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EVN Report
03-07-2025
- Politics
- EVN Report
India-Pakistan Escalation, Nuclear Deterrence and Armenia's Defense Outlook
This article first briefly outlines the evolution of nuclear deterrence theory, providing context for understanding India and Pakistan's nuclear doctrines and their historical implementation. It then examines how nuclear deterrence functioned during the recent conflict, how this confrontation differed from previous escalations, and what broader lessons can be drawn, particularly in light of certain trends in the Russian-Ukrainian war. The second section addresses the regional dimension, analyzing the deepening cooperation among Turkey, Azerbaijan and Pakistan within the 'Three Brothers' alliance. The article then explores regional formats Armenia could engage with to counterbalance this emerging axis by examining specific options. Finally, it evaluates the performance of weapons systems used by both sides, focusing on Indian systems that Armenia has already acquired and other systems it may face in potential future conflicts. Introduction India and Pakistan, the two nuclear-armed powers of South Asia, engaged in a military escalation unprecedented in scale over the past half-century. The four-day conflict involved intense fighting, including artillery duels, drone warfare, and dogfights. The conflict was triggered by the killing of 26 civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22, which India blamed on Pakistan. On May 7, under Operation Sindoor , India launched missile strikes deep into Pakistani territory—targeting sites in Punjab and Pakistani-administered Kashmir—and claimed to have hit nine 'terrorist infrastructure' locations. This was followed by a dogfight involving approximately 125 fighter jets. Pakistan reported shooting down five Indian jets, including three Rafales, a MiG-29, and a Su-30. In response, Pakistan launched a series of drone and missile strikes on May 7 and 8. India retaliated with its own drone attacks , targeting key Pakistani military assets, including a Chinese-made HQ-9 missile defense system. Cross-border shelling intensified and on May 9, both sides were engaged in sustained drone warfare and artillery duels. India also repositioned its Western Fleet, deploying an aircraft carrier. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire was reached on May 10, bringing the four-day confrontation to a halt. The Evolution of Nuclear Deterrence Theory The advent of the atomic bomb by the U.S. under the Manhattan Project in July 1945 marked the beginning of the nuclear age and the Cold War arms race. The U.S. atomic monopoly was short-lived, undone by a Soviet espionage operation orchestrated by Lavrenti Beria, head of the USSR's NKVD. The threat of a looming Armageddon not only accelerated weapons development but also spurred new strategic thinking. The term 'conventional' came to describe warfare below the nuclear threshold. In ' Arms and Influence ', Thomas Schelling popularized concepts such as coercion, compellence, deterrence and preemptive strikes . Coercion uses threats to influence an adversary's behavior; deterrence threatens punishment to prevent action; compellence pressures an adversary to act under threat of harm; preemptive strikes involve attacking first in anticipation of an imminent, confirmed assault. The condition of mutual assured destruction (MAD) was central to nuclear confrontation , wherein neither the U.S. nor the USSR could defend its population, as both retained second-strike capability—even after a counterforce attack targeting nuclear arsenals. In this environment of mutual vulnerability, each side could retaliate with catastrophic force, including strikes on countervalue targets such as cities—a posture termed mutually assured retaliation . Some scholars argued that credible deterrence relied more on absolute capability than on relative force size. As long as both sides maintained second-strike capability , neither superiority nor first strikes could eliminate the threat of retaliation. This dynamic created crisis stability , where the fear of initiating a self-destructive war served as a stabilizing force. However, the growing sophistication of counterforce —driven by advances in precision strikes, delivery systems, command and control, and surveillance —began to erode the credibility of assured retaliation. States increasingly considered disarming adversaries through a first strike. Earlier doctrines focused on maintaining second-strike capability—such as the flexible response approach associated with the punitive retaliation school. However, a shift occurred toward doctrines emphasizing first-strike capability. The U.S., for example, adopted a 'countervailing strategy' grounded in the military denial school, which remains relevant today despite concerns that first-use counterforce increases the risk of preemptive action. This evolution led to both the expansion of nuclear arsenals and sustained efforts to maintain escalation dominance at every level of conflict. Nuclear Deterrence in Action: Regional Crisis and Broader Implications India and Pakistan—acquiring nuclear weapons in 1974 and 1998, respectively—are among the world's nuclear-armed