Reassuring and Unnerving India } 739
A nuclearized Pakistan might have been the best way of avoiding confront-
ing China with the unfortunate choice between a war with India and loss of
Pakistan as a balance to India. No one outside the CCP elite, including this
author, knows the rationale for Mao’s decision circa 1975, reaffirmed by Deng
in 1982, to assist Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, both discussed in ear-
lier chapters.^6 This author’s informed guess is that China’s leaders calculated
that a nuclear-armed Pakistan was the least risky way of keeping Pakistan free
from Indian domination, thus maintaining a balance of power in South Asia
and reducing the likelihood that Beijing would face the undesirable choice
between war with India or Indian subordination of Pakistan. Sustaining a
non-nuclear Pakistan would require that China be prepared to assume the
heavy burden of another war with India. A nuclear-armed Pakistan was a less
costly way of maintaining the Pakistani balancer than was another war with
India. These calculations seem to have worked thus far. But if, at some point,
things went awry and Pakistan was on the verge of utter defeat by India, China
might well decide to act. There is also the contingency of Pakistani entrance
into another India-China war, perhaps over Arunachal Pradesh. If China be-
came heavily engaged in conflict with India, Beijing might call on Pakistan to
open a second front, and Pakistan’s army might welcome the opportunity to
seize “Indian-occupied Kashmir,” finally making Pakistan whole. Victorious
China and Pakistan might then negotiate peace terms with a defeated India.
It is elemental calculations of this sort that, in part, underlay India’s 1998 de-
cision to acquire and deploy nuclear weapons.
There existed a deep security dilemma between China and India across the
South Asia-Indian Ocean Region.^7 India was deeply apprehensive of China’s
expanding military presence, security roles, and involvement in dual-use (ci-
vilian and military) infrastructure projects in the SA-IOR. Countries other
than India across that region frequently looked on China as a balancer against
regional hegemon India and welcomed ties with China for that reason among
others. China’s rapid economic growth meant that it was able to subsidize
large Chinese infrastructural projects in SA-IOR countries—harbors, high-
ways, and telecommunications systems—projects which often had the effect
of integrating the economies of those countries into China’s economic sphere.
The result has been that China steadily expanded what it styled “friendly, mul-
tidimensional cooperation, based on mutual agreement and mutual interest”
with countries across the SA-IOR: Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka,
Afghanistan, the Seychelles, and Iran—and, of course, Pakistan. China’s rela-
tions with these countries were close and growing rapidly, including in many
cases in the military and security fields.
Beijing’s view was that China could and would expand multifaceted coop-
erative relations with all the countries of the SA-IOR as it and the govern-
ments of those countries might deem appropriate. Military and security ties
and cooperation—military-to-military exchanges, security dialogues, arms