The nuclear age began with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1947, the metaphor of a ‘doomsday clock’ as a warning signal was announced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists from its offices in the University of Chicago. If the big hand touches midnight, it means the end of the world.

Today, escalating nuclear weapon preparations and nuclear threats by high officials of Russia and Israel, against Ukraine and Palestine respectively, mean that we have reached closer than ever before – 89 seconds – to Armageddon. The furthest we have ever been from this point – at 17 minutes – was between 1991 and 1996.

The collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War led to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START I and II) between the US and Russia bringing down the global tally from its peak of around 70,000 nuclear weapons (NWs) to around 16,000 as UK and France also made reductions.

Moreover, putting many warheads on a missile i.e., Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) was also banned. Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal, agreed – as did Belarus and Kazakhstan – through the 1994 trilateral Budapest Memorandum to give up all its NWs to Russia.

In return, Yeltsin’s Russia, the US and UK gave financial help and a legalised commitment to fully respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine in its existing borders. Russia brazenly violated this commitment in 2014 by its takeover of Crimea and later in its 2022 invasion. According to the former US President Clinton, Putin told him as early as 2011 that he was not bound by this treaty. 

There were three positive developments in this period. First, was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that put an end to underground testing by all signatories (atmospheric testing had been banned much earlier). Second, two new nuclear weapons free zones (NWFZs) came into existence covering almost the whole of Africa (Pelindaba Treaty) and in Southeast Asia (Bangkok Treaty), with Mongolia separately becoming a single state NWFZ. With Mandela’s government replacing the former apartheid regime, the latter’s nuclear weapons programme was abandoned.  It is now widely accepted that in 1979, Israel carried out jointly with the then South African government, an ocean surface nuclear explosion test. But from the latter part of the nineties, there has been a steady degeneration. 

The downward turn

In 1998, India and Pakistan became de facto nuclear weapons states (NWSs). In 2006, Korea joined them while Israel is an undeclared nuclear power. In 2002, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, thereby signifying its intention to establish a missile shield against any enemy assault. That is to say, once such a shield becomes operative, the US could now seriously consider launching a first strike to finish off most of the enemy’s nuclear armed missiles and leaving it to its shield (its own interceptor missiles) to mop up any remaining enemy launches.

Fearful in the future of a possible first strike against them, it is not surprising that Russia and China are seeking to overload the absorption capacity of any such shield by making more warheads and missiles and now going in for MIRVing so that if even a few missiles get through, they would inflict enormous damage thereby serving as a deterrence against a first strike.

Of course, China’s expanded preparations have a consecutive knock-on effect on India to do the same and then for Pakistan to follow India. In short, the dynamic of nuclear arms racing between the South Asian neighbours is not necessarily under their own control.

Trump recently announced that he has allocated $25 billion for starting the construction of a country-wide ‘Golden Dome’ that is to cover the whole of US territory and which is estimated to take around 20 years at a total cost of $500 billion. Along with satellite ‘eyes and ears’ to guide land-based missile launches on the enemy, he is seeking to have interceptors that can be launched from outer space itself. As it is, Russia is not far behind and may even be ahead. There is a suspicion that, sooner rather than later, Moscow can put nuclear warheads in orbit and is close to preparing a satellite armed with a dummy warhead as a warning to the US. 

In 2019, during his first term, Trump walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, which had banned land-based missiles in the range between 500-5,500 kms. Other nuclear powers including India, China and Pakistan were never bound by this treaty and have acquired many such missiles to threaten their nuclear opponents. This is not all. Many nuclear weapon states (NWS), including the big two, have gone in for tactical NWs whose purpose is to threaten assaults of varying territorial scale short of mass annihilation even as the spread of radiation effects, should such weapons be used, cannot be restricted.

The only two positive developments on the nuclear front in the new millennium have been the establishment of a Central Asia NWFZ and the signing and coming into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which now legally criminalises all existing and future NWSs.

The weakness of the TPNW is that there is no practical mechanism ensuring disarmament or for punishing the existing NWSs. Its strength is that it sets for the first time an international legal moral-political norm that, by criminalising the possession of NWs, helps future efforts at disarmament. After all, it is only after slavery was declared a moral obscenity and crime that a longer term dynamic got created for promoting further diminution and eradication of this evil in the future.

However, the bad far outweighs these two goods. The production of NWs globally will only grow as also the development of hypersonic delivery systems that are even more difficult to detect let alone block or destroy. Two existing NWFZs, that of Africa and of the South Pacific region (Treaty of Rarotonga) are being undermined. The Chagos Islands chain has been restored to the full sovereignty of Mauritius, which signed and ratified the Pelindaba Treaty that is monitored by the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) while the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversees the nuclear facilities of Mauritius.

