Nuclear jingoism

INDIA’S nuclear jingoism was on ample display during Operation Marka-i-Haq in May 2025 when it fired dual-use BrahMos cruise missiles with conventional payload, unmindful of the fact that the dangerous caper could have been misconstrued by Pakistani air defenders as a nuclear attack. Despite an agreement on pre-notification of flight testing of ballistic missiles, the Indians, while testing the Agni V MIRV-capable missile, have shown a blithe disregard for established pre-notification protocols that mandate a 72-hour pre-test notification, a fact pointed out by Pakistan’s Foreign Office in 2024. While the Indians keep up an implacable momentum of vertical proliferation of nuclear and missile technology, the world indulges them through exceptionalism enshrined in the nuclear waiver for the Nuclear Suppliers Group and membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime.

The Indians have slyly wangled the concession from the USA and IAEA in the civil nuclear deal to keep eight reactors out of IAEA oversight. These pressurised heavy water reactors consume less nuclear fuel than they produce, which can be harvested for strategic military purposes. It should be remembered that it was the Indians who introduced the nuclear arms race in the subcontinent because of their grandiose big-power pretensions. Their nuclear explosions in 1974 and 1998 forced Pakistan to follow suit out of its security compulsions. The world indulges India through nuclear exceptionalism. The Indian nuclear security architecture was provided conceptual ballast by Gen K. Sunderji and Krishna Subramanyam in the 1980s, when they came up with the notion of no-first use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation, with a caveat of making an exception for biological and chemical attacks. However, India…