If South Asia were asked to delineate the epistemology of its deterrent models or tackle broader ideational deficiencies in its understanding of deterrence stability, it would be caught in a conceptual block. In strategic parlance, deterrence is an abstract paradigm of using the threat perception of force to avert an adversary’s adventurism.
Borrowing from a political precedent, the bilateral deterrence credibility of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) from the Cold War era had a unique interpretive variant of preventive strategies to avert nuclear standoffs. The concept of deterrence survived the East-West deadlock only because it abated the probability of nuclear escalation. This Cold War model of paradoxical stability vanished soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or USSR.
The presence of Confidence-building Measures (CBMs), situational or responsive crisis communication, arms control mechanisms, and hotline or back-channel diplomacy, with no sudden third-party interventions, protected the rationale of deterrence. If there had been a third deactivation switch in the Cold War, it would have neither neutralized nor steered the direction of the crisis towards lasting normalization with systematic de-escalation protocols.
Inversely, the ongoing absence of CBMs and de-escalation practices is a dilemma that South Asia witnesses every time it has entered into a cycle of escalatory narratives, followed by a series of limited conventional adventures, less irrational than what Western writings believe this region’s crises spiral to be.
From 2019 to 2025, the entire psychology of ‘politics for deterrence’, which emanated from the biblical moment of 1962, either became distant in practice, misperceived in theory, or entirely replaced by alternative concepts while translating in both spheres.
With frequent intermediary practices acting as an urgent fail-safe procedure to terminate spiraling conflicts, South Asia never discovered how imperative crisis communication is before reaching some tipping points. Three dimensions of the deterrence question remain crucial: how long can South Asia’s understanding of deterrence with intermediary intrusions, escalation appetites, and the dawn of the 3rd nuclear age cling to survival?
Is South Asia’s Deterrence Caught in the Crossfire?
The 1st Nuclear age, succeeding the Trinity tests, had no complicated factor of a dual-deterrent model, neither from the United States nor from the Soviet Union, unlike India, which seeks to deter both Pakistan and China. With no compressed decision-making protocols during the Cold War, conflict reversion was possible with deterrence possessing three Cs: capability, credibility, and communication.
With no doctrinal risk-intensive pursuit of preemptive strikes to score immediate objectives, the Cold War averted the contemporary manifestation of the Cold Start Doctrine (CDS). If applied to India and Pakistan, the political objectives with strategic imperatives in their escalation patterns would compel both to reorient the normative characterization of nuclear deterrents.
Read More: Redefining the Security Paradigm and Deterrence in South Asia
The integration of national security models into nuclear deterrence doctrines has created epistemic gaps, with India’s conventional forces, supplemented by its nuclear arsenal, surprisingly directed only at Pakistan, not China. The above question of the blind spot in the classical deterrence paradigm in South Asia remains to be answered; however, efforts to synonymize deterrence doctrines with local sentiments cloak the guardian knot of this theoretical Achilles Heel.
The idea of precision striking in the absence of determinative blitzing to fill the strategic void by New Delhi and the concoction of clusters of public opinion with cycles of spiraling information warfare by both adversaries pose another question.
Does having asymmetric warfare tactics, which appear to be rudimentary in South Asia, fit into deterrence doctrines enough to deter an adversary, or will they dismantle deterrence in a flash?
This entire exercise would also culminate in a conceptual distortion, subverting the historically accepted precursors of ‘strategic stability’, ‘national security’, and ‘nuclear deterrence’, creating an academic disjuncture among nuclear scholars over theoretical concept(s).
A region with a self-appointed idea of nuclear deterrence and national security has pushed conventional asymmetries into uncharted territories of deterrent postures. Both adversaries constantly juggle strategic choices as the complexity remains there; how much deterrence is enough?
South Asia’s Chicken Game: Is it on Knife’s Edge?
The decisiveness of information warfare during the May 2025 crisis was not a definitive weapon to knock out deterrence dynamics in just 87 hours. The Cold War period had enough ideological vigor to dovetail cyber thrills into their warfighting doctrines and strategic culture; computer networks for espionage to disruptive intrusions for social manipulation; ‘active measures’ of subversion operations by the Kremlin emerged as a permanent wartime mentality.
