Operation Sindoor has been analysed by experts and many Indians are consequently more informed than before on our excellent defence capabilities, both in terms of manpower and machinery. Alongside, there has been a concerted and focussed diplomatic push by India to present its narrative before the world and counter Pakistan’s propaganda, and that too has been discussed and debated. For the lay Indian, however, the key takeaway is the calling out of Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.

Pakistan had indulged in saber-rattling both before and during the Operation Sindoor, wherein several Pakistani leaders and officials continued to remind India and the world that they were a nuclear-armed nation, and that if India demonstrated any kind of military aggression, Pakistan could press the nuclear button. It was a desperate attempt by them to get the world leaders worried enough to intervene in the conflict, the immediate genesis of which was the cold-hearted killing of tourists by Pakistan-linked terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir’s Pahalgam. It was strange that Pakistan should have raised the fear of a nuclear conflict, because India had made it clear that it would retaliate only against terror assets within Pakistan. Besides, India never once threatened the use of nuclear weapons, although it too is a nuclear-weapons state.

A Pakistani diplomat based in Russia said in a media interview that his country would ‘use the full spectrum of force, both conventional and nuclear’, as a riposte to any aggression by India, including a halt in the flow of Indus waters to Pakistan. A Pakistani minister said that his country had kept 130 missiles that could carry nuclear weapons ‘for Hindustan’, adding that those weapons ‘are not just kept as models…and you have no idea in which parts of Pakistan we have positioned them’. More such remarks came from others holding responsible positions in the Pakistani establishment. The US did not even once rebuke, let alone condemn, Pakistan for brazenly threatening another nation with nuclear warfare.

Pakistan believed that not only would the international community put immense pressure on India but also that such threats would deter the Modi government from ordering precision strikes against Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure. Neither of these Pakistani wishes was fulfilled. Countries such as the United States of America and Russia, and European nations, while asking both India and Pakistan to end the conflict, could not persuade India from teaching Pakistan a lesson that it deserved to learn.

That said, the double standards of the West, particularly that of the US, on the nuclear issue, is evident. Since many years, the US has sanctioned Iran over its ongoing nuclear programme. The US believes that Iran’s nuclear weapons development drive is essentially aimed against Israel. The sanctions have come despite Iran not yet being a nuclear power. The US also holds that Iran has links with terror elements such as the Hezbollah and the Houthis, and this makes its nuclear ambitions even more dangerous. Third, the US is of the opinion that because Iran is a theocracy, the mullahs’ having control over nuclear weapons is a cause of deep concern.

However, Washington D.C. has had no similar issues with a nuclear-armed Pakistan, although it has known all along that Pakistan developed this capability through covert and devious means. Ever since Islamabad became nuclear, control over its nuclear weapons has rested with the military, and not with the civilian government. That does not seem to have worried the US much, despite the fact that, at least since Zia’s time, the Islamisation of the Pakistan Army has continued with fervour. In fact, US-Pakistan ties were at a peak every time Pakistan was governed by military dictators—Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf. Even the current Pakistan Army chief, General Asim Munir (now Field Marshal), enjoys a rapport with the American establishment, and it is an open secret that he and not the elected government controls the levers of power in his country.

The United States is often seen lecturing countries on the avoidance of nuclear weapons in a conflict, or is busy preventing nations from acquiring nuclear capabilities. This is ironical. The US is so far the only country to have used nuclear weapons in a war; it dropped atomic bombs on Japan’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, during the Second World War. These devices were code-named Fat Man and Little Boy respectively. An estimated 200,000 people died in these bombings. Not just that, the US deployed chemical weapons in its more than a decade-long war in Vietnam.

Years after the Vietnam war, the US would invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein on the pretext that Iraq had under his leadership piled up weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—chemical weapons in this case. No WMD was later found. The irony is that while the US overran Iraq on the ground that the latter harboured chemical weapons, its forces used the deadly Napalm against the Iraqis during the invasion. America had also rained this killer gas in the Vietnam war. Mark Greenside, a writer, said, ‘Napalm was this hideous, jellied gas burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It didn't just kill you; it tortured you.’

According to official figures, the US government had since 1945, produced more than 70,000 nuclear warheads (considered to be more than that manufactured by all nuclear nations combined). Until 1963, all its nuclear tests were conducted over ground, without regard to the fallout impact on the people; thereafter, the tests went underground with the Partial Test Ban Treaty coming into effect; the PTBT was followed by the Complete Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The US had progressed with its nuclear programme on the ground that it was needed to counter the Soviet Union. The latter responded in kind, and the race for nuclear weapons began in right earnest resting on the argument of deterrence.

Having gone the full way on its nuclear programme, the US announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, and has maintained it since 1992. Suddenly, it woke up to the dangers of accumulating nuclear arsenal and demanded that countries should sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that, among other things, bans any nuclear tests by non-nuclear weapons states.

One can argue that all that is in the past, and that the world is safer without the use of nuclear weapons in conflicts. If the US is serious about its resolve, it ought to at least rap Pakistan on its knuckles. Pakistan has demonstrated its rogue nature time and again, and nobody except perhaps a fistful of nations would guarantee that it would behave responsibly in the future with the nuclear arsenal that it has at its disposal. It is in this context that Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently called for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to be brought under the surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

As for Pakistan’s saber-rattling on the nuclear issue, that India contemptuously dismissed by going ahead with targeting terror assets, and thereafter a few key military assets inside Pakistan, one is tempted to quote Henry Kissinger: ‘A gesture intended as a bluff but taken seriously is more useful as a deterrent than a bona fide threat interpreted as a bluff.’

(The paper is the author’s individual scholastic articulation. The author certifies that the article/paper is original in content, unpublished and it has not been submitted for publication/web upload elsewhere, and that the facts and figures quoted are duly referenced, as needed, and are believed to be correct). (The paper does not necessarily represent the organisational stance... More >>