With roughly 170 nuclear warheads apiece, India and Pakistan have evolved a singular approach to armed conflict. Both sides are willing to use military force — but cautiously and according to unwritten rules that aim to prevent escalation.
The last major war between the two countries — the 1999 Kargil War — took place in the shadow of successful nuclear tests by each side the previous year and typified a new era in ultra-caution: only ground forces were used.
In recent years, however, those informal rules have been loosened, with both countries brandishing weapons and tactics not seen in the post-nuclear era. Air power was first witnessed in 2019, with strikes into Balakot that hit undisputed Pakistani territory for the first time in almost half a century.
This week’s fighting started with air strikes too, launched by India on both Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. But the attacks, which Islamabad said killed 32, were deeper into Pakistan than before — one strike was 100km from the border — and simultaneous across multiple targets, including urban areas.
“One really important threshold that both India and Pakistan have respected was the use of air power against each other. That source of restraint has now entirely, I think, evaporated,” said Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the 2025 book The New Nuclear Age.
“India and Pakistan are in a place where these types of skirmishes, in which they both employ air power against each other, are apparently now tolerable to each side.”
Prior to their publicly testing nuclear weapons in 1998, wars between the countries were far more intense and involved full-scale conventional military conflict, with thousands of casualties on each side. In the post-nuclear era, however, the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons has made them think twice before escalating.
Muhammad Aurangzeb, Pakistan’s finance minister, described his country’s nuclear arsenal as the “great equaliser” that helps protect Pakistan against its much larger neighbour.
“These are two nuclear armed countries. For me, this is the great equaliser,” he told the Financial Times on Wednesday. “That should lead to deterrence on both sides . . . It should never ever go into that space.”
But almost three decades of managed — almost choreographed — conflicts may have lulled both sides into believing that escalation can always be controlled. The increasingly sectarian tensions fuelling the geopolitical rivalry between the Islamic republic and Hindu-dominated India have also put pressure on their military leaderships to ignore precedent and test the limits when calibrating responses.
“The nuclear domain is a very important thing. It is a paradigm which has to be understood deeply” said Lieutenant General Raj Shukla, a retired Indian army commander and security analyst. “We know there are red lines. We will respect them.”
“But we know what the red lines are, and not the red lines that you brandish as a cover for a terror rampage,” he added, referring to the killing of more than two dozen civilians, mostly tourists, by gunmen in India-administered Kashmir last month, which New Delhi linked to Islamabad.
“This is not how to use the nuclear rattle,” he said.
Pakistani officials deny any connection to the massacre, calling for a “neutral” investigation of the attack, and suggest it may have been an Indian false flag plot, which India in turn denies. Pakistan meanwhile accuses India of backing militants in western Pakistan, which India denies.
Elizabeth Threlkeld, a fellow with the Washington-based Stimson Center, said the mutual suspicions and recriminations shared on both sides “make de-escalation more difficult . . . and risk driving escalation in the wake of future [militant] attacks”.
She noted that risk would increase if cross-border military strikes became a “more normalised” way for the South Asian arch-enemies to respond to domestic terrorism.
Western diplomats in Pakistan said both countries wanted the issue of foreign support to militant groups to be included in any larger rapprochement or co-operation, such as on military and nuclear issues.
Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US and UN who is now a political analyst, acknowledged the “stability” of nuclear deterrence “has been tested” by each side but always within bounds.
“Limited war under a nuclear overhang is dangerous, but both sides have engaged in it in the past, and know when to stop,” she said.
Shortly after India’s retaliatory strike on Pakistan, the hotline between its military operations chiefs was put to use, indicating that an important deconfliction channel is open, she added.
But few doubt that other red lines — such as refraining from the use of ballistic missiles, or fighting at sea — will be crossed if the present conflict between neighbours continues much longer.
“Nuclear signalling” has also become more common. In 2019, India’s nuclear ballistic missile submarine flushed out its launch tubes — a visible indication of readiness — during the border skirmish, according to Panda.
Pakistan, meanwhile, tested two short-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons days before Wednesday’s attack.
“Fear of nuclear escalation lingers over Indian and Pakistani leaders,” said Panda, adding that the “good news” is that both countries’s leaders use conflicts to accomplish essentially political goals “while also positioning themselves for de-escalation”.
“The bad news is that their ability to control the sequence of events in a fast-moving crisis like this, with the fog of war thick, with disinformation on both sides, with nationalist populations calling for retribution, becomes a lot more difficult to do.”
Pakistan has looser rules on nuclear use, partly a response to a weaker conventional military. “Pakistan obviously believes its nuclear weapons are sufficient to compensate for the conventional inferiority and I hope India doesn’t want to test if that holds true by attacking Pakistan with significant conventional forces,” said Hans Kristensen, director of nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Pakistan has been beefing up its conventional forces with Chinese help, which could have the positive effect of forestalling the resort to nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal includes aircraft, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles, and sea-launched cruise missiles.
India’s nuclear strategy appears to be increasingly oriented towards longer-range weapons, potentially capable of reaching targets across China. That indicates a shift in focus beyond its traditional deterrent against Pakistan.
While both countries have similar number of warheads, India has been trying to improve its delivery systems. It has built two submarines capable of delivering nuclear ballistic missiles with a third being tested.
It has also successfully tested a new MIRV, or multiple warhead missile.
While resorting to these weapons is still unthinkable, so is the prospect of losing a conventional war, as Pakistan did in 1971 when the war ended with the country essentially carved in half.
“They want to see nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” said one foreign official in South Asia. “Certainly nobody on either side wants it to get anywhere near that threshold. That does not mean there couldn’t be a miscalculation.”