This warfare model from the East-West divide became a blueprint for modern cyber warfare practices as a replacement for traditional deterrence applications; a rapid emergence of cyber deterrence. New entrants (cyber compellence & drone swarming) in South Asia’s conflicts have stirred a debate over the entire understanding of nuclear deterrents.
Protecting strategic thresholds in an environment submerged with New Delhi’s rolling war strategies to capitulate Islamabad’s strategic architecture had forced strategic calculus to walk on eggshells. Either India will start to fear strategic fatigue, or Pakistan will escalate aggressively and make a fatal mistake.
Frequent acts of aggression by New Delhi to gauge how much calibrated ascension can be achieved at Herman Kahn’s Ladder of Escalation have subverted strategic necessity in South Asia. For the chicken game, neither side will bend down nor narrativize strategic humility to measure the scale of deterrence required to deter opposing forces.
Read More: BRICS, Quad, SCO: Contesting Orders and South Asia’s Strategic Calculus
Compellence as a High-Stakes Gamble
In the 2nd Nuclear age, instituting surgical strikes as the roadmap to cross the Rubicon, and parroting a blending narrative of competing operational logics with an instrumental manipulation of pyrrhic war objectives became an accepted spoiler in South Asia.
New Delhi’s inspiration from the Cold War first-strike thinking modules has disastrous upshots; Operation Unthinkable and Dropshot serve as the precedents of preemptive strikes, but also strategic withdrawal. The prevalence of dominant deterrence has altered the postulation of Credible Minimum Deterrence (CMD) in South Asia.
With India’s escalatory war appetite and Pakistan’s dilemma of either proceeding with limited warfighting or cold war tactics of a minimalist deterrence posture, both adversaries have some political quandaries to deal with.
The mercurial defense strategies of New Delhi with disruptive hardware, translated into physical spheres vis-à-vis a series of conflicts under the nuclear overhang, depict conjectural voids in the putative understanding of concept(s) from international security.
The generality of elements of deterrence from Western literature and the rationality of warfighting with rolling recalibrations of leveraging compellence over deterrence in South Asia is an anomaly under asymmetric warfare. These precarious strategic fallacies are neither symbiotic with the Cold War idea of deterrence nor pertaining to stabilizing Regional Security Complexes (RSC) in South Asia.
This force disposition with doctrinally conflicted war objectives and ambivalent decisive plays under deterrence posturing has reinforced the risk-prone nature of military adventures, trust deficits, and the absence of mutually consented de-escalation exercises.
The Roll of the Dice: Who Will Call it First?
The May 2025 crisis has churned up quite a few questions for the security apparatus and conflict analysts of both states as to how CBMs, deterrence matrices, and conflict spoilers will be commensurate with South Asia’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). With both adversaries exiting the 2nd nuclear age and proliferating in loitering munitions, drones, or dual-capable weapons, the interpretive muddying of precision attacking versus decisive striking has become a strategic overlap in the 3rd nuclear age.
Claiming to have struck with precision while scoring no impactful political objective or having altered the adversary’s strategic fulcrum is a manifestation of strategic complacency. The question, however, about the rationale of deterrence remains precarious; is it purely about the tactics of spoilers, risk blindness, or a broader mischaracterization of military maneuvers with disjointed doctrinal anomalies?
This has formed a perception gap in South Asia’s deterrence postures; it translated itself into an accepted praxis of strategic zigzagging under the cloak of tactical improvisational of conventional and nuclear arsenals. What’s adverse is the strategic equating of such military adventures as ‘new normal’ in the region’s security architecture.
The geostrategic proximity of forces in South Asia makes it impossible to apply the traditional Cold War deterrence theories, as such applications will always be transitory and problematic. New Delhi and Islamabad must revisit the ingrained concept(s) of deterrence and realize that such dormancy of conflicts by international mediation has hardened flexibility in recurrent crises in South Asia.
Muhammad Hamza Chaudhary
Muhammad Hamza Chaudhary is a student of International Relations at the University of Punjab, Lahore. His research interests are nuclear security, emerging warfare technologies, and deterrence dynamics of the Middle East and South Asia. He can be reached at hamzachaudhary217@gmail.com
