A warning for a destructive nuclear escalation

The India-Pakistan "brawl"

From Tuomas Malinen on Geopolitics and the Economy.

The tensions between India and Pakistan have flared up again due to a terrorist attack that killed 26 people in Pahalgam, a tourist spot, on 22 April. India blamed the terrorist groups supported by Pakistan for the attacks. As a result, the Indian Armed Forces (IAF) launched Operation Sindoor (sindoor = a visual marker of the marital status of a woman), reportedly destroying nine terrorist camps in Kashmir, a region occupied by Pakistan. Pakistan responded with strikes on military installations. Pakistani leaders also vowed that they have no other option than to “pay them back in the same coin”. What is new in this 80-year conflict is that retaliatory attacks by India have become the norm, provoking retaliation from Pakistan. This enables a dangerous climbing of the ladders of escalation between the two nuclear powers.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, India holds 180 nuclear warheads, while Pakistan has 170 nuclear warheads. In their 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists report, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda estimated that in 2019, Pakistan had 20–30 tactical (low yield) nuclear weapons with several systems in development. It’s likely that Pakistan has developed (is developing) these tactical nuclear weapons as deterrence against a threat from a much bigger conventional army of the IAF. This creates a possibility of a nuclear exchange opening up between India and Pakistan.

Today I will walk you through a scenario leading into the nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, based on my game-theoretical model of tactical nuclear strikes. While the likelihood of a nuclear exchange remains relatively subdued for now, I show that if it commences, the likelihood of it leading to a nuclear war is worryingly high.