This month marked the 25th year when India and Pakistan, the South Asian familial neighbours, and arch rivals, conducted a series of nuclear tests which confirmed their status as states with nuclear weapons (SNWs) and formalised the introduction of nuclear weapons in the South Asian region. 

The nuclear revolution that heralded these weapons in the early years of the Cold War had technological competition and great power rivalry as its primary catalyst. In subsequent decades, however, nuclear weapons emerged in Asian theatres with a long history of lingering conflicts which had their Cold War imprints as well. In South Asia, the simmering India-Pakistan hostilities over lingering disputes happened under a nuclear overhang with latent nuclearization happening in the dyad since the 1970s. 

Consequently, the series of nuclear tests conducted by the South Asian neighbours in May 1998 was swiftly followed by Pakistan’s attempts to change the strategic status quo. Starting with the Kargil misadventure and followed by the Parliament attack and the subsequent mobilisation by India, Operation Parakram, the post-nuclearisation events in South Asia were unlike in any other nuclear dyads/theatres with one state’s ill-conceived attempts at nuclear brinkmanship leading to numerous face-offs and crises that took the region to the brink of nuclear war. 

This condition led a dominant section of Western analysts to constantly harp on the volatilities of the India and Pakistan nuclear dyad by tagging the region as a ‘nuclear flashpoint’ and invoking theories like stability-instability paradox with arguments for and against effects of nuclear weapons. 

The India-Pakistan dyad, for that matter, gave enough empirical substance to both sides of the argument: while the deterrence/proliferation pessimists argued that nuclear weapons will encourage its possessors to escalate into conventional conflict, the optimists contended that the fear of nuclear war will ensure that both parties will not escalate despite the scope for low-intensity and conventional military hostilities.  

The turbulence in the sub-continent propelled such presages and assessments with one crisis after another billowing towards major confrontations, but eventually easing out on all occasions. There is no denial of the fact that the three major crises since the 1998 nuclear tests – Kargil (1999), the Parliament attack and Operation Parakram (2001-2002) and the Mumbai terror strike (2008) – brought the two rivals precariously close to full-fledged wars and potential nuclear triggers. However, not once had their leaderships lost their faith in the efficacy of mutual deterrence, which seemed to have driven the urge to take risks and test the waters. 

These events of the first decade of overt nuclearization, though, were seen as Pakistan’s attempt to gain an upper hand before deterrence consolidates in the dyad and also to exploit the gaps provided by India’s No-First-Use (NFU) doctrine. It was felt that Pakistan was seeking to exploit the space or vacuum provided by India’s NFU to pursue and sustain a low-intensity conflict (LIC) with impunity with the latter deterred from escalation fearing a nuclear confrontation.

While this gambit largely worked in favour of Pakistan during the first decade after 1998, things changed with India’s doctrinal realignments as also a series of events that pushed Pakistan to the backfoot. Validating India’s post-26/11 international campaign on Pakistan becoming a ‘hub of global terrorism’, the American special forces operation of May 2011 in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden made a major impact on Pakistan’s behaviour and set off attempts to shake itself off the terror hub tag. 

Though this did not imply a major transformation in its approach towards India or on the Kashmir issue, the arrival of the Narendra Modi government in Delhi propelled new dynamics in this relationship. Albeit Pakistan did not change its fundamental approach of low-intensity warfare through terror attacks by its proxies in Indian territory, the attacks on the Pathankot air base in January 2016 and on the Uri army camp in September 2016 were destined to significantly cripple Pakistan’s long-running LIC campaign, with implications for the nuclear equations. 

The surgical strike mounted by Indian forces on the intervening night of 28 September 2016 was not just a tactical, cross-border and sub-conventional counter-terror response to Pakistan’s LIC campaign, but also had significant strategic connotations. The cross-border strike signalled India’s resolve to test and violate the perceived ‘redlines’ or nuclear tripwires – based on Pakistan’s long-held but ambiguously postured thresholds of nuclear use, which included crossing of the border – in order to endow a sub-conventional response to the LIC campaign.   

While the September 2016 operation was not the first such cross-border, sub-conventional endeavour by the Indian armed forces, the Surgical Strike was the first instance when it was postured prominently as a formal mission that called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and the resolve to hit the tripwires as a response to the LIC campaign. 

Having seen its strategy being greatly undermined and vitiating its international status as a terror hub, it was surprising to see Pakistan making another attempt at testing the waters with the Pulwama attack of February 2019, executed by its terror proxies. 

With the terror strike being amid India’s election season, Pulwama invited a much bigger response from the Indian armed forces, this time one notch higher on the escalation ladder with an aerial strike against terror camps in Balakot, in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The Balakot strike resulted in an aerial battle with an Indian MiG fighter jet being down with hits pilot in PoK and India threatening further strikes if the pilot was not returned unharmed. 

While the crisis was de-escalated with the return of the pilot, the episode illustrated the intense volatility in this nuclear dyad and the scope for rapid escalation. By escalating from a sub-conventional mission in the first instance to aerial strikes in the second, the Indian political leadership was posturing its inclination to opt for risky escalation decisions in order to set the terms of conflict. 

