Tempers may escalate, but everyone is careful about using the rhetoric of nuclear weapons, especially military leaders. This was proved during the recent India-Pakistan military clash when two nuclear powers directly engaged in a military battle.
That nuclear deterrence is still valid in theory and in practice was strongly underlined during the Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) talks between India and Pakistan in the backdrop of Operation Sindoor by India and Pakistan’s Operation ‘Bunyan-un-Marsoos’.
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Recently, Indian Army chief General Upendra Dwivedi, during a press conference on the conversations at the DGMO level during Operation Sindoor, spoke about this, saying, “As far as nuclear rhetoric is concerned, I would like to say that there was no discussion on nuclear in the DGMO talks, and whatever nuclear rhetoric was given by the politicians or given by the local public in Pakistan, I have no indication that anything of that sort came from the military.”
The Army chief also took the position that military conflicts do not directly transition from sub-conventional warfare to the nuclear domain.
Gen Dwivedi said, “…it was stated that the space for conventional operations is shrinking, and that we would go directly from sub-conventional to the nuclear domain. But this time, the action we took, especially the kind of firing that took place in Jammu and Kashmir, and the way we addressed it, and how we eliminated approximately 100 of their (Pakistan) personnel—all that action was taken because we expanded the conventional space.”
Strategists often question if Russia would have dared to embark on military operations inside Ukraine had Kyiv maintained a stockpile of nuclear weapons.
At the time of the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons with about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads and about 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons. By 1996, it had handed over all its nuclear stockpile to Russia for dismantling and became a non-nuclear country.
