Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

Similarly, it is still quite difficult to evaluate the parameters in the China-India-Pakistan trianglethat began to take shape at the end of the last decade.India set off its first peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974. After that, it set off a series of explosionsof a number of warheads that could be delivered to targets on the territory of Pakistan and China.In 1995, India’s Rao government was going to carry out a series of nuclear tests, but changed itsmind under pressure from the international community. 89 India’s nuclear explosions in 1998 werefilliped by Pakistan’s testing of its Ghauri medium-range missile, which has a range of 1,500 km;this missile could hit 26 Indian large cities and the major part of nuclear facilities in India. SergeiOborotov writes that “Ghauri with a nuclear warhead evoked the long-forgotten feeling of vulnerabilityto Pakistan among Indians.” 90 Later, Brajesh Mishra, national security advisor to India’sPrime Minister Vajpayee, recalled: “We had to show a credible deterrent capability not only to theoutside world, but to our own people.” 91In the late 1980s, India was already sure that Pakistan had nuclear weapons, and thought thatPakistan had acquired those weapons with the active assistance of China and the connivance ofthe United States. 92 At that time, with Rajiv Gandhi’s government in power, India accelerated theimplementation of its military nuclear and missile programs; at the same time, Rajiv Gandhi presentedhis gradual global nuclear disarmament plan to the UN. 93Today, the only perceivable way to study the problem of securing strategic stability in the polygonalnuclear configurations is the consistent contemplation of the dyad relationship, with ananalysis of their perception by the other nuclear actors in the hexagon (or the heptagon). The followingstep is a contemplation of the relations within the triangle with a subsequent transition tothe quadrangle and to succeeding structures.We may assume with a high degree of confidence that every time a state’s leaders, political elitesand military commanders begin to digest the main strategic stability principles related to understandingthe entirety of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons—including the degree towhich it is possible to control military actions when the use of nuclear warheads is implied—thatthey do so from the outset.The case of India and Pakistan showed that the experience of two nuclear superpowers who atsome point had gotten over a series of extremely dangerous crises that could have resulted in theuse of nuclear weapons, was difficult to learn. (In general, most politicians are not able to learnfrom others’ experiences and mistakes.)The 1999 Kargil conflict convincingly proved the inconsistency of the theoretical and rather hypotheticalassumptions of those who believed that possession of nuclear weapons by two antagonistsincreases their temperance in using military force long before they reach nuclear threshold. Overthe course of the Kargil conflict, India had to use up to ten divisions of its ground forces supportedby strike aircraft. It had to deal with about 1,000 mujahedeen who found their way from theterritory of Pakistan to the Kargil sector in the northern part of the Indian states of Jammu andKashmir. The invaders included representatives of Pakistan’s regular armed forces. Indian troopshad to fight with Mujahedeen troops in extreme mountain conditions, where artillery, armoredvehicles and even aviation, as a rule, did not provide any decisive advantage.46Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions