear weapons in May 1998 and within a year they were fighting a war in the disputed territory of Kashmir. This marked the first ever crisis between two regional nuclear powers and earned Kashmir the tag of being “the most dangerous place in the world.”1 As the conflict began, alarm bells rang instantly; no one could predict how these nascent nuclear powers would handle crisis situations. The world had long feared that nuclear proliferation would lead to such scenarios, but its entire understanding of nuclear crises had been informed by the Cold War. Would the Cold War playbook apply to regional powers? Or would their behavior depart in important, and perhaps dangerous, ways from what we had come to expect based on the bipolar world’s experience?
All Cold War nuclear crises involved one or both superpowers and were shaped by their competition. Even though the superpowers had to constantly factor the security of their allies into their deterrence equations, scholars largely examined these alliance considerations as extensions of the superpower rivalry. Virtually all modeling and empirical examinations of nuclear crisis behavior during the Cold War therefore assumed a bilateral context and were based on two-actor models. The post–Cold War regional nuclear context is fundamentally different in this regard: unlike the superpowers, regional nuclear states involved in a crisis operate in a unipolar world and contend with the preferences of the unipole and other strong states.
The Indian and Pakistani crisis experiences confirm this. These South Asian rivals faced a real prospect of major war at least three times in their first decade as overt nuclear powers. Third parties, principally the United States, played an undeniable role in mediating these episodes. Yet, there has been surprisingly little effort to theorize third-party involvement in nuclearized regional crisis environments and to understand its effects on traditional thinking about nuclear crisis behavior. Much has been said about what a third party may have done in a particular India-Pakistan crisis but far less has been done to understand why and how the third-party dynamic plays out. Specifically, how does the presence of stronger third parties alter the crisis behavior of regional nuclear powers? And what implications does this have for crisis management, stability, and outcomes? The literature provides few answers.
This book theorizes third-party roles in regional nuclear crisis settings and tests the theory by examining U.S.-led crisis management in South Asia. Its relevance flows from two of the most significant international developments since the end of the Cold War. The first is the emergence of regional nuclear rivalries. While India and Pakistan are the only pair of regional rivals to have been embroiled in an active nuclear rivalry to date, the chilling prospect of future proliferation, and fresh nuclear contests, remains ever present. The second is the shift from the Cold War’s bipolar context to today’s unipolar international setting. Projections about the waning power of the United States and the rise of China and a resurgent Russia notwithstanding, the United States remains the only state that has “global interests which it can care for unaided.”2 Its military preponderance remains all but absolute, and even “economic, technological, and other wellsprings of national power . . . are concentrated in the United States to a degree never before experienced in the history of the modern system of states.”3 While competitors like China and Russia are exhibiting increased issue-based cooperation and talk about a growing threat from them to American preponderance has been energized in recent times, there are no signs yet of any broad balancing coalition emerging with the objective of eclipsing the U.S. position as the leader of the world.4 Even if such an effort were to evolve, the power differential between the United States and its competitors makes it materially impossible for them to achieve a decisive break from unipolarity in the foreseeable future.5
The implications of the combination of regional nuclearization and unipolarity for nuclear crises are not fully understood. This void has serious consequences in a world where the United States may frequently have to get involved in regional crises in nuclear environments to manage tensions. Indeed, the central argument of this book is that crises between regional nuclear powers will be heavily influenced by the overbearing interest of the unipole (and other strong powers) in preventing a nuclear catastrophe. These crises can be conceptualized as “brokered bargaining”: a three-way bargaining framework where the regional rivals and the “third party” seek to influence each other to behave in line with their crisis objectives and in so doing, affect each other’s crisis choices. The theory of brokered bargaining posited in this book unpacks the processes and mechanisms that underpin this trilateral interaction and explains the patterns of state behavior during crises. While it speaks to crisis outcomes inasmuch as these processes and mechanisms shape them, at its core, brokered bargaining is a theory of process.
Brokered bargaining marks a fundamental departure from bilateral deterrence models that have dominated thinking on nuclear crises since the onset of the Cold War. These models discount many of the effects of third parties on non–superpower crisis behavior. Derived from the classical (rational) theory of nuclear deterrence, they explain behavior as being driven by the need of the antagonists to balance between signaling resolve to the adversary and exercising caution to avoid nuclear war. The three-way interaction underpinning brokered bargaining introduces a parallel dynamic focused on the third party and driven by a “combination of sensitivities,” the third party’s to escalation risks and the regional rivals’ to third-party preferences given its power to tilt the crisis decisively against them. Crisis behavior of the antagonists is marked by a constant tension between their incentives to pursue their maximalist objectives and their compulsion not to defy the third party completely. The third party, on the other hand, seeks to heighten the antagonists’ sensitivity to its preference for de-escalation ahead of their ideal crisis outcomes. Successful escalation management requires the third party to get the regional rivals to defer to its preferences over any autonomous decisions that could escalate hostilities. This three-way dynamic introduces risks of misperceptions and inadvertence due to the challenges inherent in signaling to multiple audiences simultaneously. Traditional deterrence models do not account for these.
