Nuclear deterrence in South Asia is widely described as a stabilising force. Since India and Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons, the prevailing view has been that the prospect of an escalation has reduced the likelihood of full-scale war, even as political disputes and periodic skirmishes and crises continue. From this perspective, restraint during moments of tension is often cited as evidence that deterrence is functioning as intended but it does so by routinely placing civilians at intolerable risk.
This deterrence discourse focuses on arsenals, doctrines, and signalling and rests on a narrow understanding of what stability entails while treating the public only in abstract terms, appearing only as “projected casualties” and “collateral damage” in escalation scenarios. This assumption that civilian suffering is the basis of credibility of deterrence is rarely interrogated in its own right as a political or ethical issue.
However, now, a humanitarian and human security lens, developed in recent work by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), shifts the reference point of security from states to people, highlighting how deeply civilian vulnerability is embedded in prevailing notions of stability. Furthermore, it raises questions about whether a system that relies on the threat of mass harm can credibly be described as secure. Against this backdrop, a human security agenda offers a way to move beyond abstract ideas of stability by introducing concrete guardrails on nuclear rhetoric and crisis communication to reduce catastrophic risk since credible security in South Asia requires treating civilians as ends in themselves, not as instruments of strategy.
From state-centric stability to human security
Analyses of South Asia’s nuclear dynamics have traditionally emphasised escalation control, crisis signalling, and deterrence learning. When confrontations end without nuclear use, they are often interpreted as validation of these mechanisms, as emphasised in the work by Scott Sagan and Vipin Narang. Civilians in this system act as a constraint and the expectation of catastrophic humanitarian consequences is suggested to deter decision-makers from crossing nuclear thresholds. This rhetoric, however, ignores the fact that people are the main bearers of danger in any nuclear conflict rather than passive externalities to deterrence. Nevertheless, the aforementioned civilians remain largely absent from the decision-making processes that define acceptable levels of danger. Therefore, human security approaches challenge this significant omission by insisting that the purpose of security policy includes protecting individuals and communities from systemic harm, not only preventing inter-state war.
This shift is particularly salient in South Asia, where population density, urban concentration, and limited emergency response capacity would magnify the consequences of even a single nuclear detonation. Humanitarian assessments consistently show that post-use assistance would be extremely limited, calling into question plans about recovery or manageability after nuclear use. The ICRC has underscored that any use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic destruction, long-term radiation effects, and would likely overwhelm any realistic capacity for emergency response or medical assistance at such a large scale. Even limited nuclear use would produce cascading, transboundary effects on health, food security, infrastructure, and governance.
Stability, risk, and unequal exposure
When analysts assert that deterrence has preserved regional peace and stability in South Asia, they tend to focus on the absence of large-scale conventional war. Yet, this definition of stability is narrow as it does not capture the recurring cycles of shelling in border regions and the full spectrum of issues faced by communities along contested borders like recurring displacement and disruption.
Moreover, nuclear risk is unevenly distributed. Proximity to likely targets, socio-economic status, and access to state services shape who would face the most severe consequences in a crisis. What is thus observed is that aggregated national narratives obscure these disparities, making it easier to discuss “acceptable costs” without addressing who would actually bear them. Treating the nation as a single, homogeneous body makes it easier for elites to talk about “acceptable costs,” especially when those costs will be borne primarily by poorer, marginalised, or politically excluded communities. Nuclear strategy can thus remain technically sophisticated while becoming ethically and socially disconnected from the populations it purports to protect.
During periods of heightened Indo-Pakistan tension, official and semi-official nuclear rhetoric rarely celebrates nuclear weapons. Instead, it frames them as grim necessities, justified precisely by the scale of the catastrophe they could produce. In this sense, the extreme vulnerability of the public functions not merely as a byproduct of deterrence, but the principal argument for maintaining the very system that keeps them vulnerable. Civilian vulnerability is thus remoulded as a strategic asset.