states, along with the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, and Israel. Both are considered minor nuclear powers , each possessing a similar number of warheads: approximately 172 for India and 170 for Pakistan. They have improved their command and control systems, diversified delivery platforms, and continue to enhance the quality and survivability of their arsenals. However, their nuclear doctrines differ significantly. India's doctrine is based on mutual assured retaliation, underpinned by a No First Use policy and a credible minimum deterrence. Pakistan maintains a more ambiguous strategy, reserving the option of first use, including tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) against conventional attacks. This aligns with the theory of conventional inferiority , which holds that weaker conventional forces may rely on nuclear weapons to offset the imbalance. Facing conventional inferiority vis-à-vis India, Pakistan uses its nuclear arsenal to bridge the gap. In contrast, India—possessing sufficient conventional capabilities to deter both Pakistan and China—maintains its arsenal primarily for strategic deterrence. Pakistan has long leveraged its nuclear arsenal through salami-slicing tactics, signaling that any large-scale Indian conventional response to its limited attacks could trigger nuclear escalation. This has added a new dimension to the stability-instability paradox. A core feature of nuclear deterrence is that strategic instability can create tactical stability: the fear of nuclear confrontation restrains conventional conflict. However, in the India-Pakistan context, strategic instability has instead fueled tactical instability. Pakistan uses the threat of nuclear escalation to enable limited conventional attacks, while India remains deterred from launching a full-scale conventional response. As in past escalations, Pakistan's nuclear deterrence held, reaffirming the perceived benefits of nuclear weapons. What set this confrontation apart was India's deep conventional strikes into Pakistan's heartland —well beyond the Line of Control . These strikes not only sharply raised the risk of nuclear conflict but also signaled India's growing refusal to tolerate nuclear blackmail. Prime Minister Modi declared that India would 'retaliate on its own terms' and would not 'tolerate nuclear blackmailing' by Pakistan. This rhetoric reflects a shift in India's posture and a greater willingness to impose costs on future provocations. Notably, the limited nature of India's response —confined to missile strikes and drone warfare—suggests that Pakistan's nuclear deterrent remained effective. Once again, conventional inferiority was offset by nuclear capability. This reaffirms that nuclear weapons remain among the most effective deterrents, especially for states facing conventionally superior adversaries. In the context of shifting geopolitical dynamics—including growing doubts about the credibility of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence—this may encourage latent nuclear powers such as Japan and certain European states, including Germany , to reconsider acquiring their own arsenals. The confrontation once again underscored the complexity of nuclear decision-making, raising critical questions of where the threshold lies—what line, when crossed, would prompt a nuclear power to use its arsenal. This ambiguity highlights a central challenge in nuclear deterrence: the credibility of threats. These dilemmas are reflected in the ongoing war in Ukraine and carry serious implications for the stability of the global deterrence regime. The Kremlin has consistently leveraged its nuclear arsenal to pursue an aggressive foreign policy—from redrawing post-Soviet borders to deterring Western support for Ukraine. Russia's nuclear signaling aimed to block the transfer of advanced weapons systems, including ATACMS missiles, F-16 fighter jets, Leopard 2, Challenger 2, and M1 Abrams tanks, as well as Patriot air defense systems. Yet over time, the West has delivered—or is delivering — all of these weapons, steadily raising the threshold for nuclear use. Ukraine's recent Operation Spider Web , targeting Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russian territory, further tested Moscow's red lines. The West's incremental escalation in arming Ukraine, Kyiv's deepening attacks into Russian territory, and even India's strikes against Pakistan all illustrate the extraordinary difficulty of crossing the nuclear threshold. Despite aggressive rhetoric, the actual decision to use nuclear weapons remains constrained by immense strategic, political, and psychological barriers. The Conflict's South Caucasus Dimension and Why It Matters for Armenia Notably, the escalation carries not only important implications for nuclear deterrence but also strategic relevance for the South Caucasus and Armenia. The conflict further consolidated the nexus between the so-called 'Three Brothers' alliance of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan. Some Indian media described the conflict as a '100-hour war' not just against Pakistan, but against the broader 'Three Brothers' network: Pakistan as the face, Turkey as the weapons provider, and Azerbaijan as the source