The tenth anniversary of India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests enables scholars to revisit the issue of South Asian proliferation with a decade of hindsight. I argue that nuclear weapons have had two destabilizing effects. First, nuclear weapons' ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan's dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war.

Contrary to the arguments of proliferation pessimists, this article contends that the overt nuclearization of South Asia has contributed to stability in the region. To that end this article carefully examines two recent crises in Indo-Pakistani relations and concludes that in the absence of nuclear weapons they would have culminated in full-scale war. Accordingly, while Indo-Pakistani relations may remain fraught with tension, the likelihood of major war in the region has dramatically diminished.

Major powers have tried to use military training programmes, manifested through military-to-military cooperation running the gamut of training exchanges to joint exercises, to defence-related dialogues through seminars and the like, in order to engage and influence other countries in the furtherance of their strategic interests. The US model is notable for being innovative, flexible, scalable, and broad in its approach, and this has fetched it considerable dividends.

In the European security calculus, terrorism has become one of the key strategic threats. Alarmingly, the continent has also become a centre of radical Islamist propaganda and activism, with a number of European countries worried over the potential of their own 'home-grown' religious extremists. Latest studies indicate a disturbing trend of a section of the youth, generally belonging to the Muslim communities of West African and South Asian origin from a poor or middle class socioeconomic background, embracing extremism and terrorism in Europe.