Stability under Pressure. A Pakistani View on Nuclear Deterrence after Pahalgam
The May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis after the Pahalgam attack has generated a familiar but incomplete debate: did nuclear deterrence work, or did it merely allow both sides to fight a limited war under the nuclear shadow? The better answer is that deterrence worked at the level at which it was designed to work. It prevented a general war and an uncontrolled vertical escalation, and kept nuclear weapons in the background. But it did not prevent India from attempting to carve out space for conventional action, nor did it prevent Pakistan from responding conventionally to restore deterrence credibility.
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Key Takeaways
From a Pakistani perspective, Islamabad’s nuclear deterrent did not fail in May 2025; the crisis showed it still prevents full-scale war while leaving dangerous space for limited conventional exchanges, information warfare, and coercive signaling.
India’s “new normal”, consolidated post-Pahalgam, seeks to normalize punitive strikes under labels like “counterterrorism” and “no nuclear blackmail”, signaling readiness to use more force against alleged terrorism. Pakistan must keep deterrence credible without every crisis sliding prematurely to nuclear rhetoric.
Pakistan’s modernization is less about a bigger arsenal than about survivability, redundancy, second-strike credibility, and reinforcing conventional deterrence and resilience amid drones, precision strike, missile defense, cyber, AI-enabled ISR, and information manipulation.
The debate about a supposed Pakistani nuclear umbrella for Saudi Arabia misreads Pakistan’s deterrence logic, rooted in the South Asian threat and not a transferable or outsourced guarantee.
This distinction matters for European audiences because Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine is often read through alarmist shortcuts: tactical nuclear weapons, crisis instability, command-and-control anxieties, and, more recently, speculation about a Pakistani nuclear umbrella for Saudi Arabia. The strategic reality, however, is far less hysterical: Pakistan’s nuclear capability emerged to offset an enduring asymmetry with India. Its purpose is defensive, India-specific, and tied to the prevention of a major war in South Asia. The Pahalgam crisis began after the April 22, 2025, attack in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, which killed 26 people. India accused Pakistan and launched strikes on May 7 against alleged terrorist infrastructure across the international border. Pakistan denied involvement and responded as the confrontation expanded into missiles, drones, artillery, and cross-border shelling on May 10, followed by a ceasefire reached through a DGMO-level contact and facilitated primarily by the United States’ (US) diplomacy.
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Stability under Pressure. A Pakistani View on Nuclear Deterrence after Pahalgam
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