of a coordinated disinformation campaign. Both Turkey and Azerbaijan were among the first to condemn Indian counterterrorism strikes. Hours after the attack in Pahalgam, during a press conference in Ankara, Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif thanked President Erdogan for his 'unwavering' support on Kashmir. Soon after, reports surfaced alleging Turkish military assistance to Pakistan —claims Ankara denied, explaining that a Turkish cargo plane had landed in Pakistan only for refueling. This was followed by the arrival of the Turkish naval warship TCG Büyükada (F-512) at Pakistan's Karachi port. Erdogan reiterated his solidarity shortly after India's 'Operation Sindoor,' referring to the events as the 'martyrdom of numerous civilians.' Notably, the 300–400 drones deployed by Pakistan during the conflict were of Turkish origin. Along with providing diplomatic support, Azerbaijan — unlike Turkey's more visible military assistance —engaged actively in disinformation warfare . Baku condemned the Indian airstrikes and expressed solidarity with Pakistan. State-affiliated media outlets, such as Caliber, disseminated false information about the Kashmir conflict, accused India of 'water terrorism,' labeled its government as a 'fascist-leaning regime,' and amplified Pakistan's narrative. Azerbaijani sources sought to portray India's deterrence posture as ineffective by characterizing its weapon systems as underperforming. The trilateral summit held in Lachin on May 28 further cemented the strategic partnership among the three countries. It signaled a shared determination to expand their regional influence—from Western to South and Central Asia—and elevate their partnership to a broader geopolitical level. Coordination across diplomatic, military, and informational fronts suggests that the parties have developed procedures for collective action and are gaining practical experience. This is illustrated by the substantial support Pakistan and Turkey provided to Azerbaijan during the 44-day war, where each country contributed according to its comparative strengths. This external balancing effort reflects a pragmatic response to a shifting geopolitical order, as the three states seek to enhance their collective security by pooling and aggregating their respective resources. The growing alliance between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Pakistan presents an increasing challenge for Armenia, necessitating renewed balancing efforts. During the Lachin Summit, Turkish President Erdogan emphasized that the three countries together have a population of approximately 350 million and a combined economic output of $1.5 trillion—underscoring the scale and potential of the partnership. This regional development, along with broader shifts in the international system, suggests that Armenia must not only deepen its ties with Washington and Brussels but also explore new alliances in trilateral and quadrilateral formats. In a recent piece , Professor Nerses Kopalyan outlined the potential of a quadrilateral alliance between Armenia, France, India and Poland within the framework of secularized multilateralism. Taking into account the already robust bilateral cooperation among these countries—as well as their respective interests in the South Caucasus—he argues that Armenia's main objective should be 'situating the matrix of bilateral relations into a minilateral configuration, with the congruent and mutual interests of all four actors aligning.' The emerging India–Armenia–Greece–Cyprus front could serve as a counterbalance to the Pakistan–Azerbaijan–Turkey alliance . Armenia, Greece and Cyprus, beyond their historical and cultural ties, have been deepening cooperation in the defense sector. In December of last year, the three countries signed defense cooperation plans for 2025, following a visit by Greek Defense Minister Nikolaos Dendias to Armenia on March 4. Armenia's strategic partnership with India in the defense sector has grown steadily since 2022, with Armenia emerging as India's largest customer for finished weapon systems, with purchases totaling $2 billion . India's relations with Greece and Cyprus have also evolved, with New Delhi receiving an invitation to join the Eastern Mediterranean's '3+1' format—originally composed of Greece, Cyprus, and Israel, with the U.S. participating informally—intended to counterbalance Turkey's posture in the Eastern Mediterranean. Additionally, India signed military c ooperation agreements with Cyprus and Greece in December 2022 and April 2023, respectively. Notably, this 'quad' could potentially expand to include France, which maintains positive and growing relations with all four countries. The Battlefield As a Testing Ground for Weapons Systems Given that Armenia is one of the top purchasers of Indian armaments—and considering Turkey and Pakistan's close military ties with Azerbaijan—it is important to examine how the weapon systems used by both sides performed during the recent conflict. Since 2022, Armenia has procured a range of military equipment from India. The table below outlines key equipment Armenia has purchased or agreed to purchase from India in recent years, some of which were deployed by India during the escalation.
