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Professor William Walker's article, "The Risks of Further Nuclear Testing in South Asia" (ACT, Sept./Oct. 1999), was a welcome departure from what passes these days for scholarship on India and Pakistan. Walker makes a number of important observations regarding the present situation in South Asia, which is dominated by the lack of normal relations between India and Pakistan and which now has an overt nuclear dimension. However, like most commentators in Western countries, he also subscribes to the conventional wisdom that the 1998 nuclear explosions by India and Pakistan had catastrophic consequences for the world.

On the contrary, the psychological shock waves have far outweighed the real ones recorded by seismometers around the world. This comment is not meant to belittle the significance of the nuclear explosions conducted by India and Pakistan, but it is intriguing that India's explosion of a so-called "peaceful nuclear device" in 1974 was not cause for such large-scale alarm and attention. That test was perhaps more destabilizing because Pakistan could not reciprocate in kind, thus creating a significant asymmetry in the perceived balance of power between the two countries.