India tested its first bomb in 1974. Pakistan tested their first in 1998, trying to catch up to their rival. And it was not long before Pakistan was threatening to use it. In May of 1999, the two nations were in the middle of a border war. The Pakistani army crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir, and got ready its nuclear weapons, with official pronouncements like “[Pakistan will] not hesitate to use any weapond in its arsenal to protect its territorial integrity.” The world was very afraid that India and Pakistan would start a war that, for the first time, would involve nuclear weapons being actively used.
But there was more, and it was even more terrifying. When US President Bill Clinton attempted to mediate the crisis he found out that the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, did not know that his country’s nuclear arsenal had been deployed! Sharif ordered the Pakistani ary to withdraw in July of 1999. The threat of a nuclear war was no longer immediate.
After the crisis, it came out that the decision to deploy the nuclear arsenal may have been taken unilaterally by the head of the Army Staff, Pervez Musharraf, without informing his government. And though India and Pakistan’s longstanding hatred has not heated up to that level since – but nuclear weapons are now on the table, and given what has happened in the past, it is enough to make anyone uneasy about what could happen in the future.
