After four days of exchanging airstrikes and drone attacks on military infrastructure brought India and Pakistan to the precipice of war, these nuclear-armed nations are holding to a tenuous cease-fire.
The world may have sidestepped a disaster. But last week’s fast-moving crisis demonstrates the inherent dangers of the modern nuclear age — and the corresponding and urgent need for diplomacy — as more nations expand their nuclear arsenals and rely on them for coercion or to make up for a weakness in conventional forces. The indefinite combination of more weapons and human fallibility can lead to their use, intentional or not. There is never zero risk.
We’ve seen it throughout the military campaign of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, against Ukraine, where he’s issued implicit and explicit threats to use a nuclear weapon in his war there. We’ve seen it on the Korean Peninsula, where the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, routinely reminds the world that his forces are armed and ready for all-out nuclear war. We see the potential in Taiwan, where observers worry that China could use the threat of its arsenal to impose its will on the island.
Conflict between India and Pakistan is nothing new, of course, and fears over the first use of a nuclear weapon between the neighboring countries have long remained remote. The two sides fought wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999 — a year after both nations conducted successful nuclear tests. They now each have estimated stockpiles of at least 170 warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
As their nuclear forces expanded, the two nations established unwritten rules aimed at preventing a dangerous escalation. Neither New Delhi nor Islamabad wants a nuclear war, stopping each side from going too far when periodic skirmishes break out. For decades, their military confrontations have been confined to the border region, and in particular Kashmir, a flashpoint since 1947, when India was partitioned into two states at the end of British colonial rule. For years, both sides have primarily battled with ground forces, and never close to nuclear sites.
But those rules have been changing. The emergence of drone warfare and precision-guided munitions has caused red lines to fade. In 2019, India launched airstrikes against an alleged terrorist training camp in Balakot, Pakistan, marking the first time that one nuclear-armed nation dropped a bomb on another. The attack, which went further than any other conflict between the nations in decades, put the countries on newly dangerous footing. Last week’s clash was even more destabilizing.
After Pakistan-based terrorists allegedly shot and killed 26 civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir last month, the Indian military responded on May 7 with airstrikes on the border region, targeting what it called “terror camps.” It eventually extended its target to a site in Punjab, roughly 100 miles into Pakistan — the deepest strike in more than half a century. Pakistan retaliated with what Indian officials said were as many as 400 drone attacks on several cities, including the Indian-administered city of Jammu, near the heavily militarized border that separates the disputed region of Kashmir between the two countries.
Soon, Indian strikes hit a military air base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, not far from Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Reports later surfaced that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan subsequently convened the National Command Authority, a group that decides the potential use of nuclear weapons.
It’s incidents like these when the potential for slipping into a nuclear escalation is the greatest. Close calls between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and other more recent nuclear crises, show that adversaries assume the worst and depend on open communication channels, monitoring capabilities and diplomatic measures. India’s airstrikes may have been inadvertent or intentional, but Pakistan won’t allow its nuclear capability to be threatened. India’s conventional forces are superior to Pakistan’s. Islamabad, therefore, sees its nuclear weapons as a means to even the battlefield in an all-out war. Pakistan, unlike India, has no declared restrictions on using its nuclear weapons first in a conflict to protect itself.
It wasn’t until the unthinkable suddenly looked possible that the Trump administration felt compelled to intervene. On Thursday, during an appearance on Fox News, Vice President JD Vance said the tit-for-tat fighting was “fundamentally none of our business.” On Friday, the day India bombed the base in Rawalpindi, Mr. Vance substantially shifted from that isolationist stance, calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to warn against the mounting escalation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later said in a statement that he and Mr. Vance had engaged with senior officials from both countries, including their prime ministers.
“We stopped a nuclear conflict,” President Trump said Monday at the White House. “I think it could have been a bad nuclear war, millions of people could have been killed, so I’m very proud of that.” Pakistan has since publicly acknowledged the U.S. role in the truce, while India maintains that the cease-fire was bilaterally reached.
As the Trump administration evidently came to realize, what happens between India and Pakistan is the world’s business, and has been since the nations became nuclear powers. A scientific study in 2019 assessed the potential consequences of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It found that the detonations would create millions of tons of soot. Clouds of debris would blot out the sun and lower global temperatures to bring about worldwide famine. Millions of people would die, and billions could be affected. The scenario was set in 2025.
This week, tensions between India and Pakistan eased following the truce. But the White House cannot grow complacent. It should lead a diplomatic effort with India and Pakistan to reduce risks in the short and long term to avoid a repeat of last week’s rapid escalation and potential for miscalculation.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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