High-Stakes Nuclear Poker: How Pakistan's Deterrent Still Checks India—Even After Operation Sindoor

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16-05-2025

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High-Stakes Nuclear Poker: How Pakistan's Deterrent Still Checks India—Even After Operation Sindoor
Rahul Bedi
39 minutes ago
By weaponising its nuclear arsenal as a tool of coercive diplomacy, Islamabad has mastered the art of strategic brinkmanship – forcing world powers to play by its rules, again and again.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif chairs the meeting of the National Security Committee, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, April 24, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI
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Chandigarh: In the smoke-filled casinos of global geopolitics, where nations bluff, raise and fold in their poker hands with gigantic stakes involving the future of states, national power, prestige and military conflicts, one player continues to doggedly game the house – Pakistan.
Ostensibly, it holds a feeble hand.
It is besieged by a struggling economy, accelerating debt, political chaos, countless ethnic insurgencies and armed movements for autonomy. Its conventional military is outmatched by India, which dismembered Pakistan in 1971 and created Bangladesh, prevailed in Kargil and last week delivered – going by New Delhi's claims – punitive admonishment to Islamabad via Operation Sindoor which reportedly led it to sue for cessation of hostilities.
Yet, despite such debilitating handicaps, Pakistan deftly plays the high-stakes game of global diplomacy like a high roller, having mastered the art of nuclear poker. With its stash of 165-odd nuclear warheads, piled up on its side of South Asia's green-baized poker table, and a bank of highly enriched uranium and plutonium to augment this stockpile, it has ensured that India and the world treat it with gravity, crossing it only at great risk.
Pakistan has yet to be decisively out-played at the tables, though its obituary as a nation-state has been written countless times.
Pakistan's nuclear ace
But over the past 26 years, after emerging from the nuclear closet in May 1998, it has deftly finessed its hand with its nuclear ace. And, in possibly the most turbulent era in the region in recent times, it has finagled loan waivers, survived sanctions, acquired advanced weaponry from the United States and China, hustled financial handouts and much else, by simply intoning its kamikaze mantra, which spooks the world each time: If we go down, we'll take the whole neighbourhood and beyond with us.
Earlier this week, Pakistan's deliberate shuffling of the deck led Washington to conclude the threat of uncontrolled escalation required its active intervention. What happened after is well-known; US President Donald Trump has already spoken of it six times in the past few days.
Rawalpindi's flexible 'minimum credible deterrence' doctrine has adequate built-in ambiguity to leave adversaries and allies guessing its poker-playing strategy. Simply put, this canon proclaims that Pakistan would activate its 'full spectrum capabilities', including nuclear, if it perceived an existential threat to its territory and the core of its military apparatus, especially the Army.
This cunningly flexible and adaptable doctrine has rewarded Pakistan for decades – not just militarily and strategically vis-à-vis India, but also financially in its dealings with global institutions. In such transactions, Islamabad has repeatedly asserted that a bankrupt nuclear-armed Pakistan posed a far greater risk than a financially mismanaged one.'
Another, more quietly voiced concern from Islamabad centers on the unthinkable scenario: that Islamic insurgents – some of whom, like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, enjoy overt military support – might seize Pakistan's nuclear assets amid a fiscal collapse. These fears were further stoked by revelations that senior Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood had once briefed top al-Qaeda figures on weapons of mass destruction, though nothing ultimately came of it.
Also Read: Operation Sindoor Highlights That It's Time for the Indian Air Force to Make Key Procurements
Hence, each time Pakistan teeters on the brink of a World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF) default, most member states quietly relent, faced inherently with the even more horrific and apocalyptic alternative. Many domestic and international security analysts argued that the IMF's approval of a $2.02 billion loan to Pakistan on May 10 and 14, in two tranches, was not purely economic.
Ostensibly it may have been driven by concerns to stabilise Pakistan's finances and, by extension, ensure the security of its nuclear arsenal. The disbursement was part of the IMF's $7 billion Extended Fund Facility, and the remaining $4.98 billion too are likely to be cleared without issue by its October 2027 deadline, reportedly for analogous considerations.
Earlier, in October 2022, Pakistan was, after four years, removed from the 'grey list' of the Financial Action Task Force (FAFT), a global organisation combating money laundering and terror financing, following quiet lobbying by the US. Analysts again pointed to Pakistan's nuclear status as a 'quiet but significant' factor, with its economic collapse seen as a global security risk – highlighting how its deterrence brinkmanship extended far beyond the battlefield.
This deterrence has further enabled Pakistan to defy norms and push the envelope with India and the world, with little consequences. During the 1999 Kargil conflict, for instance, where over 500 soldiers died on each side, US President Clinton intervened to end the fighting, influenced by Pakistan's incipient nuclear threat. Thereafter, India invited Pakistan's President Musharraf for peace talks in Agra, which expectedly failed, but the entire episode effectively, yet again acknowledged its looming nuclear weapons salience.
Around the same time, Dr. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, was exposed for proliferating uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, even delivering centrifuges via military aircraft to process it. Yet US penalties in this complex saga were mild – mostly reputational – given Islamabad's role as a key Washington ally in the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.
An emboldened Pakistan also denied the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US access to Khan, and other Western powers played along, unwilling to push Islamabad too hard and risk destabilising the region. US military and economic aid to Pakistan too continued unabated, and between 2001 and 2010 Pakistan, received over $20 billion from Washington, in a subtle endorsement of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme.
The morbid mastery of playing both sides of the global table
In 2001, Jaish gunmen attacked the Indian parliament, prompting Delhi to mobilise its army along the Pakistan border. But in this high-stakes standoff, Islamabad's nuclear red lines held firm and 10 months later, India's forces withdrew – their equipment battered, and morale dented.
