Recent attention on nuclear dangers has focused primarily on China's expanding military power, Russia's nuclear threat, and the growing momentum toward a comprehensive U.S. nuclear arsenal. At the same time, a largely unseen movement that mimics the great power conundrum is unfolding in the Asian subcontinent and deserves closer scrutiny. The triad of China, India, and Pakistan poses strategic risk and instability and represents a more worrying threat to non-nuclearization than the ongoing competition between China, Russia, and the United States.
Long considered the region most likely to experience the use of nuclear weapons, the same instability, tensions, and territorial disputes that characterized the trilateral relationship between India, China, and Pakistan decades ago continue to affect the trilateral relationship. Twenty-five years after the nuclearization of the Asian subcontinent, the combined destabilizing factors among the three countries – their evolving nuclear postures, military technological modernization, and strategic competition – have now worsened, pushing the region ever closer to a nuclear crisis.
In fact, the region has been on the brink of two crises in just five years: the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis, which brought India and Pakistan into direct military conflict, and the 2022 BrahMos cruise missile incident, the first time in history that a nuclear-capable cruise missile from one nuclear power attacked another. Both incidents were defused not through deliberate decision-making, but because both sides serendipitously found an exit point that allowed them to domestically construct a victory narrative for emerging from the crisis.
Perhaps the most dangerous dynamic between India and Pakistan is that each side is overconfident in its ability to control escalation, confident that the other will not escalate a small conventional war to the nuclear level. If each side internalizes the belief that the other is committed to showing restraint, it is more likely to see brinkmanship as a winning strategy. The next time India and Pakistan find themselves in the middle of a crisis, the conditions for de-escalation may not be in place and there may be no way out.
Additionally, India must simultaneously manage its uneasy border relationship with China. Recurring skirmishes along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) have turned deadly in the past, and although there is a pattern of dialogue following such skirmishes, the potential for increased tensions and military escalation in the future remains high as both sides continue to militarize their border policies.
As the overall trend in Sino-Indian relations becomes more tense due to competing foreign policies, the two countries need to better manage their military relations and interactions along the LAC and the disputed border region of Kashmir along the Line of Control with Pakistan.
But long-standing rivalries and the insecurities they generate are not easily overcome, and despite the urgent need to work on risk reduction to prevent the next territorial dispute from escalating into nuclear disarmament, neither India, China nor Pakistan have shown any interest in doing so.
Rather, both countries have justified their nuclear modernization based in part on threat perceptions raised by their neighbors' nuclear exercises: India's is responding to China's strategic buildup and regional ambitions, while Pakistan's adoption of tactical warfighting capabilities is a response to India's focus on counter-force and strategic defense.
India faces an intractable border dispute with its major neighbor, and China's history of military cooperation with Islamabad has increased Indian anxiety. China and Pakistan have a longstanding strategic partnership and a shared interest in countering Indian regional dominance. The two countries cooperate in the military sphere and maintain a weapons of mass destruction proliferation network that was recently found to be active until March 2024.
For more than two decades, India and Pakistan have competed to improve the survivability of their nuclear forces and counter each other at lower levels of escalation. For India, this has meant working to mature its ballistic missile submarine fleet, developing multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), exploring options for expanding missile defenses, and prioritizing the Agni family of mobile missiles. In addition to expanding its strategic forces and strengthening its command and control, Pakistan has also built a set of low-threshold nuclear capabilities designed to carry battlefield-ready tactical nuclear warheads. India is similarly developing dual-capable cruise missiles and battlefield nuclear capabilities, increasing the likelihood of a low-level nuclear conflict on the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, China's nuclear arsenal modernization and expansion is ostensibly aimed at the United States. However, most of China's nuclear-capable missiles cannot reach the continental United States, but they can easily hit Indian population centers. Nevertheless, Beijing has been forced to acknowledge the evolution of the Sino-Indian strategic relationship. As geopolitical competition intensifies, India has extended the range of its strategic missiles to cover the entire Chinese mainland.
