Is War Between India and Pakistan Imminent?If so, could it escalate to a nuclear confrontation?
Friends, India and Pakistan both say they are on the verge of war. In what follows, I examine the roots and implications of the current crisis between them and consider the likelihood of an escalation to nuclear war. Rajan Nuclear weapons rightly evoke horror, and thankfully, we’ve seen them used on only two occasions, in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Yet it has long been assumed that they prevent war, whether nuclear or “conventional,” between states who possess them precisely because their use would create a near-instantaneous catastrophe. Nuclear weapons, goes the logic, are so deadly that the prospect of immediate mass carnage and destruction will deter leaders from using them against states able to retaliate in kind. Plus, continues the argument, nuclear weapons will make even conventional war between nuclear-armed enemies unlikely: leaders on both sides will realize that a clash between their armies could “escalate” into a nuclear confrontation. One of the standard explanations for the “Long Peace” between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1949 (the year the Soviets acquired “the bomb”) and 1991 was that the “balance of terror” created by nuclear weapons restrained leaders in Moscow and Washington. This two-step logic has held up for a generation and extends to other adversaries who now possess nuclear weapons, for example India and China. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that we may be approaching a dangerous moment. The reliability of the “balance of terror” claim is currently being tested to a degree we’ve not witnessed since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Following the April 22 terrorist attack in the scenic town of Pahalgam, located within the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir, India and Pakistan have moved from a war of words to concrete actions that have raised substantially the risk of a war between them, with India vowing not to let the killing of 26 people in the Pahalgam attack go unpunished and claiming that the atrocities were committed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization based in Pakistan. Both sides warn that war is imminent. We have not seen an outright war between nuclear-armed states. We are, in consequence, in no position to know whether the prospect of catastrophe will prevent the leaders of India and Pakistan from using nuclear escalation if the current crisis between their countries begets a conventional war that then spins out of control. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to blame the Pahalgam attack on terrorist infiltrators based in Pakistan. Indeed, India has long accused Pakistan of aiding and abetting armed militants who seek to unite all of Kashmir with Pakistan or aspire to an independent Kashmiri state. On occasion, cross-border terrorist attacks, or ones traced to groups based in Indian-controlled Kashmir, have led to skirmishes between Indian and Pakistani troops along the “Line of Control” (LoC), as the ceasefire line from the 1947-48 India-Pakistan war over Kashmir has been come to be known as part of a 1972 agreement between the two countries. Since last week’s Pahalgam attack, the danger of a violent clash between India and Pakistan has grown substantially. India has bulked up its military presence in areas near the LoC. Pakistan has responded with parallel moves. More alarmingly, Modi has suspended the September 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, which was brokered by the World Bank and has since regulated the sharing between India and Pakistan of the water flows of the Indus River system. The Treaty allotted the waters of the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi, the Indus’s eastern tributaries, to India, and those of the Indus as well as the Jhelum and Chenab mostly to Pakistan. Disputes over the Treaty’s implementation were to be resolved through negotiation, and unilateral steps to disrupt the water-sharing accord are prohibited. Modi’s decision poses a serious threat to Pakistan, which depends on water flows from the Indus for irrigation and power generation. Even in past years, Pakistan has charged that India’s upstream dam-building deprives it of water flows at the volume it requires. India, for its part, has denied that the dams and barrages that it has built unfairly diminish downstream flows to Pakistan or violate the Treaty. In Pakistan’s eyes, Modi’s move to suspend the Treaty puts India in the position of being able to potentially control water flows that nourish 80% of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land. That, in turn, could reduce crop yields and increase grain prices—already a serious problem because climate change has been diminishing the amount of water Pakistan receives from the Indus riverine system. In response to Modi’s move, Pakistan has warned that any diversion or stoppage by India of water flows to Pakistan will be treated “as an act of war” and met with the use of “full force.” There’s a larger context for the conflict between India and Pakistan: the status of Kashmir itself, and it, too, is germane to the current crisis. Kashmir, India’s sole Muslim-majority state, was ruled in 1947 by a Hindu monarch, who chose to join India after Britain’s South Asian imperial domains were partitioned that year to create the new states of India and Pakistan. (Until 1971, Pakistan included East Pakistan, separated from the western wing by thousands of miles of Indian territory. Following the India-Pakistan War of that year, East Pakistan seceded to become independent Bangladesh.) Since Pakistan was created as a state for South Asia’s Muslims, many Pakistanis, and certainly the terrorist groups operating in Indian-ruled Kashmir, consider India’s control of 55 percent of its land and 70 percent of its population, encompassing the territory’s southern and southeast parts, an historic injustice that demands rectification. In Pakistan, the decision of Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist, to end (in 2019) the semi-autonomous status Kashmir enjoyed under Article 370 of India’s constitution was seen as an added affront. Pakistanis resented Modi’s move all the more because it was a gambit by an Indian leader whose political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is wedded to the concept of Hindutva (roughly the conflation of Indian national identity and Hinduism), no matter that India itself contains 200 million Muslims (14 percent of the total population). Since the Pahalgam terrorist attack, India has beefed up its military forces near the LoC. So has Pakistan. The rhetoric from both sides is increasingly strident. Indian and Pakistani soldiers have exchanged gunfire across the LoC. And the Indian warships, including one of its aircraft carriers, INS Vikrant, as well as submarines, have been dispatched to the Arabian Sea, off Pakistan’s coast, for exercises. Pakistan’s navy responded in kind and also issued a stay-clear notice to foreign shipping in parts of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Sea. Even if the crisis between India and Pakistan sparked by the Pahalgam attack leads to an all-out war, the lines of possession in Kashmir won’t change. But it could nonetheless heighten the risk of a spiral into nuclear war, especially if the initial non-nuclear confrontation were to expand in scope and lethality. One could say, not to worry: Rationality and the instinct for self-preservation will prevail. But, as Barbara Tuchman’s classic work on World War I, The Guns of August, demonstrates so vividly, hubris, bravado, miscalculation, fear, even sheer stupidity, can combine to push leaders into outcomes that none of them desired—and indeed even deemed fanciful. My sense is that this dire scenario is nevertheless unlikely in current-day South Asia. Leaders in India and Pakistan know full well that a nuclear conflict between them would have catastrophic consequences and prove difficult to contain once initiated. Recall that there were no nuclear weapons to concentrate leaders’ minds in 1914. But even if India and Pakistan prove risk averse on the nuclear front, a conventional war between them will represent the first failure of the part of the “balance of terror” theory that has held up for decades and avers that nuclear armed-states will be deterred from going to war, conventional and nuclear, against one another. That alone should worry us given that existence of nuclear-armed adversaries in other parts of the world. © 2025 Rajan Menon |