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Analysis//0021/May/2026/London-Dialogue. 11 May 2026
In the early hours of 7th May 2025, India launched an unprovoked aerial assault on Pakistani territory, codenamed Operation Sindoor, in retaliation for the Pahalgam incident of 22 April. Within ten minutes of that incident, Indian authorities had already filed a First Information Report against Pakistan, without a shred of investigative evidence and without entertaining Islamabad’s repeated offer of a neutral, third-party inquiry. New Delhi’s strikes, which it described as “focused, measured, and non-escalatory”, hit civilian areas in Punjab and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, killing thirty-one Pakistani civilians, including women and children. The cost to India’s own forces was immediate and severe. In the opening engagement, a Swiss Centre d’Histoire et de Prospective Militaires reconstruction confirmed the loss of at least one Rafale (serial BS001), one Mirage 2000, and either a MiG-29UPG or a Su-30MKI, with PL-15 long-range missiles fired from Chinese-supplied J-10Cs penetrating Indian airspace at unanticipated ranges. The French Air Force Chief publicly acknowledged three Indian losses. Pakistan’s retaliatory campaign, Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, demonstrated that India’s nuclear-armed adversary was neither passive nor unprepared.
Four days of escalation and a United States-brokered ceasefire later, the deeper question remained unanswered. The crisis exposed that the nuclear doctrines on which both states have built their security architecture are frozen relics of an earlier era. India’s continued insistence on No First Use sits awkwardly beside its drive towards counterforce capability. Pakistan’s Full Spectrum Deterrence, while having been held strategically through the May crisis, deserves an honest internal audit rather than ceremonial reaffirmation. The cost of this frozen dogma is being paid in margin, with each successive crisis narrowing the space for error in a region that has now demonstrated, twice in six years, that conventional war is back inside the nuclear shadow.
The Theoretical Inheritance and its Limits
The intellectual scaffolding for South Asian deterrence was borrowed wholesale from the Cold War. Bernard Brodie’s foundational insight in The Absolute Weapon (1946), that nuclear arsenals existed to avert wars rather than win them, and Thomas Schelling’s elaboration in Arms and Influence (1966) of the manipulation of risk as a coercive instrument, were imported into South Asian strategic thought through the writings of K. Subrahmanyam, K. Sundarji, and a small Pakistani cohort centred on the Strategic Plans Division. However, as Vipin Narang argued persuasively in Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (Princeton University Press, 2014), regional nuclear powers do not adopt postures by reading Cold War theory. They optimise their force structures around perceived threats, civil-military balances, and resource constraints. India, in Narang’s typology, settled into an “assured retaliation” posture; Pakistan, by contrast, embraced “asymmetric escalation”, staking its security on the credible threat of early nuclear use.
S. Paul Kapur, in Dangerous Deterrent (Stanford University Press, 2007), went further, arguing that nuclear weapons have not stabilised South Asia but actively destabilised it by emboldening Pakistan to pursue revisionist aims under the protection of its nuclear shield. Kapur’s reformulation of Glenn Snyder’s original 1965 stability-instability paradox into what he termed the “instability-instability paradox” remains an essential reference point. So too does the work of Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty in Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Oxford University Press, 2005), which mapped how nuclear weapons have shaped, but never eliminated, the recurrent crises between New Delhi and Islamabad. The 2025 crisis confirms a less comfortable corollary: India, not Pakistan, has been the principal beneficiary of the space that nuclear weapons opened up for sub-conventional and now conventional aggression.
India’s Quiet Departure from its Own Doctrine
India’s January 2003 nuclear doctrine committed New Delhi to retaliation only, no first use against nuclear-weapon states, and the principle of credible minimum deterrence. The framework drew on the early work of Ashley J. Tellis, whose RAND monograph India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001) anticipated a “force-in-being” rather than a ready arsenal, and on George Perkovich’s authoritative India’s Nuclear Bomb (University of California Press, 1999), which traced the political and bureaucratic logic of New Delhi’s restrained posture. More than two decades on, the official text remains unchanged. The behaviour around it does not. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in 2016 and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in 2019 openly questioned whether India should remain bound by NFU, while strategists such as Bharat Karnad have long pressed for a more elastic posture in successive volumes including India’s Nuclear Policy (Praeger, 2008).
