Cultural and Strategic Factors in South Asian Nuclear Arms Control

Future efforts at arms control are shifting to LDCs. We believe future agreements is could look very different from their cold war predecessors because third world decision making processes are influenced by many unaddressed factors, ranging from culture to historical antagonism, in addition to strategic and technical concerns. Utilizing game theory as well as historical and cultural analysis, we examine likely possibilities for arms control agreements in South Asia as a case study, and then analyze the logic behind these possibilities. Our findings about the cultural mind set and political preferences of leaders and their constituents lead us toward a specific hypothesis about how these factors influence the decision making process, a direction for the future study of other regions.