000			02582nam a2200205Ia 4500
999			_c67982 _d67982
005			20220324152230.0
008			200204s9999 xx 000 0 und d
020			_a9780195651782
082			_a327.174 BID
100			_aBidwai, Praful
245		0	_aSouth Asia on a short fuse: nuclear politics and the future of global disarmament
260			_aNew Delhi
260			_bOxford University Press
260			_c1999
300			_a354 p.
520			_aIn May 1998, India did what many thought unthinkable: it conducted nuclear tests and joined the discriminatory global nuclear order it had long criticized-on the side of the discriminators. Pakistan followed. What impelled the two South Asian neighbours to nuclearize, especially just when a global momentum for nuclear disarmament, not just arms control, was emerging for the first time in the Nuclear Age? What is the likely impact of this fateful decision on nuclear disarmament prospects? On regional security? On the subcontinent's societies? On their 500 million poor? This topical book, while offering answers to these questions, advances a thoroughgoing and incisive critique of reliance on nuclear weapons for security. In exploring the domestic, regional and international factors behind South Asia's nuclearization, Bidwai and Vanaik offer an analysis that is at once theoretical and empirical, ethical and political, as well as rooted in the specific emergence of a belligerent, exclusivist, communal nationalism in both India and Pakistan. While evaluating the impact of nuclearization on South Asian and world security, the authors span a range of issues: the ethics of war, the irrationality of nuclear deterrence, changing power equations since 1945, and alternatives to a nuclear arms race. South Asia on a Short Fuse argues that nuclearization has degraded not only India and Pakistan's security and global stature but will do little to deter conventional conflicts. In fact, it is liable to draw them, and China, into a potentially ruinous arms race. Therefore, the new challenge to the global nuclear order posed by South Asian developments calls for imaginative responses from the peace movement. This work passionately pleads for radical, yet feasible, disarmament measures. The authors are among South Asia's best regarded disarmament analysts and activists. They bring a distinctively South-centred vision into a typically North-dominated field. This landmark book is written for both general and specialist audiences.
650			_aDisarmament
700			_aVanaik, Achin
942			_cB _2ddc