India does not retaliate against Pak due to nukes: US expert

India does not retaliate despite Pakistan-backed terrorist attacks against it because of the deterrence of nuclear weapons that the two countries possess, an American defence expert has said.
"All the terrorism that Pakistan has supported against India has been carried out, secure in the knowledge that India cannot retaliate," Stephen Blank, Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Army War College, said.
"If Pakistan had no nukes, if there were no nukes on the South Indian peninsula, India could retaliate and probably would. But their hand is stayed by the threat of nuclear war," Blank told a meeting of National Defense Industrial Association in response to a question.

Similarly, nuclear weapons act as a deterrent for many countries, as was the case during the cold war between the US and China, he noted.
"If you look at the map, the Russian Far East, which directly adjoins China, is what we call an economy of force theatre. It is a theatre that can only survive by sustaining itself," Blank said.
"If a war broke out between Russia and China -- and now and then Russian military and political officials actually allude to the possibility of a Chinese threat -- probably within a day the Chinese could take out the Trans-Siberian Railway and essentially isolate the area from the rest of continental Russia," he said.

"Therefore, the only recourse that the Russian military has in a contingency with China is nuclear," he added.

During the Cold War, at the strategic level of nuclear weapons, the Russians could at any time they wanted destroy all of Europe.
"In return, we threatened to destroy all of the Soviet Union. That was basically the mutual hostage relationship. Then the US also became as well a target of enhanced Soviet capabilities," he said.
"If we are truly looking to build, 'a new world order', whatever that may be, and get beyond the Cold War, then we should not be encouraging people to build more nuclear weapons and to remain frozen in this posture of hostility and thinking about first-use scenarios," Blank said.

"So that already is the utility of nuclear weapons. It confers enormous political capabilities, as well as the strategic capability to wage conventional war. I mean, if you have nukes, you make the world safe for conventional warfare," Blank said.