A Focus on South Asia
This book applies brokered bargaining theory to the three major crises between India and Pakistan since their overt nuclearization in 1998: the Kargil conflict in Kashmir, 1999; the 2001–2002 India-Pakistan military standoff; and the Mumbai crisis, 2008. These represent the universe of crises between regional nuclear powers since the dawn of the unipolar era that set in at the end of the Cold War. Each of these episodes risked escalation that could have spun out of control and forced these South Asian rivals into major war.
The India-Pakistan rivalry is multifaceted. A territorial dispute over the state of Jammu and Kashmir has epitomized their broken relationship. Each controls part of Kashmir but both claim its entirety.6 The two sides have been involved in multiple wars and crises over this disputed land.7 Pakistan also went through the trauma of its dismemberment as a state in 1971. Years of discriminatory domestic policies led to a civil war in the eastern wing of the country. India aided and abetted the insurgents and a short India-Pakistan war ultimately forced East Pakistan’s surrender.8 Pakistan’s India-centric security establishment internalized the episode as confirmation of its deeply held view that India would waste no opportunity to undo Pakistan.9 This episode also significantly influenced Pakistan’s decision to pursue nuclear weapons.10 Bilateral tensions continued thereafter, deteriorating into significant crises at least four times between 1971 and 1998.11 The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May 1998 provided a fresh jolt to the relationship. Another three major crises and multiple bouts of moderate tensions have occurred since.
India and Pakistan have an interesting history of engagement with stronger third-party actors. Throughout the Cold War, India championed nonalignment but favored the Soviet Union, receiving significant military and economic assistance in return.12 Yet, the Indian strategic elite remained strongly wedded to the concept of strategic autonomy. In this discourse, third-party engagement for dispute resolution is an anathema. Specifically with regard to Pakistan, India tended to stick to its preference for bilateralism with a “religious fervor.”13 India’s international stature has risen exponentially since the turn of the century, bolstered by a strategic partnership with the United States.14
Pakistan was allied with the U.S.-led Western bloc during the Cold War and keenly sought U.S assistance to offset India’s greater military might. Even though this assistance was instrumental in allowing Pakistan to maintain a semblance of parity with India throughout the Cold War, the partnership was marked by tremendous angst and disappointment on both sides.15 It broke down at the end of the Cold War, but was revived after a decade, courtesy of Pakistan’s frontline role in the post-9/11 War on Terror. The United States again provided significant assistance to Pakistan, this time as a quid pro quo for its support of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, but the mutual mistrust nonetheless deepened. The United States blames Pakistan for actively abetting the Taliban insurgency fighting the United States and its allies in Afghanistan.16 On its part, Pakistan harbors a perennial concern that the United States has not fully reconciled with its nuclear capability and that it has an eye on forcibly dismantling it.17 Its apprehension has grown as the world has frequently raised concerns about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the post-9/11 period.18 China has been Pakistan’s more enduring ally. Its own tensions with India have made the Sino-Pakistan engagement a natural one.19 Unlike its disappointment with the United States, Pakistan considers China an “all weather friend.”20 Critically, China assisted some aspects of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development.21
Their distinct views on third-party engagement notwithstanding, India and Pakistan can most accurately be described as states that have maintained active working relationships with the world’s great powers throughout their history. Even though both countries were internationally sanctioned due to their nuclear tests when the Kargil conflict erupted, they continued to engage diplomatically with the United States and other major powers during this period. They were involved in far more intense partnerships with the unipole by the time of the 2001–2002 and Mumbai crises. They have traditionally seen their relations with the United States as a zero-sum game vis-à-vis the other, but the United States has tried hard in the post-1998 period not to allow its partnership with one to upset its relations with the other.22
Brokered Bargaining in South Asia: Evidence from the Crisis Case Studies
An analysis of the Kargil, 2001–2002, and Mumbai crises finds strong evidence of behavior predicted by the brokered bargaining framework. In each episode, the concern about escalation forced the United States to engage, largely unsolicited, and use a mix of rewards (or promises of) and punishments (or threats of) with the regional rivals to achieve de-escalation—ahead of any of its broader regional or global policy interests. U.S. crisis mediation was complemented by efforts from other strong powers. Both India and Pakistan eagerly engaged the United States and oscillated between manipulating the risk of war and deferring to American preferences in a bid to gain its support for their crisis objectives. The process encompassing this dynamic interaction explains both the specific choices and overall crisis behavior of the three actors.
