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Living with Nuclear Weapons in South Asia: Nuclear Rhetoric, Regional Insecurity, and the Failure of Strategic Maturity
Tahir Azad
Analysis Series
Analysis//0028/May/2026/London-Dialogue. 30th May 2026
Abstract
Twenty-eight years after the twinned nuclear tests of May 1998, South Asia remains the most acutely contested nuclear region in the world. India and Pakistan together hold roughly 350 warheads, maintain maturing delivery systems, and have fought or skirmished repeatedly beneath a nuclear ceiling. However, the dominant register of nuclear statecraft in both capitals is less doctrine than performance: arsenals invoked for electoral advantage, test anniversaries marked with public festivity, and threats of first use traded with a casualness that would be unusual among other nuclear-armed states. This paper argues that South Asia’s central nuclear problem is neither capability nor intent but culture, the absence of the institutional restraint, crisis-communication architecture, and rhetorical discipline that allow deterrence to function as a stabiliser rather than a trigger. That gap is widening as hypersonic systems, armed drones, and artificial intelligence reshape the strategic environment faster than regional nuclear thinking is adapting to them.
The Long Shadow of May 1998
The fortnight of May 1998 reordered South Asian security. On 11 and 13 May 1998, India conducted five detonations at the Pokhran Test Range under the codename Operation Shakti, and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India a full nuclear-weapons state. Seventeen days later, Pakistan responded with its own tests at the Ras Koh Hills in Baluchistan, becoming the seventh declared nuclear power and the first in the Muslim world. Both rounds drew condemnation and sanctions, and both produced United Nations Security Council Resolution 1172.
What distinguished the South Asian case was less the fact of testing than its domestic reception. In New Delhi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had campaigned on being openly nuclear. In Islamabad, the decision to test under intense international pressure was rapidly absorbed into national mythology. The fusion of weapons of mass destruction with national pride and political identity, the defining feature of the region’s nuclear culture, was established in that opening fortnight and has shaped the discourse since.
The structural consequences were severe. The Kargil conflict erupted barely a year later, the first war between two states that both openly held nuclear weapons. The 2001-02 standoff after the attack on the Indian Parliament mobilised close to a million troops. The 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2016 Uri strikes, the 2019 Balakot episode, and the May 2025 Operation Sindoor crisis each showed a willingness to escalate conventional force beneath the nuclear ceiling. None produced durable bilateral risk-reduction machiner
India: The Gap Between Doctrine and Political Rhetoric
India’s nuclear doctrine is, on paper, among the more restrained of any weapons state. Codified in 2003 on the basis of the 1999 draft, it commits India to no first use, retaliation only after a nuclear attack, and civilian command authority. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes that India fields a developing triad and, per the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, holds an estimated 180 warheads, having modestly expanded its arsenal and begun introducing canisterised missiles that can be transported with mated warheads, a notable shift from its traditional de-alerted posture.
The difficulty lies in the distance between this doctrine and the political language surrounding it. The BJP’s 2014 manifesto pledged to revise and update the nuclear doctrine, widely read as a signal to reconsider ‘no first use’. The party did not pursue formal change, but senior figures have repeatedly destabilised the policy rhetorically. In August 2019, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, after visiting Pokhran, stated that India had adhered to no first use but that its future was contingent on circumstances. The Arms Control Association assessed this as the most senior public questioning of the doctrine, delivered amid the crisis over the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir.
The 2019 general election illustrated the deeper pattern. Following the Pulwama attack and the Balakot strikes, nuclear themes entered campaign rhetoric, with the Prime Minister and senior leaders asserting that India was no longer deterred by Pakistan’s arsenal. Scholarship on the region, including peer-reviewed work on crisis behaviour under the nuclear shadow, argues that successive Indian governments face escalating domestic pressure to threaten Pakistan, amplified by a media ecosystem that profits from confrontation. The effect is to decouple a careful written doctrine from the signals leaders actually transmit, generating precisely the ambiguity deterrence theory counsels against.
