Dawn’s October 23 editorial rightly warned about India’s nuclear-armed submarine patrols. The danger is larger than a new vessel at sea. It is a sea-based nuclear force growing alongside precision-strike capabilities, missile defence and a false confidence in initiating military action.
Imagining that these developments confer a first-strike advantage or create a safe space for war is imprudent. Pakistan has the capability and resolve to preserve the strategic balance.
Retired Lt-Gen Mazhar Jamil, Adviser to the National Command Authority, warned at the International Institute for Strategic Studies on October 13 that continuous at-sea deterrence further weakens the credibility of India’s declared no-first-use policy and points towards an offensive strike posture. He added that unannounced submarine-launched ballistic-missile tests, with operationalised weapons aboard submarines, raise the risks of misperception and escalation.
Pakistan reserves the right to take all appropriate measures to protect its security and the regional balance. At the Islamabad Non-Proliferation Conference a week later, retired Lt-Gen Khalid Kidwai, also an adviser to the National Command Authority, reinforced the warning, saying Pakistan would review its options if India sought to impose a strategic imbalance.
In June 2026, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) estimated that India had a stockpile of 190 nuclear warheads and 12 of these deployed on a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine for occasional deterrence patrols. That estimate is too low and arrives seven years late.
Prime Minister Modi announced the INS Arihant’s first deterrence patrol in 2018 and the Indian Navy again patrolled it again during the 2019 crisis. India has three operational ballistic-missile submarines (SBBN), with a fourth expected in 2027.
Next year, the four SSBNs will have a combined capacity to launch missiles carrying up to 72 warheads from 24 tubes. A larger fleet of 12 nuclear ballistic and attack submarines is envisaged in the 2030s.
Aggressive posturing
India’s professed no-first-use pledge cannot be judged without taking into account its capabilities and political conduct. A ready, concealed launch platform gains a different meaning when combined with counterforce ambitions, missile defence and talk of pre-emption. General Kidwai’s assessment about a possible strike at ‘zero notice’ should be read in that setting. Pakistan has never allowed its deterrence capability to be neutralised by India’s posture that is taken as routine modernisation. Strategic stability rests on a credible balance and Pakistan will maintain it under all circumstances.
General Zubair Hayat, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, argued at the Islamabad Non-proliferation Conference that the old international order is giving way without an equitable replacement.
His strategic point applies here: strategic exemptions for a favoured state, followed by alarm at its neighbour’s balancing measures, do not produce equal security. The nuclearisation of the Indian Ocean did not begin when Pakistan raised its concerns. It began with India’s risky choices, enabled and fuelled by an international tendency to treat its ambitions as benign.
May 2025 demonstrated the danger of that assumption on land and in the air. On the first anniversary of Marka-i-Haq, President Asif Ali Zardari reiterated that India used Pahalgam’s false flag as a guise for premeditated strikes. India ignored Pakistan’s offer of a neutral investigation and had to endure a defeat and loss of face.
Pakistan’s calibrated conventional response, under political authority, restored conventional deterrence, while Full Spectrum Deterrence preserved the strategic ceiling. The Indian Air Force grounded itself, and the Indian Navy’s carrier strike group cut a hasty retreat to safety. The ceasefire followed Islamabad’s response and New Delhi’s call for third-party mediation. There was no safe band of war then, and there is none at sea now.
A lesson for India
Retired Lt-Gen Sarfraz Sattar, who served as Director General of the Strategic Plans Division, has also warned that emerging technologies and great-power competition threaten nuclear stability. The March 2022 BrahMos launch into Pakistan showed why. A supersonic nuclear-capable missile crossed the border in peacetime; India waited nearly two days before acknowledging it and did not accept Pakistan’s call for a joint inquiry and preserved the risk of escalation.
Three years on, India carried that risk into wartime by employing BrahMos against another nuclear power — the first such instance. The sea-leg of India’s nuclear triad and dual-capable missiles are sinews of a Hindutva-inflected policy of hegemony and coercion.
Pakistan’s declared Full Spectrum Deterrence covers the range of threats it faces, and it clearly signals that aggression at any level or in any domain risks a response that will deny objectives and impose costs; an adversary cannot dictate the level at which a confrontation will remain. Political authority, prepared forces and credible options give that warning its weight. As India’s posture changes, Pakistan will take the measures necessary to safeguard its sovereignty and strategic balance.
Risk reduction has value, but it cannot substitute for deterrence or responsible political choices. Dialogue is worthwhile when it reduces the incentives and opportunities for unilateral force, not when it is offered as a substitute for Pakistan’s defence. Pakistan always stands ready to impose greater costs for on any misadventure that India may undertake, including the maritime domain.
In May 2025, Islamabad demonstrated that its calibrated notch-up response should not be read to mean that every aggression will meet the same ceiling. General Kidwai also recommended adding a “plus” to Pakistan’s quid-pro-quo plus response strategy.
The lesson for India is direct. Neither an expanding submarine fleet nor other developments give it an edge over Pakistan’s response to aggression. Pakistan has demonstrated both resolve and the means to defend itself. It will preserve the balance on which peace depends.
In the Subcontinent, the true enemy is the delusion that war can be kept safely on a lower rung. That Indian aspiration makes the unthinkable look controllable. It’s an illusion that a war can be started low, kept low, and stopped on command.
A political choice driven by Hindutva and Akhand Bharat may begin the escalation; interaction decides where it goes. Field Marshal Asim Munir expressed the governing reality most aptly: there is no space for war in a nuclearised environment.