In the Kargil crisis, this entailed the United States and other major powers ignoring Pakistan’s efforts at manipulating the risk of war and its pleas for support to help terminate the crisis while it was in possession of forcibly occupied territory in Indian Kashmir. Instead, they deemed Pakistan’s unilateral withdrawal to be the most realistic and efficient way of ensuring crisis termination and threatened it with international isolation and economic consequences if it refused. India reacted militarily to Pakistan’s provocation but kept its actions limited to retain international goodwill and get the third party to make efforts to ensure Pakistan’s withdrawal.
In the 2001–2002 standoff, the third party played down the middle. India threatened to unleash its military might on Pakistan but pulled back at critical junctures as the United States acted as a guarantor of Pakistan’s promises of eliminating anti-India terrorism from its soil. The United States also raised India’s costs, for instance by issuing travel advisories that caused significant losses to the Indian economy. Pakistan promised retaliation against any Indian military action and demonstrated its ability to harm the then recently initiated U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan by withdrawing some of its forces that had been deployed on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in support of the U.S. mission. However, this autonomous behavior was trumped by its propensity to oblige the United States by accepting some responsibility for anti-India militancy and taking tangible action against terrorist outfits. These moves, in turn, allowed the United States to convince India of the merits of exercising military restraint.
In the Mumbai crisis, otherwise predicted to boil over given the spectacular nature of the terrorist attacks that had triggered the episode, India, Pakistan, and the United States exhibited an even greater sense of familiarity with the opportunities and limitations associated with the trilateral crisis bargaining framework. Despite threatening military action at times, India relied almost exclusively on the United States to do its crisis bidding. Without boxing it in completely, the United States breathed down Pakistan’s neck and once again forced it to take actions against terrorists believed to be linked to the attacks, and used this to pacify India. Notably, concerns over emboldening the Indian decision makers to use force against Pakistan kept the United States from backing India unequivocally even though U.S. citizens had died in the Mumbai carnage and despite U.S. suspicions that rogue elements within Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), or its former personnel may have had some involvement in the attacks.
Each of these three crises ended without large-scale hostilities. However, a number of risks peculiar to the three-party interaction were apparent and made peaceful outcomes probabilistic at best. For one, the likelihood of third-party involvement in regional nuclear crises creates a moral hazard problem that makes crisis recurrence more likely.23 The false expectation of supportive third-party involvement was partly responsible for Pakistan’s decision to instigate a crisis in Kargil. India’s equally flawed assumption of receiving third-party support in the 2001–2002 standoff contributed to its brinkmanship, marked by a full-scale military mobilization. The South Asian crises also exposed the risks of the regional rivals misperceiving the extent of the third party’s leverage over their adversary and its willingness to use it. Indian thinking during the 2001–2002 crisis reflected the dangerous belief that the United States would not allow an expanded war and would be able to prevent Pakistan from using nuclear weapons. On the other hand, India could have discounted third-party leverage over Pakistan (or believed that the United States was unwilling to use it) in the Kargil crisis, where it came perilously close to expanding the conflict as Pakistan initially stood firm in the face of U.S. pressure.
In each crisis, the third party played a crucial role as an information conduit between the rivals. This role puts a high premium on timely intelligence and information gathering, and on clear communication and messaging to the rivals. In the 2001–2002 standoff, India was reportedly on the verge of acting militarily against Pakistan and was restrained only by a diplomatic frenzy made possible by U.S. satellite imagery confirming that Indian forces had moved into war-fighting positions. Later in the crisis, however, the United States was unaware of a mismatch between Indian and Pakistani perceptions about the most likely scale of any Indian attack and the fact that the Indian military had planned an all-out offensive that could easily have crossed Pakistan’s threshold for using nuclear weapons. The case studies also highlighted how inherently prone the third party’s information provision can be to misperceptions and miscommunication. The Mumbai episode provided a vivid illustration of the difficulty in communicating clearly in fast paced crisis environments when a hoax call attributed to the Indian foreign minister risked igniting war. Finally, the Kargil conflict also provided an example of the three-way interaction’s potentially negative implications for bilateral crisis management. Pakistani interlocutors believe that the United States’ conciliatory signaling toward India during the crisis hardened India’s stance and enabled its decision to pull out of a serious bilateral diplomatic effort to end the conflict.
