In a recent interview, Chinese analyst of international relationships Ye Hailin said that the possibility of nuclear war between India and Pakistan is increasing.
Ye said India is a military hegemon in the Indian Ocean region, and the gap between India and Pakistan’s conventional military strength is constantly expanding. Such expansion is irreversible because this gap in conventional military powers is based on their economic and technological strengths.
Although India’s defense equipment system is indeed incomplete, Pakistan is even more imperfect. In fact, Pakistan only has expertise in several cutting-edge areas, but the overall integrity is incomparable to India.
Therefore, the imbalance of regional military power is already a fact, and this will be a normal state, but this imbalance has led to several consequences.
The first is the nuclear issue. India and Pakistan are both nuclear states. This is very dangerous, because the more unbalanced the conventional military powers of the two countries are, the lower the nuclear threshold is, that is to say, when India’s conventional military forces form an overwhelming advantage, then in fact you give the other party very few opportunities: if Pakistan can’t count on its conventional military power, it can only count on nuclear weapons.
Therefore, India needs to consider that it is constantly putting pressure on Pakistan in respect of conventional weapons, which actually increases nuclear risk in South Asian, especially as India’s nuclear doctrine is a clear “Cold Start” one, that is, India has never said the same thing as China about never being the first to use nuclear weapons. It has never had this promise.
In this case, the imbalance of conventional military powers between India and Pakistan has a very negative impact on the balance of nuclear weapons here.