The Wire
24-05-2025
- Business
- The Wire
Against Temptation: Deterrence, Stability, and Strategic Folly
BSF personnel during a retreat ceremony at the Attari-Wagah border, near Amritsar, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. The Border Security Force (BSF) has said the public flag-lowering retreat ceremony at three locations in Punjab along the Pakistan frontier will begin on Wednesday, about two weeks after it was stopped following Operation Sindoor. Photo: PTI. Like many other economists, I have long been drawn to the work of Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. As one of the founding fathers of nuclear strategy, Schelling showed how thinking in terms of incentives, expectations, and risk can clarify the logic of deterrence. His core insight – that stability often rests on the fear of loss of control – has lost none of its urgency. South Asia, however, seems to be drifting into what Schelling called a ' zone of ambiguity ' – a space where states, emboldened by new doctrines and technologies, believe they can act without triggering catastrophe. But ambiguity in a nuclearised region is not a cushion; it is a cliff edge. Recent events suggest the margins for error are narrowing. For over two decades, mutual nuclear capability imposed an uneasy but real discipline between India and Pakistan. But recent Indian doctrinal and technological shifts suggest a deliberate push toward counterforce options – pre-emptive strategies aimed at disarming an adversary's nuclear arsenal. This reflects a broader turn to limited war under the nuclear threshold, where military engagement is seen as possible without provoking strategic retaliation. Few have explained the implications of this shift more clearly than Christopher Clary and Vipin Narang. In their 2019 article India's Counterforce Temptations , they describe how parts of India's establishment now view deterrence not as a shared constraint but as something to overcome. This shift is not merely military – it is political theatre: a way to dominate narratives, signal strength, and avoid the domestic costs of appearing passive. Proponents of this approach argue that the escalatory ladder now has more rungs – that modern surveillance, precision strikes, and drones allow calibrated military action without triggering nuclear thresholds. As the Ukraine conflict has shown, warfare is evolving in ways that blur lines and arguably expand this sub-nuclear space. But this supposed buffer is dangerously misleading. It rests entirely on the assumption that the adversary will consistently restrain its response. That assumption is neither stable nor predictable. Deterrence, as Schelling warned, relies not on control but on uncertainty. It works because each side fears what happens when events spiral beyond planning. From a game-theoretic perspective, India's shift risks accelerating a race up the escalation ladder. Each side may believe it can strike first without facing full retaliation. But this is not a stable equilibrium – it is brinkmanship disguised as doctrine. Over the past decade, Pakistan has repeatedly chosen restraint in the face of Indian actions: from the 2016 'surgical strikes' to the 2019 Balakot air raid – the first time a nuclear-armed state's air force bombed another's territory – and the 2022 'accidental' BrahMos missile launch into Pakistan's heartland. These moments required Pakistani decision-makers to judge the intent and scale of Indian attacks, and choose strategic patience over escalation. Never has South Asia's future hung on a thread so strained. India's response to the Pahalgam terrorism further narrowed the space for miscalculation. India dispensed with evidence, threatened Pakistan's water flows, and launched drone strikes on major Pakistani cities. In Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, Indian drones crashed in civilian neighbourhoods. These were not remote actions; they brought a crisis to the doorsteps of millions on both sides of the border. Indian strategists may take comfort in new technologies and missile defences. But deterrence doesn't rely on perfection – it rests on enough retaliatory capability surviving to make the risk unacceptable. Pakistan's doctrine of credible minimum deterrence was built on this logic. Credibility has never meant transparency; it means ensuring that adversaries believe retaliation will follow, even if they cannot predict how. Both India and Pakistan maintain ostensibly non-deployed nuclear postures to provide a 'long fuse' in a crisis. But how long is that fuse, really, in a region where political timelines are short, and crises unfold in minutes? Pakistan is likely adapting by reinforcing the survivability and unpredictability of its arsenal – through dispersal, hardening, and perhaps changes to command protocols. These are not escalatory moves. They are stabilising responses