Bringing India-Pakistan Back From The Brink Of A Disastrous War

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India identified the Pakistani state as responsible for the attack and responded with airstrikes against what it claimed was a JeM training camp at Balakot in north-western Pakistan. The absence of a trusted channel of communication brought both countries closer than ever to a missile exchange .

Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state in the first Trump administration, claimed in a 2023 memoir that both sides had readied their nuclear deterrents. Whatever the veracity of Pompeo's claims, it's clear that mutual restraint is critical to avoiding miscalculations.

But Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's delegation of greater operational freedom to the Indian military after the Pahalgam attack has raised concerns that India's use of force could be more extensive than in 2019.

Modi has vowed to pursue and punish the terrorists and their abetters“to the ends of the Earth”, a pledge that raises domestic political costs for him and his government if there is no military follow-through.

Lessons from the Cuban missile crisis

One important lesson from past nuclear standoffs – especially the Cuban missile crisis – is that leaders of adversarial nuclear states can sometimes forge empathetic channels of communication that help pull their countries back from the brink.

There was no established hotline in October 1962. But US President John F Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, exchanged a series of letters in which they acknowledged and expressed their shared vulnerability to nuclear war.

There was no talk of nuclear jingoism or the manipulation of nuclear threats. Instead, as one of us (Nicholas) has argued in a study co-authored with US academic Marcus Holmes, the nuclear shadow that hung over the two leaders encouraged the development of mutual empathy and a bond of trust that were both critical to the peaceful resolution of the crisis.

Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev and US president John F Kennedy established a leader-to-leader hotline in 1963. US State Department

Kennedy and Khrushchev could have responded to the condition of mutual nuclear vulnerability with brinkmanship , and turned the crisis into what Thomas Schelling – one of the most prominent US nuclear strategists and an advisor to the Kennedy administration – called a “competition in risk-taking.”

But instead, they recognized that competitive manipulations of risk could only lead to mutual disaster, which enabled them to avert a potential nuclear exchange.

Indian and Pakistani leaders could take their cue from this episode. A recent report by the nuclear think tank Basic (co-edited by Nicholas) urged policymakers to avoid viewing crises as“zero-sum tests of will.” Instead, they should see them as opportunities for cooperation to avert catastrophe.

Why an India-Pakistan hotline is vital

But the absence of a trusted confidential line of communication between the leaders of India and Pakistan is a major barrier to empathetic communication.

It prevents the two reaching a proper appreciation of shared vulnerabilities that is so critical to crisis de-escalation. As Basic recommended in a 2024 report , the most important contribution to crisis de-escalation between the two countries would be to establish a leader-to-leader hotline.