The fallacy in this approach is best demonstrated in other contexts. For example, when analyzing why Apple decided to produce a cheaper iPhone, we would learn little from examining its decision to release the phone in the third week of September. Similarly, that the Nazis invaded Russia on June 22, 1941 tells us little about why Hitler sought to conquer Russia in the first place. And Indian policymakers’ decision to test the Agni-V in April 2012 does not adequately explain why the missile was developed in the first place. Indeed, Sino-Indian relations were quite good at the time of the test following India’s hosting the fourth BRICS Summit in Delhi only days earlier. Does this mean that the so-called “China killer” missile was not developed with China in mind?

Thus, it might have been relatively cheap to test nuclear weapons in 1998, given that they had already been built, and an enabling domestic political environment might explain the timing of the tests. But there were many domestic political environments throughout India’s decades-long pursuit of nuclear weapons which, like other nations’ nuclear programs, was an immensely expensive undertaking.

Failing to distinguish the tactical from the strategic, Jaishankar next proposes evaluating the success of India’s nuclear deterrent through the purpose spelled out in the nuclear doctrine Indian cobbled together in the year following its nuclear tests. Specifically, he notes that the draft document calls for using India’s new nuclear deterrent “to preserve ‘an environment of durable peace and insurance against potential risks to peace and stability.’”

Jaishankar’s use of the word “preserve” is telling. Essentially, Jaishankar is proposing that the barometer we use in evaluating the value India derived from its nuclear deterrent was that the situation that existed before the 1998 nuclear tests continued to exist after them. Not surprisingly, based on that standard, Jaishankar concludes that having a nuclear deterrent has been a stunning success.

Well, sort of. Jaishankar notes that since India conducted its second nuclear tests, Sino-Indian bilateral trade has skyrocketed. As Jaishankar later acknowledges and weakly tries to explain away, this logic violates one of the most basic principles of scientific inquiry; namely, that correlation doesn’t equal causation. In fact, this case is a textbook example of why one should avoid equating correlation with causation. After all, why would nuclear weapons be more likely to have caused the Sino-Indo trade boom than the fact that both China and India’s trade openness ratios nearly doubled between the nuclear tests and 2007? Furthermore, China’s trade volumes grew at an annualized rate of over 18 percent between 1988 and 2008. Was India’s nuclear deterrent also behind this trade expansion?

But even if, somehow, India’s nuclear deterrent did in fact facilitate greater trade between China and India, then acquiring nuclear weapons has most certainly been a strategic blunder of the first order. Indeed, as Jaishankar mentions in passing, while Sino-Indian trade has grown substantially over the previous 15 years, this growth hasn’t been completely balanced.

This seems like a considerable understatement. During 2012-2013, bilateral trade between India and China was $67.83 billion; meanwhile, India’s trade deficit was $40.77 billion. This is all the more striking when one considers that during the 1990s India just as often maintained annual trade surpluses with China as vice-versa. Since international relations are organized around anarchy, states have to prioritize relative gains over absolute ones. As a result, India should hardly be celebrating its trading ties with China. Nor does it seem likely that subsidizing China’s unbalanced economy was one of the goals Indian policymakers had in mind when deciding to build nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Jaishankar maintains that acquiring nuclear weapons improved India’s position vis-à-vis Pakistan. As he put it, “despite regular terrorist attacks and military provocations on the border, conflict with Pakistan has remained limited since 1998. And that stability has been largely to India’s benefit”, given that Delhi’s economic growth relative to Pakistan’s has widened during that time. Once again, however, Jaishankar quickly concedes that “nuclear weapons again cannot be credited or blamed” for these differing economic growth rates.

Still, he is right to argue that conflict with Pakistan has remained limited since 1998, and this can be attributed to their situation of mutually assured destruction. However, this is only beneficial to the extent that one places the avoidance of war above all other goals states pursue—including national security.

As noted above, the lack of war between Pakistan and India since 1998 is almost entirely attributable to India’s restraint in responding to Pakistan’s provocations, which have grown far more brazen since 1998. Whereas Islamabad stirred up trouble along their shared borders when the two sides didn’t have nuclear weapons, Pakistan now holds India’s largest city hostage. Coupled with the fact that India’s conventional superiority over Pakistan is many times greater than it was during the Cold War, it’s hard to argue that Delhi would be less secure if it could punish the Pakistani army severely for supporting terrorist attacks on India. Indeed, by badly embarrassing Pakistan’s generals a couple of times in a conventional conflict, it’s nearly certain that they would desist supporting another attack on India—lest the national humiliation they continued bringing to bear on the Pakistani nation lead to their downfall. In either case, India’s terrorist problem from Pakistan would cease to exist.

Finally, Jaishankar points out that America’s nuclear arsenal hasn’t deterred North Korean provocations against South Korea, just as Israel’s nuclear deterrent doesn’t prevent Hamas from launching rocket attacks. Why should we hold India to a double standard, he asks?

I agree that India should be held to the same standards as every other country. Thus, if the U.S. had developed nuclear weapons to deter North Korea, or Israel developed nuclear weapons to deter Hamas, I would also concede that they had made a strategic blunder. But in reality this is not the case. The U.S., of course, first acquired nuclear weapons to bring a quick and satisfactory conclusion to WWII, and it’s hard to imagine Japan would have surrendered as fast and that the U.S. would have been the sole occupier of Japanese territory after the war had it not had the atomic bomb. Washington then built up its nuclear arsenal to prevent the massive Red Army from overrunning Western Europe. To this very day, they don’t speak Russian in Bonn or Paris.

Similarly, Israel developed a small nuclear arsenal to offset the inherent and inescapable latent conventional superiority of its adversaries. As I’ve explained elsewhere, “Egypt alone is 55 times larger than Israel and, in 1967, had about eleven times its population.” By this measure, Israel’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon was an unambiguous success. Following 1973, it has never had to fight a conventional conflict with a state-armed military that posed a potentially existential threat to Israel. And Israel today enjoys a degree of security that would have been unheard of before it acquired the bomb, Hamas’ occasional rocket attacks notwithstanding.

None of this can be said of India, which continues to experience the same security threats from China and Pakistan that it did before acquiring a nuclear weapon. Indeed, as Jaishankar readily admits in relation to China, in some cases India’s security situation has actually deteriorated further. And despite his denials, this is even more true of Pakistan.

Zachary Keck is associate editor of The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter @ZacharyKeck.