to a shifting strategic balance. As Feroz Khan argues in Subcontinent Adrift , India and Pakistan are guided by clashing logics: India appears to believe it can win a conventional war under the nuclear shadow; Pakistan sees its nuclear capability as a firewall against a growing adversary with which it has legitimate disputes to resolve. Herein lies the fragility: deterrence holds when both sides believe in mutual vulnerability. Any effort to script escalation or engineer 'winnable' conflict under a nuclear overhang is not strategy – it is illusion. Brinkmanship can hold as long as the other side chooses restraint. But that choice is not guaranteed. As Schelling warned, war often begins not with intent, but with things getting out of hand. A drone strike too far, a misread radar signal, a rushed political order – any could turn a crisis into catastrophe. The cliffs of peace in South Asia have held – but erosion is not collapse, until the day it is. The only sustainable path forward is institutionalised engagement: a mutual recognition of red lines and a revival of crisis management mechanisms. Strategic stability isn't maintained by exploiting ambiguity – it is secured by managing it, together. Dr. Ali Hasanain is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He was formerly a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Global Leaders Fellow at Oxford and Princeton universities.
News18
14-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
The Limits of Classical Deterrence
Last Updated: From the Kargil infiltration to the Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai carnage, and 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing, Pakistan has demonstrated that terrorism is not a deviation Deterrence is not a static possession; it is a performance, an act of will repeatedly staged before an audience of adversaries who test its authenticity with every provocation. As Thomas Schelling argued, it is not brute force that deters, but the artful manipulation of risk and consequence. However, when the adversary is not a rational state pursuing defined interests, but a militarised theocracy masquerading as a republic, one that nurtures jihadist proxies as instruments of state policy, deterrence ceases to function in classical terms. It becomes unstable, reactive, and dangerously porous. Robert Jervis long warned that deterrence depends less on capability than on perception, and misperceptions, especially when willful, can cause it to collapse altogether. Pakistan's deep state does not merely misunderstand signals; it distorts them, weaponises ambiguity, and thrives on the fog of war it helps create. Pakistan's doctrine of 'death by a thousand cuts" is an institutional strategy cultivated over decades. First articulated in the wake of the 1971 war, and pursued with renewed intensity after the failures of conventional engagements, this doctrine reflects the Pakistani Army's conviction that it cannot match India in open battle, but can bleed it through relentless, low-intensity conflict. Its strategic depth lies not in geography, but in deniability, in a complex ecosystem of terror outfits, training camps, and ideological sanctuaries nurtured by the state and its intelligence agencies. From the Kargil infiltration of 1999, which was planned even as Pakistan feigned diplomacy, to the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai carnage, and the Pulwama suicide bombing in 2019, Pakistan has repeatedly demonstrated that terrorism is not a deviation. These attacks are not the acts of rogue actors. They are systematically orchestrated by groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, entities headquartered in Pakistan, operating training facilities with impunity in Punjab and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The cross-border incursions are not aberrations but rituals of strategic signalling, aimed at exhausting India's patience while leveraging nuclear deterrence to shield against conventional retaliation. In effect, Pakistan has treated its territory as both a sanctuary and a launchpad, outsourcing strategic confrontation to non-state actors while insulating itself from direct accountability. This calibrated ambiguity, of plausible deniability wrapped in nuclear doctrine, has long boxed India into a corner, limiting its responses to dossiers and demarches. But the strategic calculus has shifted significantly post-Uri and Balakot, and now Operation Sindoor. India is beginning to articulate its own doctrine: one that recognizes that restraint without consequence is mistaken for weakness, and that strategic credibility must occasionally be demonstrated in fire, not words. Traditional deterrence theory, developed during the Cold War by thinkers like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, and Glenn Snyder, presupposed a set of strategic conditions: rational