Seven years later, in 2008, Lashkar operatives struck two of Mumbai's five-star hotels, Victoria Terminus, and a Jewish seminary, killing 166 people. Once again, Pakistan's nuclear deterrent ensured that no major punitive response followed.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) – one of the world's primary high-rollers in the geopolitical casino – faced allegations from Washington of backing al-Qaeda elements for the 9/11 attacks. Later, it was also accused of sheltering Osama bin Laden, who was ultimately killed in 2011 by US Special Forces just miles from Pakistan's Kakul military academy in Abbottabad in the north-west.
Yet again, few repercussions followed and Pakistan's nuclear programme continued to expand, as did its morbid mastery of playing both sides of the global table. Need logistics for the US-led war in Afghanistan? Pakistan's your man. Seeking Arabian Sea access for the Belt and Road Initiative? China, step right in. Caught aiding militants? Let's discuss it – over a few billion dollars in aid, naturally.
And more recently, even as Operation Sindoor unfolded – with high-tech air, missile, and drone duels and deadlocked media narratives – Pakistan held firm. As India and the world awaited escalation, Islamabad calmly deployed its Chinese-origin JF-10C fighters armed with lethal PL-15E missiles, a pointed reminder that while the hardware may come from Beijing, the game was entirely Pakistan's.
Thereafter, in the fog of near-war, Pakistan appeared unfazed for a few days, sensing that India's threshold for escalation remained constrained by the unspoken threat of nuclear 'overreaction' – despite New Delhi's protestations to the contrary.
Once again, in poker terms, India held the stronger, conventional hand, with superior military tech, but Pakistan controlled the fear in the room – backed by its arsenal of 165–170 nuclear warheads, the only such stockpile in the world managed by a military known for being a revisionist, rather than a status quo, power.
According to the Federation of American Scientists and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, this arsenal includes short-range, low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use against Indian forces. Despite its economic crisis, Pakistan is reportedly expanding this stockpile –potentially to over 200 warheads – making it the world's fifth-largest nuclear weapons holder, aimed almost exclusively at India.
Also Read: Pahalgam Attack Exposes Deep Fault Lines in India's Security Apparatus
Such growth would place it ahead of Israel, India, and North Korea, but behind the US, Russia, China, and France.
Some analysts suggest Operation Sindoor's escalation was checked by this implicit nuclear threat –underscored by a Reuters report on May 10 stating that Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif had convened Pakistan's National Command Authority (NCA). Though later denied by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, the report is believed to have caused alarm in global capitals, including Washington, and catalysed a US-led push to broker a ceasefire between the two adversaries.
Tellingly, just a day earlier, US Vice President J.D. Vance had told Fox News that the India-Pakistan conflict was 'fundamentally not [America's] business' and beyond its control. Yet, mere hours later –likely in response to reports of Pakistan's National Command Authority convening – Vance emerged as a key interlocutor, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in efforts to de-escalate the crisis.
According to media reports Vance even spoke with Modi late on May 10 or early the next morning. Soon after, Pakistan's Director General of Military Operations, Major General Kashif Abdullah, contacted his Indian counterpart, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, to initiate a ceasefire – one that, for now, continues to hold.
Pakistan is not 'winning' but continues to play dangerously
This is not to suggest that Pakistan is 'winning.' Far from it. Its economy remains on IMF life support, its politics is in disarray, and it faces serious internal threats – from former Taliban allies backing the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), to Baloch rebels pushing for autonomy, amid a host of multiple serious challenges.
But like a seasoned poker hustler, Pakistan plays just dangerously enough that India hesitates to call its bluff outright, irrespective of Modi's claims of standing up to its threats of 'nuclear blackmail', which is deterrence by another name. And in an era of armchair generals, media theatrics, and precision-strike hashtags, sometimes that's all it takes for Pakistan to survive – yet again.
After its devastating loss in the 1971 war, Pakistan realised that fighting India toe-to-toe with combat aircraft, tanks, artillery, troops and warships was a recipe for disaster. Accordingly, in line with classic deterrence logic, then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto reasoned Pakistan needed to raise the cost of aggression so high that war itself with India would become irrational and non-viable.
Bhutto believed that nuclear weapons were the ultimate power currency, an equaliser and instrument of leverage, especially for weaker states like Pakistan. This conviction prompted his iconic 1972 declaration: that Pakistanis would eat grass, even go hungry, but would still develop nuclear weapons. The phrase became a powerful symbol of Pakistan's nuclear resolve that was publicly vindicated 26 years later, on May 28, 1998, but having privately achieved this capability much earlier with Beijing's assistance.
Also Read: With Simla Agreement Questioned, Does UN Military Observer Group Have Any Role Left?
China's involvement in aiding Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme is well documented, as is the US's connivance and that of other Western nations that simply looked away and pretended that nothing was amiss, despite knowing fully well what was afoot. At the time, however, the US and its NATO allies needed Islamabad to channel weapons and trained mujahideen into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and sanctions were occasionally imposed but just as often lifted, waived, or quietly bypassed.
In effect, it's now evident that Pakistan's bomb didn't just arise from defiance – it was cultivated in the fertile soil of Western complicity. Islamabad didn't play the game alone; it was enabled, rationalised, and bankrolled by these very powers that preferred buying short-term stability over enforcing long-term norms. Ironically, these are the same powers now seeking détente between Delhi and Islamabad to prevent a nuclear conflagration over Kashmir.
And while the house cards will change – from proxy militants to drone warfare to diplomatic muscle and much else – the nuclear bluff remains the ace up Pakistan's sleeve. The real question is how long the other players at the table, especially India and the West, will follow the old rules in this new Great Game.
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