What the India-Pakistan escalation teaches us about nuclear proliferation

12 May 2025

As Europe celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, India and Pakistan launched missiles and artillery shells at each other. The hostilities started with missile strikes by India on Pakistani territory on 6 May. India said these were in response to a terrorist attack that killed 27 tourists in the disputed Kashmir region in late April. Both countries have nuclear weapons, making this only the second direct missile exchange between nuclear-armed countries in history, after the 1999 Kargil war between the same.

Ever since nuclear weapons were developed, their unmatched destructive power has been used mostly as a deterrent, guaranteeing that any country that threatens to destroy a nuclear power will itself, too, be destroyed.

Given the potential damage of nuclear war, almost the entire international community agreed on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which limits the availability of nuclear weapons to the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK. Notably, India and Pakistan are two of only four countries not to have signed the NPT – along with South Sudan and Israel.

But a major reason is also that every additional state with nuclear weapons increases the risk that one state will actually use them. If missile barrages are flying towards important targets in India or Pakistan, a stressed commander cannot always know whether these are nuclear-armed or not, and might react as if they were.

The ceasefire agreed over the weekend is a good step forward – but there was little reason for India to strike Pakistan in the first place. After all, there are many less escalatory and more productive reactions to a terrorist attack than striking a neighbouring nuclear state and bringing the region to the brink of all-out war. 

Instead, the escalation highlights that the proliferation of nuclear weapons could not come at a worse moment, when the international order is breaking apart and state-on-state conflicts from border disputes to all-out war, are becoming more and more common.

Meanwhile, the typical bad guys like North Korea and Iran have long sought nuclear weapons to shore up their regimes and deter external interventions. But more recently, the US's revisionist turn under Trump has even countries like Japan and Germany debating whether they should acquire their own nuclear deterrent. And so, in search of individual security, risks of a nuclear confrontation, ironically, are increasing.