But Mauritius, even after getting back the evacuated island of Diego Garcia from the UK, has allowed the latter’s 99-year lease of the island to the US for its military base to continue. This is very worrying because this base is used for either stocking NWs or for stationing of nuclear armed planes or for both. Now that the island is officially part of Mauritian territory, the presence of NWs must not be allowed. Mauritius must allow inspection by AFCONE or the IAEA to confirm that there are no NWs in the region. And if Mauritius does not allow this, it should be expelled from the Treaty to preserve the integrity of this NWFZ that 44 African countries have signed and ratified, while 10 others have signed but not yet ratified. Only South Sudan is not yet a member. What has aroused suspicion is that the Mauritian government, for all its earlier enthusiasm about the TPNW of 2017, has not to this date signed and ratified it.

Also read: Britain Returns Chagos, But Shadow of Nuclear Ambiguity Over Diego Garcia Remains

When it comes to the South Pacific, the main culprit is Australia. The Rarotonga treaty had unfortunate gaps in that it allowed for transit of NWs through its home waters and even temporary docking of carriers for refuelling. But it categorically rejected any stationing of NWs by planes or submarines in the territories of its members that include, apart from Australia, New Zealand and many island chains like Nauru, Cook, Solomon, Fiji, Marshall, Papua New Guinea, etc.

Most of these members are deeply unhappy about the formation of the recent security pact between Australia, the UK and the US (AUKUS), which is clearly aimed at China, making this region a new centre of geopolitical tensions and – given the gaps in the Rarotonga Treaty – is almost certainly to bring in a surreptitious presence of NWs.

As it is, Australia has never questioned the US about its carriers having nuclear weapons in the past and is not going to do so now, when Trump is promising it nuclear powered submarines as a likely quid pro quo for its nuclear preparations vis-à-vis China. Australia also has not signed and ratified the TPNW.

West Asia and South Asia

However, it is the two face-offs between US/Israel-Iran and India-Pakistan that are most disturbing when it comes to the nuclear issue. Iran’s nuclear energy programme began during the reign of the Shah and, ironically, many of Iran’s scientists got their training in the US at the time. They were later available for pursuing the project under Khomeini, when the US turned hostile.

While there were those in Teheran who were willing to push for the eventual making of the bomb, the ruling theocracy wasn't, and issued a public fatwa against this. After the recent air assault by Israel and the US on its facilities, will this anti-bomb posture change because of the desire to have a nuclear deterrent against Israel? One hopes that better sense will prevail. As the South Asian experience shows, one cannot rule out conventional warfare between two nuclear-armed rivals and Israel has much the stronger conventional force.

Moreover, it is the US that will intervene to destroy any infant nuclear weapons arsenal because Iran is far from having the capacity to deliver warheads to the US, without which it has no deterrent threat against it. This does not mean that Iran will permanently abjure moving in this direction. Some have said Iran should emulate the North Korean experience which did go in for a bomb without facing any US assault. But the analogy does not hold. North Korea borders both Russia and China and the geopolitical implications of any air assault on North Korea are profoundly different from the situation in West Asia where the US faces no such geopolitical constraints. 

It is in South Asia that the nuclear danger is most acute. No other nuclear pair (not even Russia-China) has had a similar history of continuous hot-cold war for over seven decades; nor has anyone else carried out a serious conventional war (Kargil 1999), during which one or both sides may well have quietly made preparations for a possible nuclear assault or retaliation.

In February 2019, in response to a lone suicide bomber attack on Indian paramilitary forces, for the first time ever, one nuclear power, India, used its official air force wing to drop a conventional bomb load deep in the territory of another nuclear power. Any such use of one’s official armed forces constitutes an act of war even if it is unacknowledged as such by either side. Here too, there is the claim by no less than Mike Pompeo, then the US Secretary of State, in his 2023 book Never Give an Inch, that he intervened to prevent the risk of a nuclear conflagration. In May 2025, matters reached an altogether new level. The Modi government response to a terrorist attack by a non-state actor was to call this an ‘act of war’ by Pakistan and to order air assaults on Pakistan territory against military sites and civilian areas. The Pakistan government then responded with similar aerial attacks across the border in J&K.

Though the Pakistan government sponsors non-state groups (which means a variable degree of autonomy in the group’s decisions and behaviour) that carry out terror attacks across the border, this is not the same as an act executed by the apparatuses of the state itself. This is a vitally important distinction. The definition of war in international law and the UN Charter is clear about Jus ad bellum or the “right to go to war” in self-defence. This is when a country is assaulted by the official armed forces of another country or the threat of this is imminent. The shocking and shameful terror assault in Pahalgam, first acknowledged then denied by The Resistance Front (TRF) based in Pakistan, does not and must not be seen as constituting an act of war by the Pakistan government which then calls for a significant and escalating exchange by the armed forces of both countries. Other ways, through international or bilateral cooperation, have to be found to identify and punish the specific culprits of the TRF.

