South Asian nuclear war would hit globe

India and Pakistan have had several shooting matches since they carried out a total of nine underground nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

- Gwynne Dyer

However, they don’t make Putin-style thinly veiled threats to use their nukes (around 170 nuclear warheads each at the moment), and they do understand that escalation from smaller, “conventional” wars is the real danger.

For example, Islamabad did not retaliate to Indian air strikes on Pakistan in 2016 and 2019, didn’t even admit that they had happened in order to damp down domestic pressure for a tit-for-tat escalation. India has also worked to keep the level of violence down, even though the basic relationship is one of mutual hatred with religious overtones.

However, the relationship between the two countries is fundamentally unstable, because Pakistan has only one-sixth of India’s population and one-tenth of its wealth.

“Conventional” wars are basically wars of attrition, which means that Pakistan would almost certainly lose a non-nuclear conflict. By contrast both countries would be destroyed in a nuclear war, so threatening to escalate a war to the nuclear level would give Pakistan a weird kind of leverage.

The two countries have not strayed that far into the swamp of nuclear deterrence theory yet, but they will probably get there in the end. Yet the rest of the world pays almost no attention to these “local” calculations, because other countries doesn’t feel threatened by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. They believe it would largely stay within South Asia.