Description
Existing accounts of the Third Nuclear Age are mostly characterized by a disengagement with regional dynamics. South Asia presents a unique template to examine the regional dynamics of the Third Nuclear Age with the intertwining of issues of deterrence, nuclear proliferation, and strategic stability. Historically, it spawned the Second Nuclear Age with the successive Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998 and contested prevailing assumptions. The region encompasses key features of the evolving Third Nuclear Age like expanding nuclear arsenals and strategic modernization, but also includes salient factors like sub-conventional conflict, doctrinal ambivalence, great power competition and existence of three overlapping nuclear dyads (India-Pakistan, India-China, USA-China). Critical political, strategic, and technological developments in each of these dyads is surveyed and situated with the broader global dynamics (e.g., power transition, proliferation of emerging strategic technologies, decline of arms control) to examine emerging regional specificities. This exercise provides salient analytical propositions that contrasts with conventional frameworks and contributes to the emerging strand of literature on the Third Nuclear Age, by broadening and widening its empirical and conceptual foundations.