Significance of the Book
The importance of preventing escalation of crises in nuclearized environments can hardly be debated. Episodes of crisis in South Asia are especially relevant because the region represents the intersection of nuclear weapons with state fragility and terrorism. That heightened crises present the riskiest scenario in terms of “loose nukes” makes successful crisis management in South Asia even more imperative for Western policy makers.24
This book breaks new ground in several ways. It is the first attempt to: 1) present a theory of nuclear crisis behavior centered on third-party mediation; 2) conduct a systematic comparison of the three major India-Pakistan crises since overt nuclearization in 1998, including the virtually unstudied Mumbai crisis; and 3) shed light on “learning” in nuclear crisis management in South Asia across a decade-long time span. The book’s findings also offer lessons for crises between potential nuclear rivals in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula, and between China and India.
This work speaks to policy makers in India and Pakistan, and in countries that could be future regional nuclear rivals. The policy conclusions are especially relevant to the United States and other third-party states. The analysis stresses the need for U.S. policy makers to appreciate their centrality to regional nuclear crisis management. This book’s analysis will help them more accurately interpret crisis dynamics and identify crisis management options. The findings also highlight a counterintuitive aspect of great power politics by suggesting that strong states will prefer to complement U.S. efforts to prevent escalation of a regional nuclear crisis rather than using regional rivals as proxies to undercut each other’s influence. The United States should invest in third-party coordination mechanisms in anticipation of such crisis management roles. The overriding interest in avoiding any nuclear catastrophe in regional nuclear contexts also has direct implications for alliance credibility given the constraints this compulsion promises to impose on third parties that might otherwise be expected to wholly back their regional partners in crisis situations. Perhaps the most consequential policy implication of this work, however, is to point to the need for third parties to invest in deeper dispute resolution between regional nuclear rivals as the most assured way of preventing crises from occurring. This is crucial since crisis management in contexts with multiple audiences will always involve inherent risks that make trajectories of these episodes unpredictable and prone to escalation.
The book also makes several scholarly contributions. It explores the otherwise undertheorized role of third parties in preventing war and introduces brokered bargaining as one of the few truly three-actor bargaining frameworks. The analysis also adds significant value by moving beyond the dichotomous debate between nuclear deterrence optimists and pessimists that is consumed by rank ordering the importance of nuclear versus nonnuclear factors in explaining crisis outcomes. In contending that the dynamic process of trilateral interaction encompassed by brokered bargaining explains crisis behavior, and in turn, trajectories and outcomes, the findings are distinct from the views of both optimists, who link crisis results causally to bilateral nuclear deterrence, and pessimists, who point singularly to third-party presence to explain these outcomes. This research has also opened up the possibility of the emergence of a new strand of literature that focuses on the stabilizing and destabilizing effects of three-way bargaining on crisis dynamics and their impact on crisis stability. Finally, this work engages scholarship on subjects often considered to be beyond the nuclear realm, primarily mediation, unipolarity theory, and sociological literature on “evaluation” by external audiences.
Structure of the Book
The book is divided into three sections. Section I comprises two chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical foundations of nuclear crises and surveys the literature on nuclear crisis behavior. Chapter 2 introduces brokered bargaining, propositions that underpin the framework and theory, and the methodology applied to the case studies. Section II forms the core of the analysis. Each of the three chapters in this section contains a detailed case study: Chapter 3 studies the Kargil crisis; Chapter 4 is dedicated to the 2001–2002 standoff; and Chapter 5 examines the Mumbai crisis. Section III draws lessons from the case studies and explores their implications. Chapter 6 summarizes the findings and examines their implications for nuclear crisis behavior and crisis stability in South Asia, and generalizes the findings to future South Asian crises. Chapter 7 examines the relevance of brokered bargaining beyond South Asia. Chapter 8 highlights contributions of this work to theory and practice and provides specific recommendations for regional and third-party policy makers.
1. Jonathan Marcus, “Analysis: The World’s Most Dangerous Place,” BBC News, March 23, 2000.
2. Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93, 3 (1964): 888.
3. Stephen G. Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27–28.
4. Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123–26.
5. Individually, China is the only country with the economic resources to develop power projection capabilities approximating those of a superpower, but it has little interest in subverting the international political and economic order that it greatly depends on and benefits from. It has therefore deliberately avoided such investments at an accelerated pace, instead signaling its willingness to compete with the United States under the unipolar umbrella. Ho-fung Hung, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics, 126–43. Also see Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower: Why China Won’t Overtake the United States,” Foreign Affairs 95, 3 (May–June 2016): 91–104.