Pakistan: Lowered Thresholds and the Culture of Commemoration
Pakistan presents a different structure of risk. It has never adopted ‘no first use’. Per the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nuclear Notebook for 2025, it operates under a doctrine of full-spectrum deterrence within a broader philosophy of credible minimum deterrence and holds an estimated 170 warheads. The centrepiece of the lowered-threshold posture is the short-range, low-yield Nasr (Hatf-9) missile, introduced as a counter to India’s Cold Start concept of rapid, limited conventional incursions.
Pakistan’s own strategic community defends this as the rational response of a conventionally weaker state. The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of Pakistani tactical weapons lays out both the official case, that tactical weapons deter limited war and remain under centralised National Command Authority control, and the substantial criticism, including from Pakistani analysts, that battlefield weapons lower the nuclear threshold, complicate command and control, and raise the risk of inadvertent escalation. This is a genuine doctrinal debate, not a settled question, and a balanced assessment must record both sides of it.
Where Pakistan’s case is weakest is not doctrine but discourse. Youm-e-Takbeer, observed each 28 May, is a full national commemoration of the tests, with flag ceremonies, exhibitions, parades, broadcasts, and political speeches. No other declared nuclear state institutionalises its first test as a popular holiday. The United States holds no commemoration of Trinity; the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China mark no equivalent occasion; Israel suppresses public discussion of its undeclared arsenal entirely. The encoding of the bomb as an object of celebration, rather than a weapon of last resort to be handled with discretion, is distinctive to the subcontinent and corrosive to the gravity that deterrence requires.
This is not, however, a one-sided fault. Both capitals treat their arsenals as instruments of political capital. The salient point is symmetry: India’s restrained doctrine is undercut by reckless political signalling, while Pakistan’s reckless doctrine is paired with reckless commemoration. Neither state has built the institutional culture that would make either posture safe.
The Crisis Record: Kargil to Sindoor
The period from Kargil in 1999 to the May 2025 crisis represents the longest sustained sequence of nuclear-shadowed confrontations in contemporary history. Kargil remains the most instructive. As India’s conventional response gained ground against Pakistani positions across the Line of Control, external actors assessed a real risk of escalation, and the crisis was ultimately defused in part through direct American diplomatic intervention. The episode demonstrated that nuclear weapons did not prevent conventional war between the two states; they raised the consequences of every miscalculation.
The pattern since has been normalisation rather than learning. Each subsequent crisis was followed not by arms-control dialogue but by faster modernisation and sharper rhetoric. Indian institutional analysis, including the Observer Research Foundation’s assessment of the May 2025 crisis, judged that the nuclear overhang did not prevent escalation but shaped its form, with both sides calibrating strikes to remain beneath the perceived threshold. SIPRI’s researchers were blunter, noting that the 2025 strikes on nuclear-related military infrastructure, compounded by third-party disinformation, risked turning a conventional conflict into a nuclear crisis.
The Conceptual Spine: A Third Nuclear Age, and a Second-Age Discourse
The argument of this paper rests on a periodisation that requires definition rather than a slogan. In the conventional framing, the first nuclear age was the bipolar US-Soviet standoff that produced the core theory of deterrence and the architecture of arms control. The second nuclear age, dating from the post-Cold War period, was defined by proliferation, the shift of nuclear risk towards Asia, and the emergence of multiple regional dyads operating outside the superpower framework. The proposed third nuclear age is characterised by the convergence of nuclear and advanced conventional capabilities, hypersonic delivery, missile defence, autonomous systems, and the integration of artificial intelligence into command and warning.
This periodisation is genuinely contested, and intellectual honesty requires saying so. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists identified the third nuclear age as its leading global risk for 2026, and the Atlantic Council has built a substantial research programme around it. However, serious scholars caution that the label is a politically motivated construct emanating from the Western defence establishment, noting that no new nuclear powers have emerged since 2006, that AI is not yet integrated into command systems, and that hypersonic matters less for intercontinental ranges where ballistic missiles are already fast.
That critique is well taken at the global level, but it sharpens rather than weakens the South Asian argument. The objection that hypersonic add little where missiles are already fast does not hold for India and Pakistan, where flight times are measured in single-digit minutes and where no functioning early warning or mutual-notification architecture exists. The decisive variable in South Asia is not the technology in the abstract but the absence of the institutional shock-absorbers that the established nuclear powers built over decades. The region is acquiring third-age tools while conducting a second age, arguably even a first-age, public discourse of pride and threat.
