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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9192 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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India has just attacked three Pakistani army bases near the Kashmir region with missiles. There are some indications that power infrastructure in a Pakistani town was targeted as well. Troops are also clashing along the line of contact. This is as far as I know the biggest escalation in the region since the Kargil war. If this were any other two nuclear powers the world would be on a state of panic now. What are the culture war implications of a full scale nuclear war in South Asia?

UPDATE Unconfirmed reports that Pakistan is carrying out a military response, including air strikes on Indian bases in Kashmir.

UPDATE Pakistani Prime Minister has confirmed ongoing Pakistani military response. Heavy gunfire, artillery and air strikes heard on live feeds along the line of control on Kashmir

UPDATE Multiple Pakistani news outlets claim that Pakistan has shot down two Indian Rafael fighter jets. Some Indian news agencies are now reporting that a jet was downed.

I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but it looks to me like the powers that be in India are deliberately angling for a nuclear war with Pakistan because they see it as inevitable in the long term but think that the results will be more favorable for them the sooner it happens. Moreover, they're also angling for Pakistan to launch the first (nuclear) strike because they expect the rest of the world will be more sympathetic to them in that case.

Why would it be more favorable sooner? Do you think they expect Pakistan's arsenal to get considerably stronger? Wouldn't India's BMD benefit from more development and deployment time, or do you think it's already capable of meaningfully blunting a Pakistani attack?

I don't know much about India/Pakistan so I don't have a strong opinion, very curious!

Do you think they expect Pakistan's arsenal to get considerably stronger?

That is my assumption, yeah. At the moment, nuclear war between Pakistan and India wouldn't actually be an MAD scenario; Pakistan would be completely destroyed (and you can't get any more destroyed than that) while India would "merely" suffer the worst disaster in memory. Pakistan and India have similar-sized nuclear arsenals (in terms of number of bombs - India's bombs are much stronger), but India is of course much larger, and they also have much more sophisticated nuclear delivery systems; Pakistan's arsenal is dangerous but it's currently one of the easier nuclear powers in the world to foil an attack from. In the future they'll most likely be more evenly-matched and a nuclear war would actually spell the end of both India and Pakistan.

Do we know India has a sufficient amount of deployed thermonuclear warheads to actually destroy Pakistan?

Hypothetically, if India were to blow its hot nuclear load on Pakistan—in which case, as you mentioned, it would likely suffer the worst disaster in history—would India then have the (nuclear or conventional) wherewithal to prevent, say, a Chinese invasion of the contested northeastern borderlands? Or other violations of its territorial integrity?

If not, this may be reason enough for India not to pursue escalation to nuclear war, even if a nuclear exchange with Pakistan would technically be survivable.

Interesting, thanks! Looks like Pakistan has mostly SRBMs and MRBMs and cruise missiles? Pakistan definitely doesn't have the strategic depth that the US/USSR have but I don't know enough about ABMs and in particular India's ballistic missile defense program to know if that gives India much of an edge there.

Definitely makes striking the launchers prior to launch easier though!

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