The most rigorous academic case that India is drifting towards counterforce comes from Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang, whose International Security article (Vol. 43, No. 3, Winter 2018/19) demonstrated that India’s accumulating capabilities, accurate Agni-class missiles, ballistic missile defence, and developing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, indicate a quiet shift away from the assured retaliation posture once associated with Sundarji and Subrahmanyam. Verghese Koithara’s Managing India’s Nuclear Forces (Brookings, 2012) had earlier exposed the dysfunction within India’s nuclear command structure, while Rajesh Rajagopalan’s Nuclear South Asia (Routledge, 2017) catalogued the slow drift between declaratory policy and operational reality. The March 2024 test of a MIRV-equipped Agni-V under Mission Divyastra pushed this trajectory into the open. Multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles are not the natural companion of credible minimum deterrence; they are instruments associated, since the Cold War literature of Albert Wohlstetter and Glenn Snyder, with first-strike planning and with counterforce targeting of an adversary’s nuclear forces before those forces can be used.
The point is not that India has formally abandoned NFU. The point is that New Delhi has cultivated a permissive ambiguity around it, signalling to Pakistan and to domestic audiences that the doctrine is more elastic than the printed text suggests. The June 2025 SIPRI Yearbook (chapter authored by Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda) reported that India had expanded its stockpile to roughly 180 warheads, overtaking Pakistan, and was moving towards canisterised missilescapable of carrying mated warheads in peacetime. That posture is inconsistent with the demated, second-strike model India has long advertised. As Scott Sagan warned in his work on organisational pathologies in nuclear systems, including The Limits of Safety (Princeton University Press, 1993), moving from de-mated to mated postures carries risks that no declaratory doctrine can paper over.
This contradiction was made starkly visible by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post-Sindoor address on 12 May 2025, when he declared that India would no longer be deterred by Pakistan’s “nuclear blackmail” and would treat cross-border terrorism as an act of war. India is operating, in practice, with a doctrine of conventional pre-emption beneath a declaratory commitment to nuclear restraint, while building counterforce-capable systems that can plausibly be employed as first-strike weapons against Pakistan. That is not strategic stability. It is the architecture of a future miscalculation, of the kind Robert Jervis warned about in The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1989), when states convince themselves that capability acquisition can substitute for doctrinal clarity.
India’s actions in the May 2025 crisis amplify the concern. New Delhi struck targets across Pakistan’s heartland on the basis of allegations it never substantiated, refused Pakistan’s call for a neutral investigation, and pursued kinetic action while still claiming the moral and doctrinal high ground of a “responsible” nuclear power. The international community, including the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and Turkey, largely declined to endorse the Indian narrative, calling instead for restraint. A nuclear-armed state that conducts cross-border strikes on the basis of unverified allegations, while quietly assembling MIRVed missiles and canisterised launchers, is not behaving in a manner consistent with its own declaratory doctrine.
Pakistan’s Full Spectrum Deterrence: Legitimate Questions
Pakistan’s strategic posture deserves a different but equally rigorous examination. The intellectual lineage of Full Spectrum Deterrence is best traced through Feroz Hassan Khan’s seminal Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2012), which remains the definitive insider history of how Pakistan’s nuclear programme evolved from a “never again” response to the 1971 dismemberment into a layered deterrence architecture. Peter Lavoy’s edited volume Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the writings of Naeem Salik in The Genesis of South Asian Nuclear Deterrence (Oxford University Press, 2009), trace how Pakistani planners came to view nuclear weapons as both a shield and a sword in the strategic equation with India.
The doctrine itself, articulated most fully by Lieutenant General (retd.) Khalid Kidwai in successive lectures at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, claims to span strategic, operational, and tactical tiers, with ranges from zero to 2,750 kilometres, leaving “no place to hide” within India. Pakistan has invested in tactical systems such as the Nasr (Hatf-9) precisely to deter India’s Cold Start doctrine, the latter dissected in detail by Walter C. Ladwig III in his International Security article (Vol. 32, No. 3, Winter 2007/08).