To see Pahalgam as an act of war is to give unjustifiable power to any future non-state actor, individual or group, to catalyse a major military exchange between governments that will result in much greater damage and losses in soldiers and civilians on both sides – with every chance of escalating further the nuclear level, given the much greater conventional military power overall of India vis-à-vis Pakistan. The Pakistan government, even if it wants to, cannot fully control or prevent another non-state group from carrying out a future terror attack on Indian soil. Will the Modi or any other Indian government then up-the-military-ante beyond what took place in the immediate aftermath of Pahalgam?

Among the red lines that Pakistan (weaker overall in its conventional military strength vis-à-vis India) has officially drawn as to when it would consider using tactical or strategic nuclear weapons is if Indian troops encroach beyond a point into Pakistan territory or if it faces economic strangulation.

India’s official nuclear doctrine says it will respond massively wherever its troops may be attacked by NWs, meaning even if this is on Pakistan territory. Modi suspended the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) and said it will now prioritise its use of rivers, of which it is the upper riparian, to enhance its hydro-power needs regardless of what Pakistan thinks. This arbitrary suspension is illegal and not allowed for by the terms of the Treaty and is precisely a warning that India, if it so wishes in the years to come, can economically strangulate Pakistan, whose agriculture is 80% dependent on these river flows.

Incidentally, there is a long term calculation behind this move for it is in 2016 that Modi, after the Uri incident, said “blood and water cannot flow together”. Fulfilling this threat is a near guarantee that there will be a major war between the two countries. Furthermore, by threatening to undermine the IWT, New Delhi is refusing to distinguish between punishing the Islamabad government and punishing the general public of Pakistan, thereby ensuring that the people of Pakistan are much more likely to align behind an otherwise domestically unpopular government against India. But then a general anti-Muslim-ness is central to Hindutva so one should not have expected wisdom from the BJP leadership. What was and is disturbing is that almost all the opposition parties have supported Modi’s form of direct military retaliation. Are there any hopes for moving towards greater global and regional nuclear sanity? 

Suggested nuclear restraints

Presented here are some measures for promoting greater nuclear restraint and risk reduction – without expectation that they will be taken up by NWSs or even considered by their intellectual acolytes – for the purposes of informing and generating a wider public consciousness. Only greater domestic and international pressures from below can hope to pressurise recalcitrant governments. 

1. The US has signed but not yet ratified the CTBT and Russia in November 2023 withdrew its ratification. If the US were to ratify it, Russia would almost certainly do so and there would be immense pressure on both India and Pakistan to join the Treaty.
2. An international conference should be hosted by a country more seriously committed to pursuing measures of restraint and disarmament like South Africa to push for the NWSs to adopt a No First Use NFU) pledge against other NWSs and No Use Ever against non-nuclear weapons States (NNWSs). China and India are the only two NWSs to have such a pledge although India’s pledge is more qualified since, unlike China, it reserves the right to use NWs on an NNWS that have chemical or biological weapons. These two countries can see the diplomatic value of participation to achieve a degree of international approbation through outflanking the other NWSs that won’t attend.  
3. Such a conference could also push for a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (MEWMDFZ), which has long been accepted by Iran and all members of the League of Arab States. Israel is the only holdout and needs, especially at this time, to be stigmatised and pilloried for its genocide against Palestine and for its illegal expansionist behaviour regionally.
4. In South Asia, the sensible thing to do is to have a certain de-militarised zone on both sides of the border monitored by the UN. But this will not happen even though the revolution in military affairs means both sides have the capacity to inflict great damage on each other from outside this zone. 
5. Pakistan in the past has offered a No War Pact, which India dismisses claiming terror attacks are an ‘act of war’, which they are not. India has called for Pakistan to adopt an NFU pledge which it refuses, seeing its NWs as a deterrent against conventional military assaults. But neither side is willing to go in for a simultaneous agreement to have both these risk reduction and confidence building measures.
6. Lastly, any nuclear outbreak in South Asia will inflict grave suffering, particularly on Nepal and Bangladesh, at the very least through the spread of radiation. But Dhaka has a way to politically hit back against the two nuclear powers. Bangladesh in the past, unlike Nepal, has officially said it is in favour of a South Asian NWFZ. Moreover, a former Awami League MP Saber Choudhury, who is now co-President of the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND), in 2011 did table a private member’s bill in parliament for Bangladesh to become, like Mongolia, a single state NWFZ. There is no reason now not to pursue such a cause through an international delegation comprising representatives of the two Nobel Peace Prize winning bodies – the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) (which has affiliates in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) – to visit and meet the top government officials in Bangladesh to push for such an outcome. The new regime there may see real value in asserting its independence and criticism of the nuclearisation of the region in this way. It can then ask existing NWSs to sign the protocols that would affirm their respect for and acceptance of Bangladesh’s new anti-nuclear status. China certainly would endorse this and other NWSs might follow suit, putting both India and Pakistan on the spot. A Bangladeshi success along these lines can encourage Nepal to do the same. This is an attempt worth making instead of simply doing nothing and letting the nuclear war drums of this region keep rolling. 

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