Though an escalation to probably a conventional missile battle was averted in the aftermath of the Balakot strike, Pakistan’s decision to retort with an aerial counter-attack was indication enough that the next such face-off could rapidly lead to missile strikes at each other, initially of the conventional type with the nuclear ones possibly following in quick succession. 

If the Pulwama-Balakot episodes had, on the one hand, reinforced the perception of a nuclear powder keg that South Asia is in, these instances also seemingly drove home the point to the Pakistani security establishment that its LIC strategy has run its full term and that the benefits of brinkmanship can no longer be reaped nor does the onus of escalation choices lie anymore with the Rawalpindi mandarins. 

While the terror infrastructure continues to remain intact in Pakistan, the subsequent signalling by the military establishment of its inclination for peace moves with India and the country itself sinking into deeper political turmoil indicates the momentary success of India’s responses and its effects on the larger nuclear deterrence landscape. 

However, it should also be evenly accounted that Pakistan, having realised the untenability of an ambiguous nuclear posture, had in recent years been talking about full-spectrum deterrence and have seemingly shifted focus towards developing a second-strike capability from its first-use posturing held during the first decade of nuclearization.  

Twenty years after the formal introduction of nuclear weapons in the region, the South Asian nuclear dyad looks tenuously stable on the exterior though the elements that caused the dyad to be described as a “nuclear flashpoint” still lie underneath waiting for a potential trigger. A peek at the evolution of this deterrence relationship through these two and a half decades will explain how the region came to this pass.

A perennial deterrence churning 

With its history of deep-rooted hostility, the South Asian binary went through a tumultuous evolution of deterrence structures and postures. The first decade was marked by a long-running LIC matrix that constantly lurked at nuclear tripwires; one instance of what could be termed as a limited war (Kargil), confined to a localised theatre but with nuclear threats made at least 17 times; and an instance of grand mobilisation (Operation Parakram) that almost led to a full-fledged war with imminent nuclear implications.  

Though both countries hurriedly established nuclear command and control structures in the immediate years after the tests, India’s perceptibly transparent NFU-centric doctrine was met with a policy of strategic ambiguity from Pakistan. By keeping its nuclear first-use option open and refusing to declare its thresholds (a handful of thresholds articulated through mixed signalling), Pakistan sought to deter India at all levels of military action – sub-conventional, conventional or nuclear. India’s military might was cited as justification for such postural asymmetry. 

The unprofessed objective, though, was to carve out a space to sustain the low-intensity conflict (Kashmir insurgency and terror strikes in the Indian heartland) while mitigating any Indian retaliation. With its nuclear brinkmanship behaviour fuelling global paranoia, the early years of nuclearisation and its primal instability were proving to benefit Pakistan with no decisive Indian challenge to its sub-conventional influx.

Many Indian analysts highlighted this as evidence of the doctrinal imbalance, with some questioning the efficacy of nuclear deterrence against Pakistan and a few others even demanding a review of India’s NFU posture. Though the Indian leadership upheld the NFU as sacrosanct, the need to challenge the status quo, and some doctrinal realignments or improvisations, began to be felt after the 2001-2002 crises (Parliament attack and Operation Parakram). 

Largely attributed to the ‘lessons’ from Operation Parakram (which proved to be a costly mobilisation effort with scope for rapid escalation), the Indian Army initiated a major doctrinal shift at the conventional level through what is termed as the ‘Cold Start’ strategy. With its plan for rapid battle-group thrusts into Pakistani territory without hitting its perceived nuclear tripwires, the military leadership conceived the possibility of calling Pakistan’s ‘nuclear bluff’ by taking its response to Pakistani soil. Though backed by an incipient belief that the space for a limited conventional war exists, the Cold Start strategy embodied India’s resolve to alter the deterrence landscape without disturbing the nuclear doctrinal framework.

Albeit the feasibility of this strategy was consistently doubted when it was floated and debated extensively in the strategic community, its signalling spin-off, however, was immense as Pakistan began to doubt the credibility of its brinkmanship behaviour and ability to sustain the LIC without inviting India’s retaliation. Through an assortment of political campaigns (by hyping the Cold Start as escalatory) and technological responses (Nasr tactical nuclear missile, Babar and Ra’ad cruise missiles), Pakistan made a frantic effort to project and posture confidence in its deterrent. 

The lack of a unitary effort from the security establishment to promote the Cold Start and the Indian Army eventually having to disown it (by renaming it as proactive strategy) largely denoted the efficacy of Pakistan’s campaign, aided in some measure by the Western alarmists. Yet, its introduction marked a complex game of deterrence: while one actor propagated a proactive nuclear posture to feed its sub-conventional plan, the other responded with a proactive conventional posture for a range of non-nuclear responses. 

