Do Nuclear Weapons Keep India and Pakistan From Each Other's Throats? By Russ Wellen

There are those who believe that nuclear proliferation on the part of India and Pakistan has deterred not only nuclear, but conventional war between the two hostile states. Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur debate this in a new book, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Ganguly falls under the heading of "nuclear optimists," who, the authors write, "tend to stress the ultimately stable outcomes of past crises between nuclear powers." Meanwhile, "nuclear pessimists," such as Kapur, "focus on the potentially catastrophic processes by which the crises erupted and escalated."