As long as Pakistan feels threatened by India’s superior conventional forces it will likely continue its nuclear build-up. What can the West do?
One of the biggest challenges that the Obama administration faces over its Afghan-Pakistan withdrawal strategy is to decrease tensions between India and Pakistan. It is, of course, a complex issue. But the most dangerous element is almost certainly the nuclear arms racing between the two countries. What can the United States realistically do?
Efforts to negotiate direct limits on the two countries’ nuclear forces are probably premature, so the United States and other countries have instead tried to constrain the racing indirectly, by limiting the amount of fissile material they manufacture.
Fissile material, typically in the form of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium separated from the spent reactor fuel, is used to power a nuclear chain reaction explosion. Most of the established nuclear weapons states have excess fissile material left over from their Cold War build-ups. For this reason, their governments, supported by the international arms control community, have been trying to negotiate a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) at the UN Conference of Disarmament in Geneva. This would end the manufacture of fissile material, at least for the purposes of making nuclear warheads (although some FMCT variants would permit the continued use of highly enriched uranium for submarine fuel, medical purposes, or other uses).
Problems of definition and verification complicate these efforts, but the complexities of the India-Pakistan nuclear arms racing also play their part. To match India’s nuclear forces and compensate for India’s superior conventional military capacities, Pakistan is improving the quality, and expanding the quantity, of its nuclear weapons.
http://the-diplomat.com/2011/10/01/south-asia%E2%80%99s-nuclear-arms-racing