6. India controls 45 percent of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state’s territory, Pakistan holds 35 percent, and China is in control of the remaining 20 percent. “Kashmir Fast Facts,” CNN, March 31, 2016. Part of the territory under China’s control was ceded to it by Pakistan in 1963 under a bilateral agreement.
7. See Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
8. On the 1971 war and the events surrounding it, see Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
9. On the Pakistani security establishment’s (principally its army’s) fixation on India, see Shuja Nawaz, Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008); T. V. Paul, The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
10. Feroz H. Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 75–92.
11. These included skirmishes on the Siachen glacier in the north of Kashmir in 1984, which has been occupied by India since; a mini-crisis sparked by fears of an Indian preventive strike on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities later in the year; the Brasstacks crisis of 1987, which was triggered by a threatening Indian military exercise near the international border; and the “compound crisis” of 1990, which was fueled by Indian accusations of Pakistani support of an armed insurgency in Indian Kashmir. On the background of the Siachen dispute, see Raspal S. Khosa, “The Siachen Glacier Dispute: Imbroglio on the Roof of the World,” Contemporary South Asia 8, 2 (July 1999): 187–209. Also see Robert G. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security under Zia, 1977–1988: The Policy Imperatives of a Peripheral Asian State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 143–94. On the “preventive strikes” episode, see Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crisis in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 44–67. On Brasstacks, see Kanti P. Bajpai et al., Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995). On the compound crisis, see P. R. Chari, Pervaiz I. Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia: The Compound Crisis of 1990 (London: Routledge, 2003); P. R. Chari, Pervaiz I. Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process: American Engagement in South Asia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), 80–117.
12. On the Indo-Soviet relationship during the Cold War, see Robert C. Horn, Soviet-Indian Relations: Issues and Influence (New York: Praeger, 1982); Peter J. S. Duncan, The Soviet Union and India (London: Routledge, 1989).
13. Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 218.
14. See Teresita C. Schaffer, India and the United States in the 21st Century: Reinventing Partnership (Washington, DC: CSIS Press, 2010).
15. On the U.S.-Pakistan relationship until the turn of the century, see Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001).
16. Elisabeth Bumiller and Jane Perlez, “Pakistan’s Spy Agency Is Tied to Attack on U.S. Embassy,” New York Times, September 22, 2011. More generally, on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship since 9/11, see Daniel S. Markey, No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
17. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), 202.
18. For some of these concerns, as the West sees them, see Bruno Tertrais, Pakistan’s Nuclear Programme: A Net Assessment, Recherches and Documents no. 04/2012 (Paris: Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique, June 13, 2012); Christopher Clary, Thinking about Pakistan’s Nuclear Security in Peacetime, Crisis and War, Occasional Paper no. 12 (New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, September 2010). Also see Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Pakistan’s Nuclear Future: Worries Beyond War (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2008).
19. China and India have remained strategic rivals throughout and continue to have active border disputes. Most notably, they fought a major war in 1962. For a comprehensive recounting of the war, see Steven Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
20. Howard B. Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer, How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States: Riding the Roller Coaster (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), 23–24. For a typical, positive Pakistani statist view of Sino-Pakistan relations, see Ahmed H. Shah and Ishtiaq A. Choudhry, “Pak-China Diplomatic and Military Relations: An Analysis,” Berkeley Journal of Social Science 3 (Spring 2013). For a more objective view of the contours of the relationship, see Andrew Small, The Pakistan-China Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
21. Small, The China-Pakistan Axis, 27–46. Also see Khan, Eating Grass.
22. Ashley J. Tellis, “The Merits of Dehyphenation: Explaining U.S. Success in Engaging India and Pakistan,” Washington Quarterly 31, 4 (Autumn 2008): 21–42.
23. For the role of moral hazard in third-party interventions, see Alan J. Kuperman, “The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly 52, 1 (March 2008): 49–80; Timothy W. Crawford and Alan J. Kuperman, eds., Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
24. Scott Sagan points to the “vulnerability/invulnerability paradox” to argue that moves like mating and dispersal of nuclear assets that may make an arsenal more likely to survive a decapitating first strike in a crisis situation increase the vulnerability of the arsenal to terrorist breaches. Scott D. Sagan, “Introduction: Inside Nuclear South Asia,” in Inside Nuclear South Asia, ed. Scott D. Sagan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 16.
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