New Delhi is also reorganizing its ballistic missile forces into a joint rocket force that will manage both nuclear-tipped and conventional ballistic and cruise missiles. The intertwining of conventional and nuclear capabilities creates new ambiguities in deterrence between China and India. India’s pursuit of MIRVs has implications for China as well as Pakistan, and a MIRVed force could negate China’s advantages in missile defense, raising the risk of an escalation of tensions at the conventional level if Chinese and Indian strategists begin to conclude that a relative strategic balance has been achieved.
Thus, India's blatant insistence on deterrence vis-à-vis China, despite China's insistence that it is focused on competing with the US, has made the nuclear relationship between the two countries more unstable than ever.
South Asia is the only place in the world where three nuclear-armed nations are located in such close proximity, bounded by a hotly contested border. The fuse in South Asia may be shorter than it has been in recent memory, but China, India, and Pakistan still do not receive the attention they deserve from outside the region. Given the increasing strategic risks between the three countries, several steps can be taken to increase stability and reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict.
First, India and Pakistan should revise the 1988 Agreement on No Attacks on Nuclear Facilities to reflect contemporary technological advances. This modernization should include a clearer definition of nuclear-related objectives and an expansion of verification and compliance mechanisms.
Additionally, the existing notification regime, which currently covers ballistic missile tests, should be expanded to include theater cruise missile tests. Moreover, the scope of the regime could be expanded to include not only test launches of missile capabilities but also reporting of other development activities, such as static testing. Including such tests in the notification regime would increase transparency and build trust between the two countries at a time when trust is crucial. Ideally, these arrangements should be extended to China as well, although Beijing may be initially reluctant to engage.
Second, India and China, as well as India and Pakistan, should pursue cooperative border management efforts, including demilitarizing the disputed border, expanding the buffer zone, and withdrawing troops from the uninhabitable Siachen Glacier. Strengthening deconfliction channels and holding regular border management meetings could help manage and de-escalate potential conflicts.
Moreover, India, China, and Pakistan should cooperate on counterterrorism to thwart attacks by non-state groups that could endanger the region. Pakistan in particular should recognize that tolerating anti-India terrorism will only fuel India's threat perception and undermine its own security. Joint counterterrorism operations and the associated intelligence sharing can help reduce the threat posed by non-state groups and improve concrete security in the region, while also expanding the scope for cooperation on other issues.
Third, India, China, and Pakistan should prioritize the establishment of a trilateral Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) to facilitate real-time communication and deepen mutual understanding during a crisis. A South Asia NRRC could help manage and mitigate risks associated with misunderstandings, low-level conflict or unconventional skirmishes, and accidental missile launches, and would also contribute to managing threat perceptions among the three countries.
It is also essential to initiate a formal nuclear dialogue between India and China. Against the backdrop of strategic competition, a mechanism to manage the nuclear and broader military race would be beneficial for all parties. Such a mechanism should facilitate discussions on nuclear posture, doctrine and intentions. This dialogue would help clarify mutual perceptions, reduce the risk of miscalculation and promote transparency in nuclear policy.
While a planned nuclear attack is unlikely to trigger a nuclear conflict in the subcontinent, a combination of growing nuclear arsenals, interests in nuclear warheads, simmering territorial disputes, and the continuing influence of extremist groups make the region vulnerable to sudden and inadvertent escalation. Beyond the primary concerns of China and Russia, there is an urgent need for the United States and the international community to extend diplomacy to monitor and address fragile security trends in South Asia.
Unfortunately, South Asian nuclear dynamics remain overshadowed by the escalating great power nuclear competition, but to ignore the instability between India, China and Pakistan risks ignoring a potential flashpoint that could spark regional and global catastrophe. With the world's attention often focused elsewhere, vigilance and active engagement are essential to prevent the trilateral alliance of China, India and Pakistan from becoming a crucible of nuclear conflict.
