South Asia has settled into a worrisomely peculiar relationship on the spread of nuclear weapons. Government spokesmen for India and Pakistan have been saying seemingly identical things in the comparison of their countries: "We know that we don't have nuclear weapons; but we have to assume that they have them." This emerges against a background where India, of course, detonated what was officially described as a peaceful nuclear explosive (PNE) in May of 1974--and has not detonated any such explosives since, but nonetheless has been accumulating what could be a significant amount of reprocessed plutonium. In the same years, Pakistan, under Presidents Zulkifar Ali Bhutto and Muhammed Zia ul-Haq, evaded the world's export restrictions and worked hard to develop an ability to enrich uranium; none of this was halted under Prime Minister Benacir Bhutto. Pakistan has not detonated any nuclear explosives, but such detonations are hardly needed anymore for any state to be reasonably certain that a bomb will explode, and there are also rumors that the Chinese have offered Pakistan advice on the design of a nuclear warhead.1 We are thus at a stage where each nation, in the absence of international inspections and safeguards to assure anyone to the contrary, may be accused of having nuclear weapons. Adversaries may be inclined to worst-case assumptions where there is ambiguity about one another's capabilities. The outside world, including many nations which are adversaries to neither India nor Pakistan, may similarly have to be inclined to be pessimistic when so much is in doubt, and hence to conclude that both nations must have nuclear weapons. A possibility remains, of course, that Pakistan has in effect been bluffing, that it has not really managed to enrich so much uranium for bombs yet, and has merely been letting the rumors circulate to get a deterrent impact or prestige for free. It is also possible that India has used much of its plutonium (so the Indian Atomic Energy Agency has indeed claimed), so that it can not have a large inventory of nuclear weapons. As things stand, the outside world can not verify this one way or the other.