India-Pakistan War: Global Risk

Temporary Truce

Are India and Pakistan still at war? Yes.

Ceasefire of 10^th May has brought in temporary truce; but both countries have declared new parameters to interpret hostile actions by the enemy.

India has suspended Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) which Pakistan has called an act of war. Pakistan has suspended the 1972 Shimla Agreement under which both countries had agreed to maintain status-quo of LOC and resolve all disputes through dialogue.

PM Modi, in his address on 12^th May declared that India has only suspended retaliatory action against Pakistan's terror and military camps and will give a fitting reply for any terrorist attack on India.

Risk of Nuclear War

On 10 May 2025, before the announcement of the ceasefire, I met a highly educated white-collar professional who said, ‘It’s time to exterminate Pakistan.’ ‘Would that be feasible since Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state? I asked.

The risk of  the ongoing conflict escalating into a nuclear war cannot be ruled out. Even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have disastrous consequences for both countries, the region, and the entire world.

Scenarios

How may India-Pakistan war spiral into an all-out nuclear war? The following scenarios are probable:

1.   India suffers yet another Pakistan-sponsored terrorist strike; assaults terrorist bases, safe havens, and training camps in Pakistan; overwhelms Pakistan in conventional warfare and moves into its territory; Pakistan launches nuke attack against India. In February 2019, after India’s Balakot strike, Pakistan had convened a meeting of its NCA (National Command Authority), the body authorised to launch nukes! Despite its public denial, Pakistan may have convened NCA meeting after India’s calibrated assault on terrorist hotspots on 7 May 2025.

2.   Terrorists capture Pakistan’s nuclear assets, or are allowed to capture such assets by a complicit State, and attack India. It  cannot be forgotten that in 2001 Al Qaeda, a non-State actor had orchestrated hijacking of three commercial flights to attack the Twin Towers at New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC.

3.   India believes Pakistan has launched chemical and/or biological warfare in which case India’s nuclear policy of NFU (No-First-Use) does not apply.

4.   False alarm by air-land-sea defense system in either country.

Who has What?

Nine countries possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. In total, the global nuclear stockpile is close to 13,000 weapons. Russia and the US possess about 90% of all nuclear warheads.

Link for Estimated Global Nuclear Warhead Inventories, 2025:

https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/nuke-world-map.png

Most organisations – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) - and experts estimate that India and Pakistan each has at least 170 and up to 250 nuclear weapons (NW). The yield (explosive or destructive energy) of each NW may range between 12 to 45 kilotons and even up to 100 kt.

China, with long adversarial relation with India, has 600 NWs, a huge military machine, is Pakistan’s ally and leading arms supplier.

All three countries have nuclear triad – ability to launch NW by land, air, and sea – and Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) with range covering the entire enemy territory.

Regional & Global Catastrophe

What would be the fallout of a hypothetical nuclear war in 2025 between India and Pakistan?  

A Report* authored by ten experts presents a chilling what-if scenario.

What-if

·      Pakistan deploys 150 nuclear weapons and India deploys 100 (retaining a strategic reserve of nuclear arms for potential threat from China), both countries targeting urban centres with population of one million or more.

·      Fatalities: 50 million to 125 million people. (Total fatality in WW II was 50 million!)

·      Nuclear-ignited fires could release vast quantities of black carbon in smoke which will rise into the upper troposphere, then into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks.

·      Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2° to 5°C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%.

·      Net primary productivity will decline 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities.

*"Rapidly Expanding Nuclear Arsenals in Pakistan and India Portend Regional and Global Catastrophe," Science Advances 5, no. 10 (October 2, 2019)

Who benefits from war?

Who else but the countries with major share of global arms trade: US (42%), France (11%), Russia (11%), China (5.8%), Germany (5.6%), Italy, UK, Spain, Israel, and South Korea? All arms sellers love wars, their business booming with perpetual and escalating conflicts and confrontations in the world.

Who are the buyers? During 2020-24, Ukraine was the 1^st, India (8.3%) the 2^nd and Pakistan (4.6%) the 5^th largest importers of major arms.

Is that why Trump urged both India and Pakistan to stop war and do trade with it? Both countries are likely to augment their nuclear stockpile, enhance yield, and range of delivery missiles, and periodically modernise conventional arms and nuclear weapons.

Friend or Foe?

Global powers have no permanent friends or foes; geo-political shifts make strange bed-fellows. Now, India and the US have strong friendly relations, but didn’t the US send the 7^th Fleet to the Bay of Bengal in 1971 to threaten intervention if the Indian army moved into East Pakistan?

Weren’t Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai once but clashed in a bloody war in 1962, and China continues to claim Arunachal Pradesh as its own?

For the US, is Pakistan a friend or foe or just a tool in its ambition to stay put as world’s unrivalled super power? The US used Pakistan in Afghanistan to humble Soviet Russia in 1989; invaded Abbottabad in Pakistan – only 103 kms from Islamabad - in May 2011 to kill Osama Bin Laden in his safe-haven; but recently bailed out Pakistan with a crucial IMF loan, and possibly brokered the ceasefire with India at the behest of Pakistan.

Smiling Buddha

·      18 May 1974 – Pokharan Test - Codename: Smiling Buddha.

·      11 & 13 May 1998 – Pokharan II Test – Codename: Operation Shakti

·      12 May 2025 – PM’s Address to nation

Is it merely coincidental or deeply symbolic that it was Buddha Purnima on 18 May 1974, 13 May 1998, and  12 May 2025?