The official silence on Cold Start matched by Pakistan’s refusal to brand the Nasr as a tactical nuclear response only added to this complexity, until two articulations by Shyam Saran, the then Chairman of India’s National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) in 2013, first at an April 2013 event in New Delhi and a subsequent op-ed article in a leading newspaper, both of which were seen as a significant signalling exercise by the Indian security establishment to its nuclear-armed rivals. By clarifying that India will not differentiate between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and will consider any such use against its forces or territory as a first strike (implicitly inviting nuclear retaliation), the security establishment has belatedly implied the existence of its proactive strategy. 

The next stage in this deterrence churning, then, could come in the form of Pakistan’s response to the latest Indian posturing, even as Western observers anticipate India’s proactive military plan to see action after the next major terror strike.

While its tryst with doctrinal realignments continues, India initiated a decisive new level of posturing, with greater implications for the deterrence calculus, by introducing ballistic missile defence (BMD) into the scene. Although India’s BMD programme originated out of concerns about Pakistan’s missile prowess and the China-Pakistan proliferation nexus, the rapid advances in India’s missile defence platforms had by then emerged as a potent challenge to Pakistan’s deterrent. 

Even though interception technologies were and continue to be still evolving, and are yet to guarantee leak-proof protection, the Indian programme was initially geared towards developing an extended area defence capability, and subsequently towards a nationwide shield, that could limit the damage from Pakistani (and Chinese) missiles, if not absolute destruction. 

With no technological counter of its own, but for the nascent cruise missile inventory (with limited engagement scope against missile defence systems), Pakistan realised that India’s pursuit of a multi-tier interception network will negate its first-strike advantage, and could provide India with greater defensive depth, which Pakistan feared, could encourage India towards pre-emption. 

Besides the fact that even a failed first use might invite Indian retaliation, the shift in the deterrence calculus through these initiations was such that even a marginally-effective Indian missile defence system could diminish the combative edge of Pakistan’s strategic forces. Like its response to the Cold Start, Pakistan had since been projecting India’s missile defence as causal for instability and contending that they will affect nuclear Confidence Building Measures (CBMs). 

Consequently, Pakistan attempted a weakly-devised signalling effort in May 2012 by declaring a survivable second-strike capability on its naval platforms. While the strategic component of its naval platforms continues to remain unclear even a decade after this declaration, the fact that Pakistan declared a second-strike alternative (after years of reliance on its first-strike posture) was then seen as a sign of its desperation on the Indian capabilities including missile defence, the doctrinal realignments, and postural shifts. 

Stable, but an uneasy equation

After the initial gains that Pakistan accrued from its postural asymmetry in the immediate years after overt nuclearisation, the scales began to shift in favour of India around a decade later. Besides the measures discussed above, events like the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden and the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, even if in limited terms, had also, in many ways, impacted this turnaround. 

While Pakistan attempted to match India’s nuclear deal advantage by feverishly augmenting its fissile stocks, the Abbottabad operation eroded the credibility of its Army and its own international standing both of which diminished its leverage in the India-Pakistan reconciliation process.   

That the democratic transition had negligible impact on Pakistan's nuclear policy or posturing was evident from the fact that successive civilian regimes from Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif to Imran Khan did not muster the strength to snatch the policy initiative from the Army, which continued to shape strategic policies, including nuclear and approach towards India. 

The grand transformation, however, happened from the events of 2016, notably the Indian surgical strikes and how it significantly altered the status quo vis-à-vis, Pakistan’s LIC strategy and nuclear posturing. However, the escalatory dimensions of this feat, when being repeated in Balakot, have been described earlier in this essay. 

Certainly, so, the question remains perennial moot on whether a major terror attack in the coming years on Indian soil that could invite a formidable military response from India will have the potential to eventually hit the nuclear tripwires.

While Pakistan continues to provide a haven for terror groups and proxies against India, the recent political turmoil in the country with the Pakistan Army’s shifting loyalties to its civilian picks as well as its diminishing clout on the country’s polity are factors that will significantly influence this question. With a severe economic crisis threatening to propel the country further on the road towards systemic failure, Pakistan’s ability to substantially indulge in nuclear gaming with India could be considerably undermined. 

This is, however, not to suggest any diminutive imprints on Pakistan’s nuclear capability or postural structures. Rather, Pakistan has been actively pursuing what it terms as “full-spectrum deterrence,” a fundamental shift from what was initially the pursuit of credible minimum deterrence (CMD) like in the Indian case.   

Largely attributed to the Indian doctrinal realignments and capability acquisitions listed above, the shift to “full-spectrum deterrence” largely implies an expansion of capabilities to cater to the full spectrum of theatres (which drove the initial posture), development of new nuclear thresholds and response options that could yield the postural advantage held in the early years of covert nuclearisation, and enhance the credibility of the deterrent through systems for each threat scenarios, instead of flexible numbers. (A subsequent essay in this series will provide a detailed analysis of this exercise). 

Thus, it is evident that nuclear deterrence in the South Asian dyad will continue to evolve and metamorphose into newer dimensions and outcomes. While the initial years of instability and volatility might be behind us, the peculiar state of the India-Pakistan relationship and the intensity of disputes that underpin this relationship provides immense scope for newer eruptions in what could remain an uneasy deterrence equation.