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Rawalpindi

Nuclear Norms

As nuclear neighbours, Pakistan and India need to show more responsibility than the bigger nuclear nations.

By Makhdoom Shahab-ud-Din | July 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave birth to a plethora of reverberations. The tremors were felt even through South Asia. While some of these tremors amounted to miniscule political shifts, there is one tremor that has the potential to completely transmute the entire geopolitical landscape of South Asia. This is the nuclear rhetoric and forms a neo-realistic view. The potential threat of using nuclear weapons by Russia hangs like a guillotine upon the world’s people. This unequivocally has a surfeit of negative implications for South Asian countries.

With threats of nuclear use, Russia has become far more unpredictable than it ever was in recent years. This also owes to the fact of how bogged down and inefficient the Russian army has proved to be during its impasse in Ukraine. This is coupled with the international outcry and what we have is a Russia that is being choked at geopolitical and economic levels. Russia has never been a pushover and when push comes to shove, it has the potential of unleashing a nuclear attack which could run amok over all of Europe.

While the probability of such an event to be triggered is very low, it does, however, start a cascading effect in the shift of nuclear norms throughout the world and in particular South Asia. The region is home to not one but two nuclear powers –India and Pakistan. An air of disquiet always looms over the region. It should not be forgotten that when all eyes were on Russia, a crisis befell South Asia when India accidentally launched a cruise missile into Pakistani airspace. These are the type of nuclear norms being developed where one country would misread the trajectory of their own missile launched across international borders. Perhaps, what is more surprising is how Pakistan did not retaliate and everything was resolved without any further escalation. Further similar events could likely lead to a small scale war in South Asia with a heavy toll on the entire region.


Moreover, when it comes to having a nuclear country prone to aggression as a neighbour, such as Russia, nuclear deterrence always seems to be unstable. Although Russian diplomats have often reiterated their stance on how they are not going to deploy tactical nuclear weapons but any country prone to aggression does have an unstable outlook when it comes to nuclear deterrence. Similar is the case with India and Pakistan. While it can be said that nuclear deterrence has prevented both conventional and nuclear war up to this point, peace has always been brittle and deterrence has been very volatile; this is due to two cardinal factors – the ever rising defence budget of India and the geostrategic direction of states such as Kashmir in the region.

The Indian show of power while undermining regional priorities has always dealt a blow to the diplomatic environment and has destabilized the deterrence of the region.

The Indian show of power while undermining regional priorities has always dealt a blow to the diplomatic environment and has destabilized the deterrence of the region. In recent times the defence budget of India accounted for 76.88 billion dollars, making India the third largest spender on defence after the USA and China. Moreover, India has been modernizing its conventional and network-centric platforms in order to nuclearize the Indian Ocean. This could make region around the Indian Ocean a very volatile area. This could have a plethora of negative implications. Firstly, the region of Indian Ocean holds immense economic importance as the majority of trade passes through these waters. Nuclearizing the waters could bring havoc, placing all of South Asia in fear and tumult. India has already started to transform its navy into a blue ocean navy by deploying aircraft carriers and developing a ballistic missile defence system that could completely dismantle the geopolitical balance in South Asia.

On the other hand, it can be seen that Pakistan has a credible deterrence. This shows that Pakistan has the potential to counter the Indian aggression. Furthermore, the technologies that India is working on such as the BMD system could take several years before it is perfected. Despite the economic and political turmoil, Pakistan has been consistently working over its nuclear deterrence force to stabilize the regional-centric deterrence as a counter to Indian aggression, in order to bring peace in the region. However, nuclear norms can change sporadically and things can escalate quickly. Couple this with the fact that nuclear weapons have now become an affordable and cost-effective option to offset the Indian threat, and what we are left is with a potential for a small scale nuclear war.

Similar to India, Pakistan also allocates about 2.5 percent of its GDP but in contrast with India, Pakistan’s GDP is much smaller than India’s. Pakistan cannot compete financially with India and a war with the neighbour could not only bring chaos to South Asia. It would also severely impact the already disintegrating Pakistani economy. Therefore, it is necessary that nuclear powers like India and Pakistan not walk in the footsteps of aggressors.

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The writer is a journalist, TV anchor, and social media influencer based in Europe. He is an Erasmus Mundus Journalism Scholar and can be reached on Twitter @NewsUpdatesPak. His email address is makhdumshahab@gmail.com

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