This IISS report examines nuclear deterrence and stability in South Asia by separating perceptions from facts in order to assess the extent to which India and Pakistan may be at risk from imprudent or mistaken use of nuclear weapons.
The authors start from an uncomfortable truth: chance played an important ameliorative role in the February 2019 India–Pakistan security crisis.
India and Pakistan risk stumbling into using their nuclear weapons through miscalculation or misinterpretation in a future crisis.
This report presents evidence suggesting grave deficiencies and asymmetries in India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear doctrines, which are compounded by mutual disbelief, existing and emerging military capabilities, and the prolonged absence of related dialogue mechanisms.
India and Pakistan are seeking new technologies and capabilities that dangerously undermine each other’s defence under the nuclear threshold. Whatever they learn from past crises, the uncharted territory they are now exploring requires enlightened judgement about their doctrines, their nuclear and conventional capabilities, and their unpredictable implications in future crises.
India and Pakistan already possess sufficient nuclear weapons to ensure a robust, largely stable mutual nuclear deterrence. Nuclear expansion casts doubt on stated policies of minimalism, risks a high-cost arms race in the post-pandemic era and may put overall deterrence stability at risk.
China’s evolving profile as a nuclear-weapons state is compounding India’s security challenges. Yet control over the drivers of the India–Pakistan nuclear-deterrence and stability equation remains almost entirely in the hands of leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Only India and Pakistan can choose to creatively overcome the challenges to adopting new risk-reduction measures, as an imperfect but realistic stopgap until trust-building and eventual political dialogue make arms control possible.
This report identifies a list of potentially useful confidence-building measures (CBMs) and other practical steps both countries could take early on.
It concludes that a robust, trusted, reliable, deniable backchannel between their leaderships is the most promising means by which India and Pakistan could achieve greater strategic and nuclear-deterrence stability. This is in their interests and operationalising it is their decision. Such a mechanism should help avoid or mitigate the costs of any future crisis as well as eventually help India and Pakistan to adopt new CBMs on the way to building greater trust.
Editor