Operation Sindoor's changed rulebook, but hasn't undercut nuclear deterrence: Ankit Panda

Time of India

25-05-2025

Ankit Panda
A book title that has the words 'nuclear', 'precipice' and 'Armageddon' is bound to be disquieting, and that's probably what its author Ankit Panda intended. Panda, who is with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC and works at the intersection of nuclear policy and international politics, talks to Sunday Times about the risks unfolding against a multipolar backdrop
Let's talk about the title 'The
New Nuclear Age
: At the Precipice of Armageddon' first. Why do you call it the new nuclear era and how is it different from the Cold War? Looking back, does that seem like a more stable status quo despite the risks?
The Cold War might seem stable in hindsight, but it wasn't to those who lived through that era. It was characterised by the central presence of nuclear weapons as the sword of Damocles that hung over the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, and, as a broader consequence, over the rest of the world. After the Cold War ended, we entered a period of broader optimism: nuclear disarmament seemed somewhat viable because the US and the Russian Federation, the successor state that inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, drew down in numbers. The global nuclear order became more ossified, too, as the Non-Proliferation Treaty was indefinitely extended, and a Comprehensive Nuclear- Test-Ban Treaty was opened for signature. Unlike during the Cold War, nuclear risks are now manifesting against a complex multipolar geopolitical backdrop with rapid technological shifts. The good news is that we don't live in a world with 70,000-plus nuclear weapons today—we are a little shy of 13,000 weapons today—but the risks of nuclear catastrophe are once again growing.
An unpredictable Trump, a
Putin
who makes nuclear threats and can authorise nuclear use unilaterally, and Xi who appears to be veering away from China's no-first-use policy…who worries you the most?
I go back and forth on this. The bigger problem is that most nuclear states today largely imbue the authority to initiate nuclear wars in the hands of a single person, whose psychological state is vulnerable to a variety of stressors in peacetime and certainly in a time of crisis or war. Frankly, what worries me most is the risk of escalation in states with relatively smaller nuclear arsenals and more vulnerable—either in reality or in perception—nuclear command-and-control systems and forces. The incentives for these states to resort to nuclear use is going to be greater—particularly when they are conventionally inferior to their adversaries.
Pakistan
and North Korea are the two contemporary archetypes.
Many analysts have pointed out that India's
Operation Sindoor
was a clear message that Pakistan can no longer use its nuclear capability as a shield. What is your view?
Operation Sindoor conveyed India's willingness to tolerate greater risks under the nuclear shadow and, in doing so, has introduced a new rulebook for how future crises are likely to be handled between India and Pakistan in the new nuclear age, but it hasn't fundamentally undercut nuclear deterrence or called Pakistan's nuclear 'bluff'. At no point during Operation Sindoor did India's military operations, in my view, approach Pakistan's well-understood 'red lines' that would have increased the risk of nuclear use. The use of air power and precision strike standoff weapons is notable, in particular. This has allowed India to shed the older strategic mindset that largely relied on ground forces to punish Pakistan, understanding that this would be more likely to trigger nuclear use.
India has said there was no nuclear signalling during the conflict and the IAEA has confirmed that there was no radiation leak in Pakistan but Trump confidently asserted that a 'nuclear conflict' had been averted. What do you read into that?
My view is that any time two nuclear-armed states start exchanging ordnance, the risk of nuclear war has increased over the pre-crisis baseline in some immeasurable manner. This is because of the essentially unpredictable character of warfare. While no one at the prime minister's office in New Delhi or in
Rawalpindi
would have wanted multiple rounds of exchanges over 88 hours outside of the crisis, that's where we ended up regardless. The details of this crisis are still rather muddled and our true sense of the dangers, as with previous crises, including the famous Cuban Missile Crisis, will likely emerge over years, and possibly decades, as memoirs are written by those who lived through it. I do see significant evidence that both India and Pakistan, while pursuing their respective military objectives, took measures to avert significant escalation: for instance, neither side deliberately targeted significant civilian infrastructure, nor did they resort to dynamic targeting outside of anti-air engagements (i.e., the targeting of moving objects, which introduces the risks of striking targets one would rather avoid). The counterfactual of how this all plays out if the US sits out, of course, will be unknowable, but I would have expected to see continuing violence and possibly greater escalation. Despite India's preference for handling Pakistan-related matters bilaterally, New Delhi has long tolerated US involvement in deescalating crises.
What are India's challenges vis a vis China which is expanding its arsenal?
India's nuclear doctrine is rooted in the very classical notion in nuclear strategy that the assured power to hurt—to deliver unacceptable pain—under all conceivable circumstances is sufficient to deter a 'first strike'. This becomes more difficult as China pursues an array of advanced non-nuclear technologies, including more advanced missile defences and conventional precision-strike systems. While Beijing is largely seeking these capabilities to better deter the US in the Indo-Pacific, these same capabilities could contribute to a campaign of attriting India's nuclear forces or, post-launch, intercepting inbound Indian warheads. India can cope with this through two means: quantitatively, by building more nuclear weapons, or qualitatively, by building better countermeasures for its existing missiles or seeking novel delivery systems like hypersonic weapons. The latter strikes me as the more feasible approach. These interlinkages between the US, China, and India, however, also speak to the multipolarity inherent in this new nuclear age.
You point out that even a non-nuclear nation could trigger an escalation. Can you elaborate?
Sure. During the Cold War, it was essentially true that only nuclear weapons could destroy other nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike. However, with the revolution in precision-strike systems and the proliferation of these weapons to a wide range of countries, we're now in a period where non-nuclear, advanced states can—and, indeed, do—aspire to hold at risk the nuclear weapons of nuclear-armed states. In the book, I focus primarily on the case of South Korea, which is a very technologically sophisticated non-nuclear player that harbours aspirations to nullify North Korea's relatively small nuclear force. Of course, in seeking to do so at all, including through preemptive options, South Korea could create powerful incentives for North Korea to use its nuclear weapons early in a crisis, lest it lose them entirely. This is the essential dynamic of how non-nuclear states could drive escalation.