India’s Nuclear Posture and the Hypocrisy of Restraint
India’s draft nuclear doctrine encompasses No First Use (NFU) and “credible minimum deterrence (CMD),” pledging to retaliate massively only if attacked with nuclear weapons. The official doctrine of 1999/2003 explicitly promised that India would “not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike” but would respond with punitive retaliation intended to inflict “unacceptable damage” on any aggressor. In theory, this pledge places India in the category of restrained nuclear states. In practice, however, the evidence increasingly suggests otherwise. From Pakistan’s perspective, India’s evolving arsenal and doctrine reveal a pattern of hypocrisy, where the rhetoric of restraint conceals a growing appetite for offensive and destabilizing capabilities.
Pakistan’s own posture remains defensive and regionally confined, centered on full-spectrum deterrence (FSD) designed to counter the Indian threat at all levels including strategic, tactical and operational. Yet India’s NFU doctrine affords it the freedom to pursue a large, high-readiness arsenal without the reputational costs faced by Pakistan. NFU has granted New Delhi a warfighting advantage, enabling its conventional dominance under the nuclear umbrella while dismissing Pakistan’s security concerns as excessive. The fundamental question for Pakistani strategists is whether India’s declared doctrine truly governs New Delhi’s behavior, or whether it merely serves as a diplomatic smokescreen for a far more ambitious strategy.
India’s capabilities tell their own story. After decades of professing “minimum” deterrence, New Delhi is steadily expanding its arsenal. Independent estimates suggest India now possesses 150–200 nuclear warheads. Its fissile material stockpile is sufficient for far more.
India has created a nuclear triad at the embryonic stage. It employs the Agni missile series, on land starting with the short-range Agni-I and intercontinental Agni-V. Some are MIRVed. Dual-capable fighter-bombers (Rafaele and Su-30MKI) can deliver nuclear weapons by air. India has INS Arihant and INS Arighat at sea. Ballistic submarines are being constructed in greater numbers. Meanwhile, India is also contemplating nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) with French help.
Beyond this, India has tested an anti-satellite weapon. It is pursuing MIRVs and advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets. These include military satellites and airborne early warning platforms. According to analysts at Belfer Center these capabilities can be described as a wide and expanding array of effective and responsive nuclear delivery systems. Such a posture goes well beyond the concept of minimum deterrence.
These advances appear less as defensive insurance and more in the form of counterforce preparations. As scholars argue, India has long-range precision strike capabilities coupled with missile defenses, which theoretically have allowed it to disarm Pakistan in a first strike. Although India never initiates first, the fact that these options are pursued provides dangerous incentives toward preemption in case of a crisis, compelling Pakistan to increase its own readiness to meet it. Every new Indian submarine, missile or satellite system reduces the stability margin. The blocks of escalation dominance are gradually becoming the same as what India refers to as credible minimum strength. The counterforce strike is the option that India is opting. One may view this tendency as an indication of a growing stability of deterrence practices, and instead the doctrine of maximum damage containment. This would place Pakistan in a more vulnerable situation concerning crisis instability, as it would be forced to assume more offensive nuclear stances in response. Lastly, the development of counterforce alternatives weakens the culture of restraint and predisposes the South Asian security environment to fragility.
Even the NFU promise of India has come to be less realistic. The BJP’s 2014 manifesto declared that they would review the nuclear doctrine, and the then Prime Minister, Modi, even suggested that NFU could be reconsidered, in which circumstances, later. Talking of NFU, former defense minister Manohar Parrikar questioned why India had not been a slave to it. But even more deplorable are the arguments of Indian strategists according to which pre-emptive nuclear attacks are now in negotiation on precisely the opposite terms as NFU. Such debates, in the opinion of Islamabad, show that NFU is a political slogan rather than a constraint.
Crisis behavior reinforces these suspicions. The India policy discusses its huge retaliation on any nuclear attack but very few commentators believe that New Delhi will literally burn down cities as a retaliation. A more plausible example would be that of a limited retaliation counterforce that would directly strike the nuclear target in Pakistan. The Balakot airstrike by India was a move taken under the nuclear shadow, i.e. it was not a foot forward, but it showed the extent to which India would go in achieving its political objectives. This trend was reinforced more recently in May 2025, when the Indo-Pak confrontation re-emerged, and somewhat restrained conventional action was being sought, even though the risk of nuclear retaliation was very real. In Pakistan, this incident highlighted the value of nuclear signaling as a domestic political spectacle in India, where “nuclear jingoism” will sell among the domestic audience, but will not help achieve stability during a crisis.
The second disruptive tendency is the canisterization of Agni missiles. Missiles are fueled and loaded by putting them in sealed canisters, reducing the time to launch from hours to a few minutes. It is said that there are some Indian systems that are maintained at this high pitch of readiness. Such attitudes are deadly to Pakistan: hair-trigger forces shorten the decision time, promote launch-on-warning postulations, and raise the chances of accidental or erroneous launches. Scholars and Researchers caution that the canisterization will enable India to strike against a counterforce on short notice only to contribute to an event that will merely serve to destabilize the crisis. What the Indian government boasts of as technical modernization; what the Pakistani planners have acknowledged as nuclear brinkmanship.
This is the trend of nuclear exceptionalism that has been the order of the day in the treatment of India by the international community. India, similar to Pakistan, is not a signatory to NPT, and yet it has received tremendous special treatment. The civil nuclear agreement between India and the United States allowed India to secure just a part of the reactor arsenal and leave the others unsecured but it gave it state-of-the-art nuclear technology. India has a stock of fissile material that can produce over 2,600 warheads. India is celebrated as a responsible nuclear power in the Western capitals, which can hardly be said of Pakistan in spite of its consistent interest in regional deterrence. The most infamous reference to nuclear brinkmanship in Indian political discourse is the infamous katl ki raat speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who states that nuclear arms are not on Diwali sale. These phrases are used to justify the unofficial reversion to nuclear in domestic politics and they give great cause to doubt the Indian commitment to restraint and stability.
Major powers continue to arm India with advanced systems. The United States has tried to back India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group. It also helps to facilitate the Indian membership in other export control cartels.
France is the new major defense partner of New Delhi. It provides Rafale planes and contributes to the construction of the next-generation nuclear submarines. According to SIPRI, 28 percent of French arms sales between 2020 and 24 were to India.
The massive assistance Russia has extended to India in the missile and naval programs has put New Delhi at a decisive advantage and has created what Islamabad believes to be a dangerous imbalance. The world praises the modernization of India and the dilute deterrence of Pakistan is often condemned.
Even the weak deterrence balance in South Asia is compromised by this asymmetry. India has had a consistent history of military development, which it has framed as restraint, but with great-power desires and counterforce capabilities. In fact, this development is threatening to upset the balance between India and Pakistan. The growing militarization of India would embolden the irrational behavior of Islamabad in an emergency, and there is no alternative for Pakistan but to strengthen itself as well. India is slowly turning into a nuclear hypocrite what it terms as restraint. With no real restraints on the Indian accumulation, backed by the world powers, South Asia would experience an unsustainable stability in which a single misjudgment would be disastrous.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Opinion Desk.
