The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates that Pakistan possesses around 170 nuclear weapons. India, similarly, is estimated to have about 180 weapons. Any nuclear exchange in South Asia would obviously have huge global environmental and economic consequences, even beyond the immediate loss of life, between devastated cities and fallout-laden winds spreading across the broader region. Even if other major powers like the U.S. and China escaped being drawn into the war itself, “nuclear winter” effects in the atmosphere would dramatically affect food production in neighboring China and even further beyond; one 2019 Rutgers study calculated that resulting famines would affect “millions — or even billions.”
Why It’s Likely: The May conflict underscored that once conflict begins there aren’t many escalatory options for either side before you get into real danger zones. “Once you start really damaging the other side’s military bases, you start degrading their command-and-control networks, and their ability to calibrate a response is going to decline,” says Christopher Clary, a nonresident fellow with the Henry Stimson Center and a former Pentagon South Asian country director. Intelligence leaders worry about India and Pakistan specifically because the conflict is on a short and hard-to-understand fuse. “You can see the potential for it to go from zero to 60 despite the fact that neither side may want to go to war, because the domestic politics on both sides push them to escalate, each playing off the other,” says Avril Haines, who served as former President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence.
One particularly worrisome facet is that Pakistani military doctrine is believed to have a low threshold of use of nuclear force against India — and domestic political pressures mixed with the relative immaturity of both countries’ arsenals and doctrines could mean that any nuclear exchange spirals into a rush to use dozens or scores of weapons as quickly as possible, resulting in hundreds of nuclear attacks during just a few days of war.
Urban targets in India-Pakistan scenario. No urban targets are attacked on day 1.
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