The May 2025 crisis offered the first sustained stress test of this framework, and the results invite honest reflection rather than triumphalism. Pakistan absorbed Indian aggression, retaliated effectively through conventional means, and avoided crossing the nuclear threshold. According to a recent Journal of Strategic Studies article, Pakistan did not issue any explicit nuclear threat, choosing instead to retaliate with conventional missiles and drones under Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos. The restraint was real and the conventional response credible.
Yet the deeper doctrinal questions remain. As Toby Dalton and Michael Krepon argued in their joint Stimson Center and Carnegie Endowment study A Normal Nuclear Pakistan (2015), Pakistan’s expanding arsenal increasingly outpaces the doctrinal logic that originally justified it. If FSD’s purpose rests on persuading India that even shallow incursions risk nuclear escalation, what does it mean when India strikes inside Punjab and targets airbases near Islamabad without ever crossing what Pakistan describes as a nuclear red line? Are tactical nuclear weapons genuinely usable in the dense, urbanised eastern theatre, given the fallout that would blanket Pakistani populations as quickly as Indian forces? These are not hostile questions but the questions any serious strategic community should ask of its own doctrine after a crisis of this magnitude, in the tradition of internal review that Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels urged in The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (Palgrave Macmillan, 4th ed., 2019).
The Doctrinal Lag in an Age of Compression
Both doctrines were drafted for a slower strategic environment. The 2025 crisis dispatched the assumptions of deliberate decision-making in roughly ninety-six hours. As the Belfer Center has observed, the conflict involved drones, cyber operations, naval signalling, and disinformation campaigns operating simultaneously in compressed timelines that no South Asian doctrine has yet metabolised. The work of Erik Gartzke and Jon Lindsay on cross-domain deterrence, particularly their volume Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity (Oxford University Press, 2019), highlights precisely this lag and finds South Asian doctrine acutely vulnerable to it.
The technologies on the horizon will compress timelines further. India is developing hypersonic glide vehicles alongside its ballistic missile defence. Pakistan is moving to integrate sea-launched cruise missiles into its nascent triad, as documented by Hans Kristensen, Matt Korda, and colleagues in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Both states are investing in artificial intelligence-enabled surveillance and command applications, a domain on which James Johnson’s AI and the Bomb (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides essential reading. Each technology, layered onto frozen doctrines, increases the probability that decision-makers will face nuclear-relevant choices on timescales their declaratory frameworks were never designed to handle.
The Price of Dogma
The cost of frozen doctrine is paid in margin. India’s doctrine permits massive retaliation but is being equipped for selective counterforce. Pakistan’s doctrine threatens early use across a wide spectrum, but the conditions under which that spectrum has been tested are very different from those it was originally designed to address. The 2025 crisis demonstrated that Indian decision-makers now believe they can act conventionally inside Pakistani territory without crossing the nuclear threshold. They were tactically wrong on the opening night, with their Rafales and Mirages falling to Pakistani air defences in the largest beyond-visual-range engagement in modern South Asian history, and strategically reckless throughout. The danger is that India draws the wrong lesson from May 2025, concluding that the nuclear threshold is more elastic than it actually is.
What the region needs is not the abandonment of nuclear deterrence but the honest revision of the doctrines that govern it. India must be pressed by its own strategic community as much as by external observers to clarify the relationship between its declaratory NFU and its evident counterforce trajectory. Pakistan should pursue, in its own institutions, an open examination of how Full Spectrum Deterrence performed in May 2025 and what refinements the crisis suggests. Both states should invest in crisis-management mechanisms, hotlines, escalation-control protocols, and confidence-building measures of the kind long recommended by Krepon and the Stimson tradition that do not depend on third-party mediation to function.
The dogma exists precisely to make these conversations feel unnecessary. The longer the doctrines remain frozen, the higher the eventual cost of thawing them. South Asia has been fortunate, twice in six years, that escalation stopped short of catastrophe. Fortune is not a doctrine. It is the absence of one.
Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad is Executive Director of London Dialogue, an independent UK-based research and policy institute. He can be reached at [email protected]
Tahir Azad
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