How close are India & Pakistan to nuclear war?

Could India and Pakistan be just one misstep away from nuclear disaster? The two nuclear-armed rivals just had their deadliest clash in three decades, trading missiles, drones and airstrikes. It took urgent intervention from world leaders to reach a ceasefire. And we stopped the nuclear conflict. I think it could have been a bad nuclear war. Millions of people could have been killed. That conflict can lead, in the case of Indo-Pakistan, India-Pakistan can lead to the peril of more than 1.6 billion people. Despite the ceasefire, tensions between the two neighbours remain high. As the world watches, experts warn that the next time, there may be even less time to stop a catastrophe. It can quickly get out of hand with less time for the international community to come in and intervene and de-escalate. This is a nuclear flashpoint. And it's one where I think we see a real risk of breaking the nuclear taboo that has been in place since the end of World War II. We talked to three analysts about how likely a nuclear escalation in the future is and what can be done to prevent it. India and Pakistan are two atomic powers that have roughly the same amount of nuclear weapons at their disposal. The two neighbours also have one of the world's riskiest rivalries. So every clash, no matter how small, carries a risk of things spiralling out of control. And the last couple of weeks, things were escalating fast. It all started at the end of April, when an extremist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir left 26 people dead, almost all were shot at close range. India blamed Pakistani cross-border terrorism for the massacre, a claim Pakistan denies, and struck targets across Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir two weeks later. Both sides then fired heavier delivery, drones and missiles at each other's military installations, killing dozens of people. After a ceasefire was reached, both sides continued to trade threats, with Modi calling it the new normal. There's a risk that we could find ourselves back in this situation, and we can actually see a normalisation of cross-border military strikes. And when you're talking about two nuclear-armed adversaries, that is a particularly concerning situation. India warns the international community to put pressure on Pakistan to destroy its terrorist infrastructure. Pakistan warns the international community to put pressure on India to convince India to give up Kashmir. It's not just land at stake. Water, trade and the safety of ordinary people hang in the balance. South Asia is a region home to some two billion people. It is a hugely consequential part of the world. But this is something that is not limited just to India and Pakistan. And if we were to see, God forbid, any sort of breaching of the nuclear threshold, it would have knock-on security impacts worldwide. How big is the risk of a nuclear escalation? The military engagements between the nuclear powers have the potential to be misinterpreted by either side. So it's a very delicate situation for both sides to navigate. India has a no-first-use pledge, meaning they say they won't fire the first shot. So India will never use nuclear weapons first. Pakistan doesn't have a no-first-use. But if Pakistan does use even a tactical nuke, it knows India will respond with a full strike. Pakistan is acutely aware that it is a smaller country than India. It has less strategic depth and sees India as a more substantial competitor at the conventional level. So Pakistan has always relied on its nuclear deterrent as a way of trying to forestall Indian conventional military action. It is a very real threat, and it's one that I think is underappreciated on the Indian side in particular. If Pakistan determines that India is conducting preemptive counterforce strikes on its nuclear weapons to disarm it, that will lead Pakistan to resort to nuclear weapons. That's one situation. The other situation is if Indian military conducts decapacitation strikes on Pakistan's command and control centres, that will lead Pakistan to think about employing nuclear weapons. If India conducts attacks on Pakistan's major hydropower infrastructure and puts Pakistan's economic security and survival at stake, that could lead Pakistan to explore the nuclear option. And these tensions are flaring up at a time of global instability. This is a time of enormous global flux. And so in the context of that broader instability, I think that has a trickle-down impact to the region. It's not just how many warheads you have. It's delivery systems. It's technology. And as India builds out its defence relationship with the United States and other Western partners, India is gaining access to, at least in Pakistan's view, advanced technologies and systems that Pakistan does not have similar access to. I think there are real drivers of arms racing dynamics that we don't have an effective way of controlling. We haven't yet, as an international community or within the region, figured out what arms control could look like when you have this many players at such different levels of capabilities, right? Both sides are now militarising and more focused on their dispute in Kashmir. And India has now an active border dispute with China that has second-order effects between India and Pakistan because India is going to modernise its nuclear forces and conventional forces to keep its balance with China. But Pakistan will read that as a threat for itself as well and we will see more volatility in their conventional and nuclear forces development. Both sides need to take responsibility for thinking not just about how to get out of the current crisis, but how to manage this risk going forward. The only way out of this cycle is for Pakistan to eliminate the terrorist infrastructure. And instead of denying that there are any terrorist groups inside Pakistan, Pakistan could act against the 2008 Mumbai terror attack terrorists. None of them have been punished. And that would allow India to say, OK, you are acting against terrorists. Let us resume trade. Let us resume conversations and go back to the dialogues we used to have. Pakistan already clamped down on those terrorist groups and the international community actually agreed with that. With the recent terrorist attack that took place, India has not shared a shred of evidence that links Pakistan to that terrorist attack. The only way South Asia can actually move forward is if India and Pakistan have better relations, there's more regional economic integration, so that someday they are more like France and Germany are today. Then what France and Germany were, you know, let's say 100 or 120 years ago.