What is observed is that the concept of “escalation control” is central to South Asian nuclear discourse. It is regarded as a marker of professional competence and suggests that leaders can climb and descend an escalation ladder in an orderly, controlled fashion. Therefore, for domestic and international audiences, it reassures: nuclear risk is being managed by experts. Leaders signal to each other through actions that implicitly or explicitly expose civilians to greater risk, because those whose lives are at stake are not participating in the decision-making process, and the moral dimension of these choices is obscured behind a language signalling and resolve. However, on closer inspection, escalation control often means something less reassuring i.e. the deliberate management of public fear to coerce an adversary into not using nuclear threat. The assumption that leaders will act cautiously because civilian harm would be unacceptable implicitly turns that harm into a stabilising factor, without requiring public consent or meaningful democratic debate.
A human security approach, therefore, reframes the question; the issue is not whether fear of civilian casualties can restrain leaders, but whether any legitimate political order should rely on routine threats of mass suffering as an instrument of policy. It reviews escalation control as a matter of consent and accountability as no electorate in South Asia has been asked whether its cities should be used as bargaining chips in nuclear posturing and no school-going child in Delhi, Lahore, Mumbai, or Karachi has agreed to become a data point in an escalation scenario. The danger lies not only in intentional nuclear use, but in the normalisation of political language that treats potential civilian annihilation as a legitimate instrument of statecraft.
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Strategic Restraint: A Fragile Illusion
Concepts like escalation control are often cited as evidence that nuclear risks are being responsibly managed. While such mechanisms may reduce certain dangers, they depend on rapid decisions under uncertainty and communication among a small group of political and military elites. The populations most exposed to the consequences of these choices have little visibility, influence, or protection.
The February 2019 Pulwama attack illustrates the limits of this logic. After a suicide bombing by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 Indian security personnel, India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed adversaries, entered a volatile crisis marked by airstrikes, domestic political pressure, and intense international scrutiny. From afar, the episode is often framed as a deterrence success: escalation occurred, then stopped and nuclear weapons were not used. Yet, this narrative obscures the civilian experience. In major cities, daily life continued as normal while critical decisions were taken amid uncertainty and emotional polarisation. There was little public guidance, no robust civil defence preparation, and no realistic capacity for civilians to respond in case of a nuclear emergency. Tens of millions were effectively placed in a high-risk situation without their knowledge or consent. The outcome depended less on robust safeguards than on restraint, circumstance, and luck, none of which come under the bracket of a sustainable security strategy.
Recent events in Kashmir underline how fragile this supposed ‘stability and peace’ remains. In April 2025, the deadliest civilian attack in the region in over two decades killed 26 tourists in Baisaran valley near Pahalgam, Kashmir. The Resistance Front (TRF), a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility. The attack followed several years in which India-Pakistan relations were held up as a case of “strategic restraint” that is exemplified as the 2021 Line of Control ceasefire was largely held, India’s accidental missile launch into Pakistan in 2022 did not trigger retaliation, and crises appeared to be managed below the threshold of war. That perception quickly eroded post the Pahalgam attack, which triggered the Indian military's “Operation Sindoor” against targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Although New Delhi described the strikes as focused and non-escalatory, they still caused civilian harm and raised fears of further escalation and most specifically acute risk of nuclear escalation challenging the stability of South Asia, a nuclearised and geostrategically key region being seriously threatened. Both sides escalated rhetorically and militarily while simultaneously claiming the mantle of responsible crisis management, making civilians the involuntary participants in the "human shield" of deterrence.
From a human security perspective, this reveals a troubling reality: what elites describe as “limited” escalation can still involve cross-border strikes, civilian casualties, the use of new technologies such as drones, and even the first combat deployment of naval forces in decades. These developments widen the scope for miscalculation rather than containing it. Claims of having “stopped” a nuclear conflict often emerge only after the fact, serving domestic political narratives rather than reflecting any reliable safety net and are precisely what keep pushing the region back toward crisis.
