Abstract
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center, two renowned Washington-based think tanks, released a joint report last year titled ‘A Normal Nuclear Pakistan’. It has been doing the rounds among nuclear analysts both here and in the U.S. since its publication. The Report gives the impression that it is an altogether new idea, but it seems to echo much of what had been postulated by an Adelphi Papers publication of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, written by its nuclear expert Mark Fitzpatrick in 2014. 1 In fact, the first proposal for ‘normalisation’ of nuclear Pakistan goes back to 2011, when it was an earlier Carnegie report written by Toby Dalton, Mark Hibbs and George Perkovich, that had argued for bringing Pakistan into the nuclear mainstream,2 albeit with certain conditions similar to those postulated by Mark Fitzpatrick and now by the Carnegie-Stimson Report. The 2011 report had also suggested a ‘criteria’ based approach,3 rather than a ‘countryspecific’ approach, for allowing entry into the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG).