Against Temptation: Deterrence, Stability, and Strategic Folly

The Wire

24-05-2025

BSF personnel during a retreat ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border, near Amritsar, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. The Border Security Force (BSF) has said the public flag-lowering retreat ceremony at three locations in Punjab along the Pakistan frontier will begin on Wednesday, about two weeks after it was stopped following Operation Sindoor. Photo: PTI.
Like many other economists, I have long been drawn to the work of Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. As one of the founding fathers of nuclear strategy, Schelling showed how thinking in terms of incentives, expectations, and risk can clarify the logic of deterrence. His core insight – that stability often rests on the fear of loss of control – has lost none of its urgency.
South Asia, however, seems to be drifting into what Schelling called a ' zone of ambiguity ' – a space where states, emboldened by new doctrines and technologies, believe they can act without triggering catastrophe. But ambiguity in a nuclearised region is not a cushion; it is a cliff edge. Recent events suggest the margins for error are narrowing.
For over two decades, mutual nuclear capability imposed an uneasy but real discipline between India and Pakistan. But recent Indian doctrinal and technological shifts suggest a deliberate push toward counterforce options – pre-emptive strategies aimed at disarming an adversary's nuclear arsenal. This reflects a broader turn to limited war under the nuclear threshold, where military engagement is seen as possible without provoking strategic retaliation.
Few have explained the implications of this shift more clearly than Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang. In their 2019 article India's Counterforce Temptations , they describe how parts of India's establishment now view deterrence not as a shared constraint but as something to overcome. This shift is not merely military – it is political theatre: a way to dominate narratives, signal strength, and avoid the domestic costs of appearing passive.
Proponents of this approach argue that the escalatory ladder now has more rungs – that modern surveillance, precision strikes, and drones allow calibrated military action without triggering nuclear thresholds. As the Ukraine conflict has shown, warfare is evolving in ways that blur lines and arguably expand this sub-nuclear space.
But this supposed buffer is dangerously misleading. It rests entirely on the assumption that the adversary will consistently restrain its response. That assumption is neither stable nor predictable. Deterrence, as Schelling warned, relies not on control but on uncertainty. It works because each side fears what happens when events spiral beyond planning.
From a game-theoretic perspective, India's shift risks accelerating a race up the escalation ladder. Each side may believe it can strike first without facing full retaliation. But this is not a stable equilibrium – it is brinkmanship disguised as doctrine.
Over the past decade, Pakistan has repeatedly chosen restraint in the face of Indian actions: from the 2016 'surgical strikes' to the 2019 Balakot air raid – the first time a nuclear-armed state's air force bombed another's territory – and the 2022 'accidental' BrahMos missile launch into Pakistan's heartland. These moments required Pakistani decision-makers to judge the intent and scale of Indian attacks, and choose strategic patience over escalation. Never has South Asia's future hung on a thread so strained.
India's response to the Pahalgam terrorism further narrowed the space for miscalculation. India dispensed with evidence, threatened Pakistan's water flows, and launched drone strikes on major Pakistani cities. In Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, Indian drones crashed in civilian neighbourhoods. These were not remote actions; they brought a crisis to the doorsteps of millions on both sides of the border.
Indian strategists may take comfort in new technologies and missile defences. But deterrence doesn't rely on perfection – it rests on enough retaliatory capability surviving to make the risk unacceptable. Pakistan's doctrine of credible minimum deterrence was built on this logic. Credibility has never meant transparency; it means ensuring that adversaries believe retaliation will follow, even if they cannot predict how.
Both India and Pakistan maintain ostensibly non-deployed nuclear postures to provide a 'long fuse' in a crisis. But how long is that fuse, really, in a region where political timelines are short, and crises unfold in minutes?
Pakistan is likely adapting by reinforcing the survivability and unpredictability of its arsenal – through dispersal, hardening, and perhaps changes to command protocols. These are not escalatory moves. They are stabilising responses to a shifting strategic balance.
As Feroz Khan argues in Subcontinent Adrift , India and Pakistan are guided by clashing logics: India appears to believe it can win a conventional war under the nuclear shadow; Pakistan sees its nuclear capability as a firewall against a growing adversary with which it has legitimate disputes to resolve. Herein lies the fragility: deterrence holds when both sides believe in mutual vulnerability. Any effort to script escalation or engineer 'winnable' conflict under a nuclear overhang is not strategy – it is illusion.
Brinkmanship can hold as long as the other side chooses restraint. But that choice is not guaranteed. As Schelling warned, war often begins not with intent, but with things getting out of hand. A drone strike too far, a misread radar signal, a rushed political order – any could turn a crisis into catastrophe. The cliffs of peace in South Asia have held – but erosion is not collapse, until the day it is.
The only sustainable path forward is institutionalised engagement: a mutual recognition of red lines and a revival of crisis management mechanisms. Strategic stability isn't maintained by exploiting ambiguity – it is secured by managing it, together.
Dr. Ali Hasanain is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He was formerly a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Global Leaders Fellow at Oxford and Princeton universities.