Taken together, Pulwama, Pahalgam, and Operation Sindoor show that strategic restraint and nuclear “deterrence”, as currently practised, is a brittle foundation for human security. Crises are shaped by opaque doctrines, and high-speed military operations conducted under intense media pressure wherein civilians remain uninformed and unprotected, while life-and-death decisions are concentrated in small elite circles operating with incomplete information. Framed narrowly, these episodes may appear as success stories of deterrence. Viewed through a human security lens, they are cautionary tales and hence, reminders that avoiding catastrophe still depends far more on prudence and luck than on any genuinely robust safeguards.
Toward a human security agenda
A successful human security approach does not require immediate resolution of India- Pakistan disputes or a complete overhaul of the nuclear doctrine. Rather, it calls for moving beyond a narrow, state-centric understanding of stability to one that prioritises the protection of people without waiting for India-Pakistan political disputes to be fully resolved. It rejects the idea that widespread civilian vulnerability is an acceptable baseline for regional security, and instead advances a set of mutually reinforcing measures. It focuses on strengthening crisis communication channels, improving incident-prevention mechanisms, and exercising restraint in nuclear rhetoric that can reduce the likelihood that miscalculation or misinterpretation will escalate into catastrophe.
These measures are often discussed as confidence-building or diplomatic tools. Viewed through a human security lens, they function as forms of risk governance, i.e. mechanisms that help limit civilian exposure to decisions made under extreme pressure. First, crisis communication must be treated as humanitarian infrastructure: hotlines and secure channels should be upgraded, institutionalised, and stress-tested so they can reliably clarify ambiguous incidents, avert misinterpretation of military moves, and manage false alarms when tensions are highest. Second, incident-prevention and de-escalation should be strengthened through clear, jointly understood rules for exercises, cross-border operations, and air and naval encounters, including advance notification and tailored confidence-building measures (CBMs) in emerging domains such as drones and unmanned systems, with these mechanisms seen as core elements of national security rather than political concessions. Third, political and media actors need to exercise restraint in nuclear rhetoric, recognising that threats, boasts, and casual references for domestic audiences raise the risk of miscalculation. Instead, analysts suggest that leadership and security advisors should cultivate norms that treat nuclear threats as extraordinary and unacceptable, while consistently emphasising the humanitarian consequences of any use. While none of these steps can replace long-term conflict resolution, together they can meaningfully reduce the chances that a future crisis will escalate into irretrievable disaster, and they affirm a vision of security in which protecting civilians is a primary obligation rather than a deferred objective.
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Conclusion
South Asia’s nuclear debate has largely treated civilian harm as an abstract consequence rather than as a central concern of security policy. The need of the hour is to reframe the discussion around human security and ensure that it does not negate the realities of deterrence, rather challenges the assumption that stability achieved through persistent civilian vulnerability is sufficient or sustainable. Conventional deterrence questions whether the nuclear system prevents war between states. Instead, human security poses a harder question: does the current system protect people, or does it manage rivalry by placing them in the line of fire? If “stability” is secured by threatening cities, then stability is not peace; it is coercion: and such a negative peace is neither sustainable nor long-lasting.
South Asia needs a nuclear debate in which civilians are not footnotes, where their lives are not merely evidence of deterrence credibility, and where their potential deaths are not treated as strategic currency. The humanitarian impact lens has already restored a sense of the real consequences of nuclear use and the limits of any meaningful post-attack assistance. The next step is to reject strategic language and practices that convert that catastrophe into an instrument of policy.
Far from being sentimental, this shift is grounded in democratic principles and in a more rigorous appreciation of how deterrence can fail. In a region where crises can escalate faster than institutions can respond, aligning nuclear policy with human security may be the most realistic and responsible security strategy available and may offer a more realistic appraisal of both risks and responsibilities.
About the author:
Vedika Rekhi is a US-based policy researcher and strategic analyst working across international security, conflict management, and strategic communication. Her work spans South Asian security, nuclear risk, crisis dynamics, and the humanitarian impacts of warfare, with experience translating rigorous research into policy-relevant analysis for think tanks, multilateral platforms, and international audiences.
