South Asia’s Nuclear Arms Racing Image Credit: Agência Brasil
South Asia’s Nuclear Arms Racing      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 government