unitary actors, a clear hierarchy of command, and an ability to link action with consequence through reciprocal threat. But the rise of state-sponsored non-state actors—terrorist groups, proxies, and ideological militias—has ruptured this framework. In such scenarios, the deterrer confronts what political theorist Martha Crenshaw termed 'strategic fragmentation"—where the actor initiating violence is insulated from punishment, while the state enabling that violence hides behind legal and diplomatic ambiguity. As Daniel Byman (2005) has argued, 'the state sponsor calculates the benefits of plausible deniability as outweighing the costs of global condemnation," turning the non-state actor into both weapon and shield. This renders classical deterrence largely ineffective, as the key requirement of attribution collapses. India's evolving strategy represents a meaningful attempt to reimagine deterrence under these conditions. By holding the sponsor accountable for the surrogate's actions, New Delhi is reconfiguring the deterrence relationship from dyadic (State A vs State B) to triadic (State A vs State B + Proxy), targeting the violence ecosystem, not just the visible actor. Operation Sindoor further advances this framework by demonstrating that India will no longer distinguish between proximate actors and the strategic architecture that enables them. In doing so, India is operationalising a doctrine of hybrid deterrence, one that speaks to the moral hazard of outsourcing war and offers a doctrinal template for other democracies navigating grey-zone conflict, from Israel's campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah to the U.S. post-9/11 counter-terror posture. Operation Sindoor was a paradigm shift towards creating deterrence for both state and non-state actors. With Operation Sindoor, India has made a few things very clear. First, it has established a template of predictable consequences. A pre-announced expectation that terrorism will trigger punishment. This reduces strategic ambiguity for both domestic and international audiences, but most importantly for Pakistan's deep state. It will shift the cost-benefit calculus in Rawalpindi, from viewing cross-border terrorism as a low-cost, high-deniability enterprise to one that carries an assured price. Second, predictable retaliation may paradoxically enhance deterrence credibility, especially in the context of repeated provocations. As Robert Jervis warned, deterrence often fails not due to weakness but due to mismatched perceptions, where adversaries underestimate resolve because previous actions were one-off, reactive, or too surprising to set a precedent. Therefore, by creating a pattern of anticipated and delivered response, India is attempting to recalibrate Pakistan's perception of its threshold for retaliation. Third, this predictability will also reduce the risk of miscalculation on India's side while transferring the burden of escalation onto Pakistan. Unlike surprise operations, which may spark panic or overreaction in a nuclear-armed state, a publicly telegraphed strike enables crisis management mechanisms to activate in advance. India retains escalation dominance by striking only terror infrastructure, thereby distinguishing between the Pakistani state and its proxies, while still raising the political cost of harbouring such proxies. top videos View all Lastly, from the perspective of international diplomacy, this shift also aids legitimacy. When retaliation is signalled, proportional, and avoids civilian or military targets, it is harder to cast India as the aggressor. The pre-emptive communication of intent aligns with emerging doctrines of 'responsible retaliation" seen in counter-terror campaigns globally, particularly post-9/11 doctrines espoused by the US and Israel. First Published: May 14, 2025, 13:42 IST
Bloomberg
06-03-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Real Ukraine Peace Talks Require a Real US Security Guarantee
Don't be distracted by whatever ' minerals deal ' the US and Ukraine may or may not hash out in the coming weeks, for it will not address the main obstacle to the kind of cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine that US President Donald Trump so badly wants to broker. That question is: How can third-party guarantors credibly assure the security of Ukraine after an armistice? Credibility: Every devil in every detail is wrapped up in that one word. The concept is so slippery that it's kept strategists busy at least since the American scholar Thomas Schelling (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory) analyzed types of deterrence during the early Cold War. We can't ask Schelling to weigh in on Ukraine today (he died in 2016). But here's what he wrote about American troops — and obliquely about their British and French partners as well — stationed in West Berlin at the time.
