{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018010642652476462, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003274662300450266, 'mean_word_length': 5.079601990049751, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
How do you solve a Problem like South Asia?

For a quarter century now, nonproliferation and nuclear experts both within and outside the US government have viewed the unfolding nuclear dynamics in South Asia with alarm. In the decade prior to 1998, the year when India and Pakistan stepped out of the nuclear closet, US concerns on deterrence instability arose from India and Pakistan’s lack of secure second-strike capabilities and their weak command and control institutions. Now, sixteen years after India and Pakistan have proceeded to make up for these lacunae, their concerns have remained unchanged. The causes of these concerns now, however, are the diversified nuclear arsenals, proliferating delivery systems, and missile defenses that produce a security dilemma and arms racing among the South Asian antagonists. When observing the nuclear trends in preand post-1998 South Asia, it becomes apparent that it is not the nuclear arms competition between India and Pakistan that constitutes the root of concerns. After all, the pace and intensity of the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan is benign relative to the superpower arms competition during the Cold War. Likewise, India and China’s nuclear rivalry does not arouse the same concerns as the one between India and Pakistan. The cause for concern is therefore less the nuclear arms race than the absence of normal relations between the two South Asian states. It is this latter aspect—and the prospect of a conventional war that could turn nuclear and swiftly spin out of control—that keeps the experts and concerned laymen awake at night. In this regard, the Stimson Center’s new edited volume on deterrence stability and escalation control in South Asia does an excellent job of highlighting both the technical and strategic aspects of nuclear instability in the region. More important, it offers bold, innovative, and insightful management solutions to the seemingly intractable and ugly rivalry between India and Pakistan. For the past twenty-five years, the Stimson Center has been bringing together government and academic experts and policy practitioners, from the United States and South Asia, to apply their minds to one of the great enduring rivalries of our era. This report is an exemplar of that effort and offers what could perhaps be considered state-of-the-art analysis outside academia and the highly classified domains of government intelligence files.