The Technology Gap in Concrete Terms
India’s test of a long-range hypersonic missile on 16 November 2024, reported to exceed 1,500 kilometres and to carry varied payloads, together with the 2024 Agni-V multiple-warhead test and the BrahMos-II programme with Russia, is expanding Indian counterforce potential. The destabilising mechanism is well documented: speed and manoeuvrability compress an adversary’s decision cycle, heighten counterforce temptation, and increase the risk of conventional-nuclear entanglement. Pakistan’s likely response, accelerating its own systems and leaning further on lowered thresholds, deepens the instability.
The drone dimension, prominent in May 2025, compounds the problem. Armed drones and loitering munitions are cheap, deniable, and difficult to attribute, exactly the attributes most dangerous in a nuclear-risk environment, and they operate in a domain where the boundary between conventional and strategic action is undefined. When political leaders are simultaneously issuing public nuclear threats and deploying autonomous systems of contested attribution, the margin for catastrophic misreading is not theoretical but operational.
Why Culture Outweighs Capability
Standard analysis of South Asian nuclear risk focuses on warhead counts, ranges, command-and-control vulnerabilities, and the proximity of non-state actors. These matter. But the deeper deficit is cultural and institutional. Deterrence is not merely the possession of weapons; it is a social technology requiring shared understandings, reliable communication channels, credible and legible red lines, and the discipline to keep arsenals out of routine political competition.
The established nuclear powers, for all their Cold War recklessness, eventually built that architecture: hotlines, notification regimes, arms-control treaties, and professional norms that placed weapons outside the register of popular celebration. South Asia has built almost none of it. There is no operationally meaningful India-Pakistan nuclear hotline, no bilateral arms-control process, and no successor to the 1999 Lahore Declaration’s risk-reduction provisions, which Kargil effectively nullified. In repeated crises, the only reliable de-escalation mechanism has been external intervention, a dependency that may not always be available. Youm-e-Takbeer festivities and electoral nuclear rhetoric are symptoms of this same underlying failure to build the cognitive and institutional infrastructure that nuclear possession demands.
What Strategic Maturity Would Require
These failures reflect political choices, not iron necessity, and can in principle be reversed. Four measures define the minimum threshold of strategic adulthood.
Remove nuclear weapons from domestic politics. Both states should retire nuclear threats from electoral rhetoric and public commemoration. India’s written doctrine already provides the basis; what is missing is the discipline to honour it in political speech. Pakistan’s establishment would need to recognise that populist nuclear signalling, whether on the campaign trail or at anniversary ceremonies, erodes the very credibility deterrence depends on.
Build genuine crisis communication. The absence of an operationally credible nuclear hotline between two states that have fought repeatedly and approached the nuclear threshold more than once is a structural absurdity. Authoritative, real-time channels between governments and military commands must exist before the next crisis, not be improvised within it.
Address emerging technology jointly. Hypersonic systems, armed drones, and AI-enabled targeting are not purely bilateral matters. Both states should engage existing Track II channels and pursue confidence-building measures tailored to these technologies, including pre-notification of hypersonic tests and explicit acknowledgement of the decision-compression problem.
Shift the register from pride to responsibility. Strategic communities in both countries, many of whose members privately understand the risks, should press their political leaderships more directly on the long-run costs of treating nuclear weapons as sources of prestige. Civil society, universities, and the media have a decisive role in reframing public discourse from celebration to stewardship.
Conclusion
Twenty-eight years after Pokhran and Chagai, South Asia has not reconciled itself to the responsibilities of the weapons it acquired. The region holds roughly 350 warheads between two states, maturing delivery systems, a nascent hypersonic capability, recent experience of large-scale drone warfare, and a record of recurrent crises. What it lacks is the strategic culture, the institutional architecture, and the political discipline to manage these assets safely.
The gap between capability and culture is, at root, a failure of strategic maturity, shared by both states even where their specific failings differ. The next crisis will arrive in an environment further complicated by faster weapons, autonomous systems, and compressed decision cycles. Whether the region’s leadership will have matured sufficiently to handle it without catastrophe remains, on current evidence, an open and uncomfortable question.
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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