India had declared that the 1974 nuclear test was for peaceful purposes. But its security concerns aggravated after China became a NW state, and Pakistan was believed to have clandestinely acquired NW capability. India went ahead with the 1998 tests ignoring pressure from the US and other NW states to desist from it. As had been apprehended by India, Pakistan too conducted tests in May 1998, days after India’s tests to come out in the open as a NW state.

What Next?

India and Pakistan being nuclear weapon states must avoid a full-blown war escalating into a nuclear war. Diplomacy and dialogue guided by mature statesmanship may help to ensure peace.

Pakistan must stop sponsoring, sheltering, and supporting terrorists and terrorist organisations.  Mere platitudes by Pakistan will not suffice. It must act decisively and credibly against terrorist organisations in the country to eliminate them.

But the elephant in the room is Kashmir upon which neither India nor Pakistan is likely to relinquish its claim. Temporary truce may prevail, but long-term peace may be a mirage despite which both countries must work, hope and pray for peace.

Nuclear Holocaust

Highlighting his concern about the monstrous destructive power of the new weapon, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb told NBC in a 1965 documentary,

"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu …. says, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds”."

He was referring to Gita Shloka -11.32:

"कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो

लोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्तः ।"

Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people. 

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned the world in a joint statement in 1985.

Since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, during the Cold War years and thereafter, scientists and strategists have been warning the world of a nuclear holocaust. Global nuclear disarmament initiatives have partially succeeded in reducing the nuclear stockpile from more than 64000 at the height of the Cold War to about 10000 at present. Yet, the current active stockpile can destroy our entire planet and annihilate humanity and other life-forms. Hence, we must never forget that these nuclear arms at various locations of the world constitute a mine-field that can trigger incomprehensible disaster by design or even by accident.

Russel-Einstein Manifesto

“In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”

‘Two of the twentieth century’s most famous intellectuals, philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein (who died several months before the text was released), issued this manifesto in London on July 9, 1955 to warn the world about the dire consequences of a nuclear war. They urged peaceful resolution to international conflict to avoid “universal death.”’ (Atomic Heritage Foundation)

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 0.015 and 0.021 megatons, respectively, and killed 220000 people. 

Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound, Hiroshima

(The vault lies under the mound and contains the ashes of roughly 70,000 victims. These were persons whose ashes were unclaimed because the entire family had perished or because they were persons of unknown identity.) 

The vastly more  lethal Hydrogen Bomb aka The Super or the thermo-nuclear bomb was produced first by America in 1952, and later by other NW States. Russia tested in 1961 a three-stage thermo-nuclear device – the Tsar Bomba with a yield of 50 megatons of TNT – 3333.33 times greater destructive energy than the Hiroshima bomb.

Note: The yield of a nuclear weapon, or its destructive power, is expressed in megatons (1 million tons) or kilotons (1,000 tons of TNT).

Nukemap

Nukemap (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator created by Alex Wellerstein. It is an interactive tool; the user can choose her target city, type and yield of the bomb, and the mode of detonation (air-burst, ground-burst, etc) to estimate the death and devastation that would ensue.

“The scariest site on the Internet isn’t lurking on the dark web, but hiding in plain sight at nuclearsecrecy.com,” says The Washington Post.

Resources & References

·      SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute)

·      FAS (Federation of American Scientists)

·      UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists)

·      Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

·      Man’s Peril: Bertrand Russell’s Talk (23 Dec 1954) on BBC Radio.

·      Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

·      Nuclear Notebook - Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns and Mackenzie Knight

 ***

Postscript

Comments by thoughtful readers

Reader 1

Two comments:

1. According to our experts and media, we inflicted grave damages on their nuclear arsenal. If this is correct, then India can sleep peacefully and Pakistan should be deterred from future action.

2.  This comment is more pertinent for the border areas and armed forces. War extracts a very large cost from both of them. The rest of the country is much removed and can debate it intellectually. For them it's a matter of life and death.

My reply:

I respect your comments, but sharing a few thoughts. 

No.1 - I wish that were true. Surgical strike and Balakot didn't stop Pahalgaon, and India's May 7 assault is unlikely to stop future terrorist strikes. Who won the current round? Both India and Pakistan are in celebration mode - Victory Days et al. Neither would reveal what they lost - men and equipment. No one wins a war. It hurts both parties. 

No. 2 - I agree. Our lives and views are shaped by geography. People in the border areas suffer a lot more than those farther inland. But a nuclear war eliminates distance. Every part of India is within strike-range of Pak & China. In a nuclear war, we all die. So, the angst is not intellectual, it's existential.

Reader 2

Interesting. But I have my own take on India and Pakistan being nuclear armed states.

It's fairly easy to put together the required quantity of fissile material (particularly Plutonium, but not so much enriched Uranium) and explode it on the ground or underground. It is quite another matter to "weaponise" it, which requires making a compact device which can be carried in an aeroplane or a rocket and dropped on the target in a manner that at the critical moment it detonates with the force it is designed for.

Of course, a friendly collaborator with the capabilities to make a "nuclear weapon" can sell or gift one to the country of its choice.

A nuclear device is too complicated to be a danger in the hands of terrorists unless helped by those who are capable.

Reader 3

Well researched. Pakistan doesn’t have launch capability at Sea.

India has demonstrated considerable air defence capability.

Chinese Air Defence- electronic - didn’t look that effective based on outcome.

Nobody in Pakistan wants war - knowing they have more to lose - except the Jihadi General Munir . Has he learnt his lesson ; remains to be seen.