The acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan, and the modernisation of China's strategic forces added to the tension, they told an Asia Pacific Security Conference here.

The September attacks using hijacked planes to ram buildings in New York and Washington has forced nations to upgrade their military capability, in a move which could stir up old animosities in Southeast Asia, they told the conference, being held as part of the Asian Aerospace 2002 event.

Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, referred to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Asian powers as the advent of a second nuclear age.

"The emergence of nuclear weapons states in South Asia leaves a qualitative and new strategic environment for Asia," said Trenin, a former colonel in the Soviet and Russian armed forces.

"Modernisation of Chinese strategic forces adds to this new environment," he said, adding the new situation "calls for a new level of strategic ... interaction in Asia and there's a new need for a system of nuclear arms control and nuclear safety."

The chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Council in London, Francois Heisbourg, noted that being a non-nuclear power in Asia was now considered an "anomaly".

Luo Renshi, a senior research fellow at the China Institute for International Strategic Studies in Beijing, said any deployment by the US of a missile defence system would force China to develop and deploy its own system.

Panitan Wattanayagorn, assistant professor of political science at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, said the region was "close to the classic definition of an arms race" where a purchase by one country leads a neighbour to do the same.

Because of the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Southeast Asia has not witnessed an arms race in the past decade, he said.

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