The nuclear arsenals of China, India and Pakistan are growing

For most of the 75 years since India and Pakistan became independent states, at midnight on 15th August 1947, nuclear weapons have cast a shadow over South Asia. China got the bomb in 1964, two years after thumping India in a border war and forcing its policymakers to confront their country’s vulnerabilities. India showed it too could build one with a demonstrative explosion just a decade later. Pakistan was a screwdriver’s turn away by the 1980s. In 1998, both India and Pakistan conducted nuclear-weapons tests, making official what was already an open secret.

Yet, in many ways, all three countries were hesitant nuclear powers. China did not deploy a missile capable of hitting the American mainland until the 1980s. When India and Pakistan fought a war over Kargil, in the disputed region of Kashmir, in the summer of 1999, India’s air force, tasked with delivering the bombs if needed, was not told what they looked like, how many there were or the targets over which they might have to be dropped.