AllAfrica
26-02-2025
- Politics
- AllAfrica
The nuclear consequences of Ukraine losing the war
Since the Cold War, deterrence has been a fundamental principle underpinning peace between global superpowers. The idea is that if two sides have nuclear weapons, the consequences of actually using them mean the button never gets pressed. But the strategy goes beyond the countries which own the weapons. In practice, for instance, most of Europe relies on the US for a nuclear 'umbrella' of deterrence. And any country with nuclear weapons can offer guarantees of peace to others. This is what happened in 1994 when Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest memorandum in which Ukraine renounced its nuclear weapons from the Soviet era in exchange for a promise to 'respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.' This was widely seen as a good idea for Ukraine and the world, reducing the risk of a nuclear accident. But that memorandum has not served Ukraine well. As North Korea, India, Pakistan or Israel know, owning nuclear weapons – even against international agreements – ensures your protection. A piece of paper does not. And now, across the world, the ability to offer the equivalent of a Budapest memorandum to other countries has vanished. A key part of the theory behind a successful nuclear deterrent has fallen away. This is described in game theory – the mathematical study of strategic interactions – as the idea of a 'credible commitment.' To deter a military invasion, the country offering protection must be ready to do something that hurts its own interests if it happens. In the case of Ukraine, this has so far involved allies sending costly military equipment, financial support and enduring the small risk of further escalation of the conflict. Being a trustworthy guarantor is a matter of international reputation: a country that delivers is considered credible. But no one will trust a guarantor that breaks its promises. And while credible retaliation is important, so too is avoiding escalation. For it is also in everyone's interest to reduce the probability of a catastrophic outcome. Over the years, the small number of countries with internationally accepted nuclear arsenals (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) have developed nuclear doctrines. These are sophisticated and often deliberately opaque rules for escalation and de-escalation. The Nobel prize-winning economist, Thomas Schelling, argues that the uncertainty around these rules is what makes them so effective. It strengthens a system in which protection can be offered to other countries in exchange for them not developing their own nuclear capabilities. Game theory research has also shed light on the complexity of these rules of engagement (or non-engagement), such as the expectation (and necessity) of credible retaliation against an attack. Imagine, for example, that China launches a nuclear bomb that completely destroys Manchester. A rational British prime minister may prefer to end hostilities and accept the destruction of a major city rather than retaliate and risk the total destruction of human life. But for the deterrent to actually work, they must retaliate – or expect to see Birmingham and London disappear. Another difficulty comes in finding the appropriate response to varying levels of provocation. When Russian-affiliated soldiers were found guilty by Dutch courts of downing a Malaysian Airlines civilian flight with 298 people onboard, including 196 Dutch nationals, there was no talk of proportional retaliation. No one seriously contemplated shooting down a Russian plane or bombing a small Russian city. Nor was there any retaliation to Russian interventions in European elections, or to the sabotage of infrastructure in Baltic states, or to murders and attempted murders on European soil. And after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the reaction of the west was consistent with principles designed to avoid escalation. Sanctions were imposed on Russia, military aid was sent to Ukraine. But to abandon Ukraine now, forcing it to cede territory after three years of fighting, death, and destruction, would be a significant shift. It would represent a clear and deliberate abandonment of the international guarantees Ukraine thought it had. Game theory also suggests that the most likely consequence of abandoning those commitments is that no country will repeat Ukraine's mistake of giving up its nuclear capabilities. And no country will want to place their trust in potentially unreliable allies. Europe for instance, will aim to develop its own nuclear umbrella, potentially combining French and British capabilities. It will also hasten to integrate the next likely targets of Moscow's military ambitions. This will include the parts of Ukraine not annexed by Russia, but also Georgia, already invaded by Russia in 2008, and Moldova, partly occupied by Russia. The second consequence is that the West will no longer have a good reason to convince countries to abandon their nuclear ambitions. That means no credible deal for North Korea, no convincing offer for Iran, and even fewer prospects to end the nuclear programs of Pakistan, India or Israel. Looking at the ruins of Mariupol or Gaza City, and comparing them to Pyongyang, Tel Aviv or Tehran, many countries will conclude that a nuclear weapon is a better way to ensure security than any piece of paper. So if the West does abandon Ukraine, game theory suggests that the world should expect a proliferation of nuclear powers. Each will need to learn, as Russia and the US have, to live on the threshold of diastrous confrontation. But research shows that establishing a situation of reduced risk takes time. And that could be a time filled with increased potential for events reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis – and a growing belief that nuclear war is inevitable. Renaud Foucart is senior lecturer in economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
