The sun had just risen in Kyiv on May 24. Suddenly, Yevhen Zosin was deafened by the sound of an explosion. He immediately went to his pet dog, heard another explosion and was thrown back by a shock wave. “We both survived, she and I. My apartment was blown to pieces,” Zosin said.
They had just survived an Oreshnik missile strike. Meaning ‘hazelnut tree’ in Russian, the Oreshnik missile—an intermediate-range ballistic missile—flies at about 13,000kmph with the terminal phase exceeding Mach 13.
What makes the Oreshnik even more dangerous is that it has six warheads. All six hit different targets with pinpoint precision at blinding speed. There is no known defence against it.
This was Moscow’s way of upping intimidation to new levels. It sent shivers across the world, mainly because the missile could easily have had a nuclear warhead.
And therein lies the value of nuclear deterrence—a core concept that has held strong since 1945, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Nuclear deterrence basically says: “Attack me and you will be destroyed.” It means nuclear adversaries are scared of attacking each other, lest they spark off a nuclear war.
There were such fears during Operation Sindoor last year, too. And there were valid reasons.
India’s nuclear doctrine rests on three foundations—credible minimum deterrence (enough nukes to inflict unacceptable damage), no first use, and massive retaliation if attacked.
The Pakistani doctrine rebuffs ‘no first use’ and is governed by a ‘full spectrum deterrence’ nuclear posture that frees Islamabad to use nuclear weapons early in the conflict, if only to overwhelm India’s conventional military superiority. As if to underline this, Sohail Mahmood, prominent diplomat and director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, said in a seminar on May 28, 2025: “Pakistan’s full spectrum deterrence ensures that no space exists for aggression below the nuclear threshold.”
The latest doctrine, especially after 2011, is called the ‘Quid-Pro-Quo-Plus’, which means that to any Indian conventional attack, Pakistan would respond one step ahead. In other words, this is nuclear blackmail at its best.
Moreover, Pakistani missiles had an inbuilt dual-use character—its long-range missiles were both conventional and nuclear. That is why using them during Operation Sindoor would have raised the bogey of nuclear possibility.
As outgoing Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan said in his exclusive interview with THE WEEK: “[As] Pakistan’s missiles are configured for both roles, they established the Army Rocket Force command (to focus on non-nuclear missiles) to separate the two. They recognised that ambiguity as a mistake.”
On August 14, 2025, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the establishment of the ARF on the lines of the Chinese PLA Rocket Force.
The formation of such a force would mean expanding space for conventional warfare as opposed to nuclear confrontation even at the tactical level.
It was not always like this. During the Balakot conflict, on February 26, 2019, the Pakistan military’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) announced that the National Command Authority (NCA), which has the mandate on use of nuclear weapons, had convened a meeting. Major General Asif Ghafoor, then ISPR director-general, had threatened: “I hope you know what the NCA means and what it constitutes.”
During Sindoor, alarms bells rang after Reuters reported that Sharif had called a meeting of the NCA on May 10. But there was vehement denial from Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, who told a television channel: “[Nuclear] is present, but let’s not talk about it. We should treat it as a very distant possibility and not even discuss it in the immediate context.”
On hindsight, this might have been a classic display of brinkmanship. Former chief of the Indian Strategic Forces Command Air Marshal Rajesh Kumar (retd) writes in his co-authored book Redlines Redrawn: Operation Sindoor and India’s New Normal: “Nuclear signalling is both an art and a science—too subtle, and the signals could be missed and if too aggressive, it may provoke the adversary to challenge the enunciated red lines.”
While the traditional Pakistani nuclear posturing was seen as a response to India’s ‘Cold Start’ war doctrine (swift, pre-emptive strikes inside Pakistan to inflict significant damage on the military), India’s new doctrine of ‘Dynamic Response’ (assertive, cost-imposing retaliation across the length and breadth of Pakistan) has further expanded the space for conventional warfare below the nuclear threshold. Said Gen Chauhan: “The threshold for nuclear use remains very high globally. There is a large space for conventional operations before that threshold is ever reached.”
However, Field Marshal Asim Munir reiterated the old position during a dinner in the US on August 10, 2025. “We are a nuclear nation. If we think we are going down, we will take half the world down with us,” he is reported to have said.
What had led to fear in Delhi during Sindoor was that Pakistan had India-focused Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW), said to be the backbone of its QPQP doctrine.
Their use was based on four foundations—when India strikes large swathes (territorial threshold), destroys a large part of the Pakistani military (military threshold), strangulates Pakistan economically (economic threshold) or politically destabilises Pakistan or creates internal subversion (domestic threshold).
The bedrock of Pakistan’s TNW is the already in-service Nasr (Hatf 9) short-range ballistic missile with a range of 70km. It is a low-yield nuclear missile that uses a single-stage solid propellant for its 400kg single warhead.
It is felt that Islamabad did not resort to TNWs against India possibly because of two factors. The overall dominance and superiority of the Indian Air Force attacks after initial setbacks, which showed India’s capability to hit deep in Pakistan, and second, the accuracy and unstoppable character of the BrahMos missile.
A second alarm went off when western media reported that Indian bombs had fallen close to two sensitive sites on May 10. One of them was Kirana Hills near Sargodha (rumoured to be a storage site of nuclear weapons). This, too, was strongly denied by Air Marshal A.K. Bharti, who was then the director general of air operations.
A few months after Sindoor, on November 13, Pakistan passed its 27th constitutional amendment, creating the post of the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), who would head the Strategic Plans Division. So it will be the CDF—Munir—who will control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. In other words, the nuclear trigger will lie in the hands of the army, eroding whatever remained of civilian control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
For India, as if the mixed nuclear signals from Islamabad were not enough, the fact that the army has complete control of the nuclear arsenal means that these weapons could be called into action during preliminary stages of any future conflict. One can only expect these mixed signals to continue.
